D. L. Moody:

" I do not see how any Christian, most of all a Christian minister, can go into these secret lodges with unbelievers. They say they can have more influence for good, but I say they can have more influence for good by staying out of them, and then reproving their evil deeds. Abraham had more influence for good in Sodom than Lot had. If twen- t3'-five Christians go into a secret lodge with fifty who are not Christians, the fifty can vote anything they please, and the twenty-five will be partakers of their sins. They are tijtequally yoked with unbelievers. * * If they would rather leave their churches than their lodges the sooner they get out of the churches the better. I would rather have ten members who were separated from the world than a thousand such members. Come out from the lodge. Better one with God than a thousand without Him. We must walk with God, and if only one or two go with us it is all right. Do not let down the standard to suit men who love their secret lodges or have some darling sin they will not give up." -
Twelve denominations *'are committed by vote of their legislative assemblies or by constitution to a separation from secret lodge worship." Among these are the Disciples (in part), who number nearly six hundred thousand, the United Presbyterians, eighty thousand, the Lutheran Synodical Conference, five hundred and fifty thousand, the Friends, about sixty thousand, the German Baptists, or Dunker, sixty thousand, and the United Brethren, one hundred and fifty thou- sand. The total membership of these denomi- nations is one million seven hundred thousand.
^ Finney's Fremasonry, pp. 5, 262, 263. ^ Farwell Hall, Chicago, Dec. 14, 1876.
THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM. 93
^' Individual churches in some of these should be excepted, in part of them even a considerable portion." Besides these, the Congregational '' State associations of Illinois and Iowa, have adopted resolutions against the lodge," and many local churches also oppose the lodge. One article of the United Presbyterian Testimony, or creed, is:
"We declare that all associations, whether formed for political or benevolent purposes, which impose upon their members an oath of secrecy, or an obligation to obey a code of unknown laws, are inconsistent with the genius and spirit of Christianity, and church members ought not to have fellowship with such associations." ^
The Discipline of the United Brethren still reads, I believe, as adopted in 1849 •
" Freemasonry, in every sense of the word, shall be to- tally prohibited, and there shall be no connection with se- cret combinations (a secret combination is one who^e ini- tiatory ceremony or bond of union is a secret); and any member found connected with such society shall be affec- tionately admonished by the preacher in charge, twice or thrice, and if such member does not desist in a reasonable time, he shall be notified to appear before the tribunal to which he is amenable ; and if he still refuses to desist, he shall be expelled from the church."
The United Brethren joined this with temper- ance and anti-slavery as making three great move- ments of moral reform ; but it is now in many cases a dead letter, and will probably be taken out of the discipline. The majority will still hold to their convictions, but will adopt the principle of the great evangelical churches that these questions of moral reform are chiefly for the individual conscience.
^ United Presbyterianism, p. 141.
94 THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM.
As an expression of undergraduate opinion, an editorial in the Yale Courant of March 23 , 1878, is SO able and fair as to make it worth quot- ing entire :
" The recent stealing of chains from the Bones* fence, the breaking of their padlocks, and the confiscation of their supper, were expressions of a feeling not only sour but weak and mean. The taking of chains from the Keys' fence, also, was the outcrop of a temper just as small and pitiable. Strange that the popular attitude toward the Senior societies is either bitterness or idolatry ; bitterness if you know you cannot go, idolatry if you dream you can ; bitterness if you did not go, idolatry if you did. Thanks to the signs about college that a true neutral spirit is grow- ing, a neutral spirit which is not neutrality, but a fair and gentlemanly independence, a neutral spirit which is not ashamed of itself, and which does not have to go begging for respect. Opposition to Bones and Keys is by no means a sin, we have even thought it a virtue, but when such op- position cankers into violence and acted malice, it becomes as much a crime as under-class subservience and fawning. We have no hopes of ever seeing the downfall of the Senior societies, those fascinating vampires of darkness, whose shadows fall ominously down the stairway of the academic years, and awe the climbers by the majesty of — dumbness ! But we sincerely hope and pra)' that Yale may never see the time when no manly neutrals shall have minds of their own, and when no independent paper dares let a neutral say his uttermost say. Even were Bones and Keys such a blessing as they are claimed to be — in disguise, yet it would be a sorry day for the college when there should no longer exist in it lusty, honest neutrals, but only soreheads ; it would be worse, indeed, than that a nation should have but one political party. Bones and Keys are a curse to the college ; they increase the expenses of a course already perniciously tending to extravagance, and influence, where they do not handle, by creating a college atmosphere of more royal and stylish living ; they furnish the chief incen- tive to that trickery which seams under-class life through and through, dividing it into castes and engendering in it those bitter and undying alienations which to this very day disfigure '78 as they did '76. They cause occasional inca-
THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM. 95
pacity on the crew and the nine — we will not say how lately they have done this. They often produce unjust promotion to the Glee Club, and they sometimes elect ath- letic officers without regard to brains or business. In all candor we say it, we do not think they put many rewards upon, nor many safeguards around, temperance and moral- ity in college, nor do we think their example as salutary for sound morals as institutions of such pretensions might be, for it is not so many years, nay, not so many Thursday nights ago, that a certain well-known Senior group came from the hall to the campus — drunk ! Yet it is not, in the main, against the thirty men that we inveigh ; the present thirty are for the most part splendid men, including the very best in the class ; it is against the system that we state these unexaggerated but disagreeable facts of influence and tendency. The men are not, in the main, vicious men, only so far as they are supporting a vicious system. So long as a few men, just few enough to be unjustly representative, are segregated from a class and by tradition gifted with certain social honors supposed to be the signs of distin- guished though mysterious merit, just so long will there rise among the students a natural, though dangerous, com- petition for distinction, whose intensity will ever vary di- rectly as the narrowness of the probabilities for success. Yet Bones and Keys are not an unmixed evil ; to meet a select coterie once a week, and over a cheerful spread to discuss college gossip, there to chat with several Profes- sors who have just entered, or at the great convocations of autumn and commencement to meet many of the most scholarly, successful, or wealthy gentlemen of the land, reaching back to the classes of antiquity, this is certainly not a s\u,per se. These are the partial influences of cer- tain meetings on thirty men, but the influences of a system on a college are something disastrously different."
The following testimony includes the words of many eminent graduates and educators.
Francis Lieber :
•' It would lead us too far from our topic were we to dis- cuss the important fact that mysterious and secret societies belong to paganism rather than to Christianity, and we con- clude these remarks by observing that those societies which may be called doubly secret, that is to say, societies which
g6 THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM.
not only foster certain secrets and have secret transactions, but the members of which are bound to deny either the ex- istence of the society or their membership, are schools of untruth ; and that parents as well as teachers, in the United States, would do no more than perform a solemn duty, if they should use every means in their power to exhibit to those whose welfare is entrusted to them, the despicable character of the thousand juvenile secret societies which flourish in our land, and which are the preparatory schools for secret political societies." '
George William Curtis, one of our very best and ablest public writers, says in Hai^pers Monthly for January, 1874 :
"The spring of this triumphant political Anti-Masonic movement was hostility to a secret society. Many of the most distinguished political names of Western New York, including Millard Fillmore, Wm. H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, Francis Granger, James Wadsworth, George W. Patterson, were associated with it. And as the larger por- tion of the Whig party was merged in the Republican, the dominant party of to-day has a certain lineal descent from the feelings aroused by the abduction of Morgan from the jail at Canandaigua. And as his disappearance and the odium consequent upon it stigmatized Masonry, so that it lay for a long time moribund, and, although revived in later years, cannot hope to regain its old importance, so the death of young Leggett is likely to wound fatally the sys- tem of college secret societies.
Every collegian knows that there is no secrec}^ whatever in what is called a secret society. * * Literary brother- hood, philosophic fraternity, intellectual emulation, these are the noble names b)' which the youth deceive themselves and allure Freshmen ; but the real business of the society is to keep the secret, and to get all the members possible from the entering class.
■^ "^ Earnest curiosity changes into ^j/;7V ^« r^;;^j, and the mischief is that the secrecy and the society feeling are likely to take precedence of the really desirable motives in college. There is a hundred-fold greater zeal to obtain members than there is generous rivalry among the societies
1 Civil Liberty, p. 135.
THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM. 97
to carry of; the true college honors. And if the purpose be admirable, why, as Professor Wilder asks, the secrecy? What more can the secret society do for the intellectual or social training of the student than the open society? Has any secret society in an American college done, or can it do, more for the intelligent young man than the Union De^ bating Society at the English Cambridge University, or the similar club at Oxford? There Macaulay, Gladstone, the Austins, Charles Buller, Tooke, Ellis, and the long illus- trious list of noted and able Englishmen were trained, and in the only way that manly minds can be trained, by open, free, generous rivalry and collision. The member of a se- cret society in college is really confined, socially and intel- lectually, to its membership, for it is found that the secret gradually supplant the open societies. But that member- ship depends upon luck, not upon merit, while it has the capital disadvantage of erecting false standards of meas- urement so that the Mu Nu man cannot be just to the hero of the Zeta Eta. The secrecy is a spice that overbears the food. The mystic paraphernalia is a relic of the baby- house, which a generous youth disdains.
There is, indeed, an agreeable sentiment in the veiled friendship of the secret society which every social nature understands. But as students are now becoming more truly "men" as they enter college, because of the higher standard of requirement, it is probable that the glory of the secret society is already waning, and that the allegiance of the older universities to the open arenas of frank and manly intellectual contests, involving no expense, no dissipation, and no perilous temptation, is returning. At least there will now be an urgent question among many of the best men in college whether it ought not to return."
Hon. William M. Evarts, Ex-Secretary of State, who graduated at Yale in 1837, spoke at the alumni dinner of 1873. The Hartford Cour- ant said next day :
'* He did good work to-day in speaking against the evil effects of secret societies — a subject which had been pre- viously well handled by Mr. Van Sanford. * * There were hundreds of old graduates who agreed with the speaker when he advocated the revival of the old societies
98 THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM.
and the suppression of the foolish secret clubs which have supplanted them."
The Courant also said editorially :
*' The speakers at the Yale alumni meeting yesterday- did well in entering their protest against the influence of the class secret societies in killing the two great rival de- bating societies, which were open to the members of all classes. * * Mr. Evans, who has few equals and no superiors as a ready thinker and talker, attributes no small degree of his success to the training of these societies. * * Of late the secret societies, confined to classes, and seldom mustering more than twenty at any evening session, have monopolized the time and attention of the students and liave destroyed the honored old societies. To the gradu- ate of a few years, there is nothing more absurd than the importance which the undergraduate attaches to his society badge and secrets. ^ * Meantime, the secret society fosters snobbery and tends to create division among the best friends. * * It would be a good thing if young men liad the manliness to appreciate the bad effects of these societies and to voluntarily repudiate them and revive the more honorable and more manly rivalry of the great, open, college debating societies."
The Springfield Republican^ Oct. 23, 1873 ' In earlier times, ''Secret associations were an economi- cal device. * * To-day and here they have no such ex- cuse for their existence. There is not a moral, political or social purpose which secrec}^ can aid more than openness. ^ * It is a foible that belongs to the juvenile mind and the juvenile state of civilization. It is the meat of petty rather than large minds, and we fear we must say of the feminine rather than of the masculine cast of thought. Secret societies, therefore, thrive among vealy youth in colleges, and among a class of ordinary people who are just below politics."
President Robinson, of Brown, in his report to the corporation for 1876, mentions several objections to the societies, and closes by saying :
" That they are, as now existing with us, a direct hin- drance to the best kind of work, I have no doubt."
THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM. 99
President Hitchcock, of Amherst, gives letters from nine college Presidents on this point. ^ The first says :
*' Could these associations be altogether removed from the institutions of learning in our country, I should think it a result in which friends of learning, *and especially the officers of colleges, would have great occasion to rejoice."
A second President :
"As soon as the Faculty ascertained that such societies were in existence, they ordered the students to break off their connection with them, stating explicitly that they could not and would not be permitted."
A third President :
'• We are unanimously and decidedly of opinion that it would be desirable to have all these secret societies rooted out of our colleges."
A fourth President :
" The literary and religious effect bad; the moral effect equivocal. * * I have made one, nay more than one in- effectual attempt to rid this college of their influence. So far as I have seen, all direct opposition has only aggravated the evil ; and latterly my efforts have been directed to the modification and direction, rather than to the extermination of these societies, which I have always regarded as an evil — latterly as an evil inseparable from an assemblage of young men — perhaps of men of any age."
A fifth President :
" On the whole, my opinion is that they have been evil, and sometimes very much so. ^ * I suppose it would be desirable that secret societies should be rooted out of our colleges and from every other place. If all these paltry and rival associations could be at once and forever broken up there can be no doubt it would be a great blessing."
^ Reminiscences of Amherst College, pp. 320-326.
lOO THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM.
A sixth President :
"There is reason to believe that some, at least, of those societies, have on the whole an injurious influence. * ^ There are altogether too many of them."
A seventh President :
" I am of opinion that the tendency of such societies is bad of necessity, that is, so long as they have the power, by means of secrecy, of doing mischief."
An eighth President :
" The only secret society * * known to exist here is supposed to be harmless, and its meetings are permitted to be held."
A ninth President :
"Their influence not suspected at first, but found to be bad. * * Nothing but evil results, or is likely to result from them upon members themselves as students, or as Christians, and no good to those who are not members. They are a mere plague to any college."
President Hitchcock, however, adds :
"We did not find it necessary to take any active meas- ures against these societies, and they have been suff"ered ever since to exist. And I am confident that the evils feared from them have much diminished."
Dr. Howard Crosby, Chancellor of the Uni- versity of New York, under the title of ** My Objections to Secret Societies in Colleges,'* writes in the Congregationalist of 1869 :
" The heart of man loves secrecy, because it is an ele« ment of power. * * Solid, studious men get this power in a legitimate way. * * Hidden treasures lie within their minds, and the world pays respect to the power that is implied. * * Where men cannot gain this position of influence in the legitimate way, either from want of ca- pacity, or indolence, or the necessities of youth, there is a very natural endeavor to gain it by trick and assumption.
THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM. lOI
^ * We have no hesitation in writing secret societies among the quackeries of this earth, a part of the great sys- tem by which the mud-begotten try to pass themselves off as Jove-born. Leave out those secret associations, whose concealment is for safet3', as in political crises, and a secret society is a deception, more or less innocent according to the character of its contents.
My first objection to the secret societies of our colleges is founded on the above considerations. They are pre- tenses, and thus at war with truth, candor and manliness. ' Omne ignotum pro magnifico' is the principle from which they draw their life. * * Everything that conflicts with" truthful openness " is a sham and will leave its mark upon the character. A sham is not only in itself a mean thing, but it blocks the way to truth. * *
My second objection to secret societies in our colleges is in the opportunity given b}^ the secrecy to immoralities. * "^ They all offer a remarkable opportunit)^ for sins, in which publicity would not allow their members to indulge for a moment. * *
A third objection " is that *' the confidence between parent and child is broken, and hence destroyed, by these secret societies. "^ * A free and entire communion between the young and their parents is both the safeguard of the young and the comfort of the parents. This the secret societies of our colleges overthrow. * * The secrecy of the col- lege society renders it peculiarl)^ adapted to be a rival to the family. * *
These are my three main objections to secret societies. * * But there are other local objections that belong to the college.
■^ * My fourth objection is, that college secret societies in- terfere with a faithful course of study. * "^ I always found the best students were those who either kept cut of the se- cret societies, or who entered very slightl)^ into their opera- tions. ^ "^
A fifth objection is found in the natural use of these so- cieties for disturbance of public order. * "^ Out of the darkness dark deeds grow. * "^
The sixth objection I have to offer is their evil influence upon the regular literary societies of the college, which are instituted as adjuncts of the curriculum. -^ -^ I believe that I am right in asserting that in most of our colleges the literary societies * * have been utterly ruined, except as alumni centers, by the secret societies.
I02 THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM.
My last objection is their expensiveness. * ^ I know that many excellent men, long after they leave college, support these societies. * * But for all that, I cannot but believe that the principle on which they rest is- pernicious, and nothing is gained by them which might not be gained far better by open dealing. The principle is not only pernicious, but childish."^
Reports from forty-eight schools and colleges in twenty states, as to college secret societies, were sent to Ezra A. Cook & Co., Chicago, at their request, about the year 1873. Of these only three expressed views favoring the socie- ties, and the letters showed "a general and deeply seated conviction that their nature and tendency is wholly evil.**
Among the institutions which do not allow secret societies are many Western colleges, in- cluding Olivet, Beloit, Ripon and Oberlin. They are forbidden at West Point. In 1857 the Princeton societies were suppressed by the Faculty. The same step was also taken at the same time by the authorities at Harvard ; a let- ter has been published elsewhere which shows the position of a part of the Harvard Faculty on this, point.
The Yale Faculty have also committed them- selves on this question. Some years ago a part of the incoming Sophomore class, which in- cluded in its number inany of the best men in the class, asked the Faculty to allow them to form a society for the coming year. The follow- ing are the conditions on which permission was granted ; they are given from memory, but may be relied on as substantially correct :
^ College Secret Societies, published by Ezra A. Cook^ Chicago ; pp. 30-35-
THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM. I03
1. The society shall not take the name of any previously existing society.
2. The society shall hold its meetings in some (I think public) room on the college campus.
3. The members of the Society shall wear no common badge.
4. The society shall give out no elections to members of succeeding classes.
These conditions would require a revolution in the society system, as it is at present. If a society composed largely of men of high stand- ing in the Sophomore class were required to observe such conditions, it is a plain inference to the judginent of the Faculty upon the secret society system.
President Dwight's great name I find quoted against secret societies.
President Porter's position may be inferred from the following passage :
'* The love of secrecy and reserve is too strong in human nature, and especially in boyish nature, to be easily thwarted. We doubt the expediency, because we disbe- lieve in the possibility of destroying or preventing secret societies. That such societies may be, and sometimes are, attended with very great evils, is confessed by the great majority of college graduates." ^
Notice that the reason here suggested for al- lowing secret societies is that they cannot be prevented ; not that they ought to be encour- aged, or that they are a good thing.
Ex-President Woolsey, who is as earnest in religion as he is great in political and social science, and whom our instructors are glad to honor as their instructor, says :
" I don't believe in secret societies, either in college or out of it."
^ American Colleges, p. 195.
CONCLUSION.
Some further considerations may properly be noticed here, which relate especially to the se- cret system in colleges.
This question is particularly important in re- lation to personal character. It is sometimes said that if the societies are evil, there are greater evils ; which may be true, but an error in the higher relations of life is often the parent of errors which run all the way down to grossness, as there is an intimate though not always neces- sary connection between skepticism and immor- ality. The indifference or slothfulness of to- day may mean the vice of to-morrow ; or the loss of opportunities which might have saved others from ruin. This truth has special force of those whose character is forming. " As the twig is bent, the tree is inclined." " Better that " the child, says Ruskin, ^'should be ignorant of a thousand truths, than have consecrated in its heart a single lie." ^ Dr. Crosby says, "The Soph- omore wears his badge, an emblem of a sham, and feels a glow of pride in supporting an hy- pocrisy. This language is not too strong to those who are accustomed to trace the great evils of our world to their germs, and who would strangle the tiger when he is a manageable cub. These little(.^)divergencies from truth in children and youth become the gigantic frauds of great world-life by the simple action of time upon divergent lines of progress. There can be no
^ Time and Tide, p. 107.
THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM. I05
more important instruction inculcated on our young men than the necessity of truthful open- ness as the very warp of all virtue." ^
The great educational institutions are so re- lated to the national life as to make it impera- tive on them to give this question thorough consideration and conscientious action. They are the schools of the nation ; for their gradu- ates, generally speaking, are the leaders in the politics, the church, the literature of the nation, in all the spheres which make up the national life. Their sons are to shape the character and mold the institutions of their generation. They must teach language, science and philosophy ; but far more must they instill into their stu- dents undying love of true friendship, simple truth, clean-handed patriotism, and pure reli- gion. Whatever pollutions enter the stream, its fountain must be kept clear.
The societies may be a step tow^ard a system combining more of the social with the intellec- tual than did the old literary societies, and bet- ter adapted to the varying natures of students than were two great literary institutions ; they may be, but in; order to meet the true princi- ples they must be so greatly changed as to make it very doubtful if they are. Two great literary societies dividing all college may or may not be the ideal system ; yet it seems certain that the true society must be neither secret nor exclu- sive, neither a political party nor an aristocracy, but must be based on the simple, natural prin- ciple of organization for a definite end, under
^ College Secret Societies, published by Ezra A. Cook, Chicago ; pp. 31, 32.
I06 THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM.
which the social element will come naturally into place. So far as graduates are concerned, I need not dwell on the obvious duty which they have to consider whether they are support- ing, for their own pleasure, institutions which on the whole are hurtful to the students.
If the objections to the societies are so serious, why do they find support among so many men of character and eminence.^ xOne reason lies in the natural conservatism of mankind. Men generally take things as they are, and make the best they can out of them, for themselves ; which of course is not the true principle, but it rules with many, and is strong with nearly all. Hence, if a system is once well established, it can exist under a heavy load of abuses for a long time. If Southern men had had their way, there would have been a great slave-holding empire in the South to-day; although every- body knows that slavery is a bad system econ- omically and every other way.
Many have never really considered the mat- ter. They find the system existing and go on as their predecessors have done and their fellows are doing, with no thought of change ; and many shrink almost unconsciously from thinking of the matter, knowing that such thought may lead to convictions which they do not care to entertain. Even if they do consider it, many will conclude that the evils mean simply the abuse of a good thing in bad hands, which is common enough, unfortunately, and so cannot be helped. One instance came to the writer's knowledge, not long since, of a student's saying of a particular system of this kind, that he did not think it a good one, but saw no way of help-
THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM. I07
ing matters, and so would take his election with the rest. Ex-Mayor Golden, who has been already mentioned as a man much respected, who had held high Masonic honors, takes up this point : " It may be asked how it happens that I should have been so long a Mason and not until this time expressed my disapprobation of the institution. ^ * I began to question its utility long ago. ^ * When I was hardly twenty-one years of age I was initiated in a lodge in New York, which was distinguished for the respectability of its members. * * My confi- dence that they would not have done anything wrong induced me to pass through the required forms with very little — too little — consideration. A like deference for the example of others led me from step to step with the same inconsider- ateness."^ As to the example of Washingto^i and other great men who were members of se- cret societies, *' I should have been awed by their opinions could I be sure that these patrons, of whom masonry so justly boasts, deliberately ex- amined the merits of the institution ; but when I reflect how many years of my life were passed before I gave the subject due consideration, I cannot but suppose that they, like myself, for a long time may have been content to rest on the example of their predecessors, and that they have left their successors free to express their opinions."
Much of the support, again, is only virtual, not active. Men have belonged to a society in younger days ; whatever its faults, there are few
' College Pamphlets, Yale Library, Vol. gi, Anti-Masonic Address to People of New York, pp. 22, 23.
Io8 THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM.
who do not retain some affection for their so- ciety, and they also think that honor requires them to support it, or at least say nothing which may bear against it. It is to be said, further, that this does not decide the question, though it has an important bearing upon it. Almost ^very bad system has had good supporters, sometimes a great many of them. Witness the record made by so many good men on the sub- ject of slavery.
The nature of a college community presents some special difficulties in the way of reform^ where a system is once established. The stu- dents are these who feel the evils most. No man really understands what this system means un- less it exists among his equals or his superiors. But the students are in college a very shoi-t time, comparatively. They come at an early age, when few of them have any definite opinions on a sub- ject like this. Consequently, they are ready to take the current ideas of their institution ; and those who do not take these, often arrive at their own conclusions so late as to make their influence of little value. Yet in some instances much has been done by the students; and it certainly is very greatly to be desired that they should themselves think fairly and act rightly on this question. Probably a large part of the evils in the present system could be m.ade to disappear simply by the removal of the one bar of secrecy.
Before closing, I wish to warn the societies, and particularly the more earnest men, of whom they include so many, that in refusing to reply to these arguments they are leaving many a conscientious young man, where this system is dominant, to struggle with doubts of a very
THE SECRET SOCIETY SYSTEM. IO9
grave kind, and perhaps to sacrifice his con- science to their inducements. If the ideas here set forth are wrong, they should be set right ; and for the sake of the many young men to whom this is an important, if not a vital, ques- tion, I demand that if these conclusions are false, some of the able thinkers in the societies state why they are false, and what the truth is ; and perhaps also they may lead us all to take