form in which the germs could be protected and cultivated, as in the case of the orders of the Illuminati. The same sort of protection which secrecy affords to ascending movements is also secured from it during their decline. Refuge in secrecy is a ready resort in the case of social endeavors and forces that are likely to be displaced by innovation. Secrecy is thus, so to speak, a transition stadium between being and not-being. As the suppression of the German communal associations began to occur, at the close of the Middle Ages, through the increasing power of the central governments, a wide-reaching secret life developed within these organizations. It was characterized by hidden assemblies and conferences, by secret enforcement of law, and by violence—somewhat as animals seek the protection of concealment when near death. This double function of secrecy as a form of protection, to afford an intermediate station equally for progressing and for decaying powers, is perhaps most obvious in the case of religious movements. So long as the Christian communities were persecuted by the state, they were often obliged to withdraw their meetings, their worship, their whole existence, from public view. So soon, however, as Christianity had become the state religion, nothing was left for the adherents of persecuted, dying paganism than the same hiding of its cultus which it had previously forced upon the new faith. As a general proposition, the secret society emerges everywhere as correlate of despotism and of police control. It acts as protection alike of defense and of offense against the violent pressure of central powers. This is true, not alone in political relations, but in the same way within the church, the school, and the family.
Corresponding with this protective character of the secret society, as an external quality, is, as already observed, the inner quality of reciprocal confidence between the members. This is, moreover, a quite specific type of confidence, viz., in the ability to preserve silence. Social unities may rest, so far as their content is concerned, upon many sorts of presumption about grounds of confidence. They may trust, for example, to the motive of business interest, or to religious conviction, to courage, or to love, to the high moral tone, or—in the case of criminal combinations—
