6

PART I:
The Faith of Our Founding Fathers

JOIN, or DIE.

The fractured rattlesnake pictured above is easily recognized

by students of American history. It was designed by Benjamin
Franklin at the time of the Albany Congress (the issue then at
stake being joint action against the Indians rather than the British),
and first appeared in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9,
1754. As the Revolution got underway, the reptile proliferated
everywhere in various popular forms, landing even on an early
naval flag, and others. The rattlesnake was a Franklin favorite as a
political emblem, and by 1774 it had evolved into a symbol of
American unity, for its fragmented sections had then not only
joined, but its tail had got in its mouth.
That the serpent came to represent a land originally discovered
and colonized in the name of Christ the King by Christendom’s
Catholics - some of them canonized saints - proves the struggle on
this continent has never been one of flesh and blood, but against
the powers of darkness in the very highest places. Evidently, when
the Immaculate Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to the Indian Juan
Diego in the Spanish west in 1531 and promised to destroy the cult
of the serpent there, the ancient dragon had nowhere to go but east,
where he found more hospitable quarters among usurpers and
heretics. Settling incognito in spots like his famous Green Dragon
Tavern in Boston, he was free to get on with his Revolution with
the help of Ben Franklin and his cronies, and did so.
He was incognito, of course, only to the ignorant, for by the
time his tail reached his mouth he was quickly recognized by those
 The Faith of Our Founding Fathers 7

in the know as the age-old Ouroboros, Alchemy’s symbol of

eternal perfection. There is an alchemical figure in the Leyden
Papyrus dating from 250 A.D., called “Cleopatra’s Gold-Making”
which features him prominently, circling the Greek motto “One is
All,” to which Americans may easily trace their well-known E
Pluribus Unum, super-catchword of the man-made unity imposed
on them in 1776.
From the beginning this old serpent was rightly named
Lucifer, the “Light-Bearer,” for he is the source of the “false light”
which the Blessed Virgin told us at La Salette would soon
“illumine the world,” causing “extraordinary wonders every place
because the true faith will be extinguished,” Has not every
spiritual master since St. Paul warned that the devil is most to be
feared when he transforms himself into an “angel of light?” (2
Cor. 11:14). In what other guise can he hope to supplant Him who
declared, “I am the light of the world!” (John 8:12).
The light the serpent offers can only be the light of his own
tremendous natural knowledge, for he is forever cut off from the
supernatural world of grace and the light of the Holy Ghost; but
this knowledge which he retains in his fallen state is incomparably
beyond what the most learned human scientist can acquire by his
own efforts, and it can be spiritually transmitted - with God’s
permission. It comprises a cosmic understanding of natural forces
and how they operate, together with detailed angelic grasp of the
most hidden properties and constituents of all forms of matter
and/or energy. The Book of Job tells how the devil has “gone
round about the earth and walked through it” (1:7), and the
Gospels confirm the power God allows him over nature.
Satanic natural knowledge is the primordial Gnosis the serpent
offered Eve, when he persuaded her that by its light alone gods
can be made here below without help from above. This makes
Satan not only father of lies, but father of all so-called Illuminati
or “enlightened ones” peddling freedom and salvation through
science rather than through the Redeemer who tells us, “Without
Me, you can do nothing!” (John 15:5). Knowing our weakness,
God so far has restrained the serpent from putting his full
intellectual arsenal into our hands, but at La Salette our Lady
warned that because of man’s sins, in 1864 “Lucifer, together with
a great number of devils” would be loosed from hell and “little by
little will abolish the faith.” She prefaced this statement by saying
8 Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism

that the Pope must “beware of miracle workers, for the time has
come for the most astonishing wonders to take place on the earth
and in the air.”
It would be foolish to look for miracles in the Catholic sense.
The wonders our Lady speaks of can only be marvels of the
natural order. They will be scientific, in the deepest and truest
meaning of the word. Didn’t the great Bossuet say, “The very
things God has revealed happen in ways we could never have
foreseen?”

It was to this end that Lucifer taught men Alchemy as part of

witchcraft, as the Fathers of the Church declare, for despite all
attempts to present these as contraries, there remains an intrinsic
relation between science and occultism. Albert Pike, high priest of
the Luciferians, knew whereof he spoke when he said, “ At the
bottom of magic ... was science!”
The occult liturgist Aleister Crowley was on solid ground
when he:

...resolved that my Ritual should celebrate the sublimity of

the operation of natural forces without introducing disputable
metaphysical theories. I would neither make nor imply any
statement about nature which would not be endorsed by the
most materialistic man of science. On the surface this may
sound difficult; but in practice I found it perfectly simple to
combine the most rigidly natural conceptions of phenomena
with the most exalted and enthusiastic celebration of their
sublimity.

Thus may a “God of creation” - the prince of this world - be

exalted without reference to the Creator of this same creation!
The psychic researcher Sir Oliver Lodge furthermore saw
back in 1913 when addressing the British Association:

I am one of those who think that the methods of science

are not so limited in their scope as has been thought; that they
can be applied much more widely, and that the psychic region
can be studied and be brought under law, too.
 The Faith of Our Founding Fathers 9

And Sax Rohmer comments:

Certainly we are better equipped today, in some respects,

for exploration, than were the ancients. Could we but establish
links between the exact sciences thus far rendered exact - and
those at present termed occult, great progress would shortly
be recorded.

He would no doubt be gratified at the number of such research

projects now carried on with public funds. Hasn’t the Church ever
warned us that the devil uses the same natural means to confect
false apparitions and other spiritism that science uses to produce
its wonders on the material level? Although requiring divine
permission, even diabolical possession is a merely natural
phenomenon.
Schoolchildren are therefore rightly taught that modern
sciences sprang from Alchemy and the occult arts, yet they are led
to believe the association between them dissolved long ago, and
that science inherited only a strange collection of flasks and
retorts, or at most some primitive laboratory techniques. They are
not told that the underlying philosophy remains unchanged. Nor
are they told what the Great Work, the Magnum Opus secretly
carried on by alchemists boiling and bubbling their brews and
powders, actually was: the total regeneration of mankind by purely
natural means, without reference to God or His supernatural
economy. In negative terms it is the destruction of the Church.
Yet, if modern science inherited anything at all from Alchemy, it
is precisely the Great Work, no longer pursued secretly in dark
corners, but now engaged in openly with unparalleled fervor by
neo-alchemists all over the earth. As our Lady said, “Little by little
they will abolish the faith,” simply by shifting attention slowly but
surely from the eternal things which are not seen to those temporal
ones which are not only seen, but are now measured, manipulated
and channeled into unheard of uses for pleasure and profit to the
exclusion of God.
Like science today, Alchemy had its innocent side, taken
seriously even by devout churchmen, intent primarily on a better
understanding of God’s creation or bettering the lot of their
fellows. At least it was accepted as a fact of life by the Church. A
treatise on the subject is attributed to Pope John XXII, who
10 Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism

nevertheless issued the Decretal Spondent quas non exhibent

against its illegal practice. Rooted in philosophy, Alchemy’s
declared purpose was compatible with orthodoxy, for by seeking
to perfect matter and its relation to the spiritual world, it could be
directed to a right ordering of reality. Pope John’s consistorial
advocate considered Alchemy a true art, holding that alchemists
do not sin as long as they attribute their power to God, an opinion
approved by many later canonists.
This view was held as late as 1949 by Dr. F. Sherwood Taylor
in The Alchemists, Founders of Modern Chemistry:

Its philosophy aimed at the unification of all nature in a

single scheme, the author of which was avowed to be God. The
attitude of the alchemist was a religious one. His view was
hierarchical: he ranged the substances of which the world was
composed in grades of worthiness. The angels were worthier
than man; man, than the animals; animals, than plants;
plants, than the elements; the fifth element was worthier than
the others; fire, than air; air, than water; water, than gold;
gold, than the other metals. The changes in nature were
thought of as exaltations or degradations of that scale.

Unfortunately Alchemy had its darker side, whose findings

were never put into the hands of the mob like some products of its
modern labs. From time immemorial it remained open to
inspirations inconsistent with faith. Its very name al-chemia or
“the black earth” was a synonym for the “Egyptian art,” Khem
being the ancient name for Egypt. It was, in other words, the
Hermetic philosophy in practice. It could be called experimental
gnosticism, the implementation under controlled conditions of the
Secret Doctrine inherited from Cain and passed on to the Cathars
and Albigensians of every age by the Hebrew kabbalists. Revealed
only to carefully chosen adepts, it was habitually veiled in
elaborate symbolism to escape the lawful authorities. By the 14th
century many ecclesiastics were tried for practicing alchemy, often
combined with charges of heresy. In 1323 all Dominicans not
renouncing the art and burning their books within eight days were
 The Faith of Our Founding Fathers 11

declared excommunicated. Thereafter Alchemy had a bad name,

but its progress was not checked.
The “Khem” of Alchemy carried overtones of the Greek word
Xumeia, which referred to the casting of metals. This fitted the
popular conception of an alchemist as some harmless old wizard
who spent his days trying to make gold from the hypothetical
“philosopher’s stone,” or longing to recapture his lost youth by
concocting the “elixir of life.” Such illusions were encouraged by
the craft, inasmuch as they provided ready pretexts for cozening
countless Christian monarchs and nobility into subsidizing
research. The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf of Hapsburg
supported whole stables of alchemists and dabbled himself,
abetted by his unsavory Jesuit confessor Fr. “Zani” Damiano,
handed over for execution by the Inquisition in 1616 for heresy
and occultism. There were also many quacks, like the notorious
Dr. John Dee and Sir Edward Kelly who took in Queen Elizabeth.
Still, even the great St. Thomas Aquinas had addressed himself to
the problem of whether gold produced by alchemy could be sold
as real gold, and he had concluded it could, provided it really
possessed the properties of gold. Today his conclusion remains
valid for an artificial or synthetic product.
Needless to say, the “gold” alchemists were really after was
not the metal we know, but the perfect substance, Prime Matter in
solid form, whose liquid form was the celebrated “Elixir.” Its
symbol was the sun, Ormuzd, the god of Mithraism, of Gnosticism
- and of Freemasonry. Thus “was created the jargon of alchemy,”
writes Grand Commander Pike in Morals and Dogma of
Freemasonry, “a continual deception for the vulgar herd, greedy
of gold, and a living language for the true disciples of Hermes
alone!”
This living language, largely derived from the Kabbala,
thrives now as the sacred tongue of speculative Masonry, into
which Alchemy injected itself via the Rosicrucians, “true disciples
of Hermes” who comprised the Society of Alchemists formed by
Christian Rosenkreutz at the Hague in 1459. Under orders to
maintain secrecy for 200 years, they nevertheless acquired
powerful affiliates, particularly in Germany, and eventually the art
spread to England, where even the scientist Robert Boyle, a
professing Christian and father of “Boyle’s Law,” established an
alchemical society at Oxford. The archeologist Elias Ashmole and
12 Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism

the celebrated Isaac Newton assisted in the project, for which a

Rosicrucian from Strasburg came to lecture, with John Locke and
Christopher Wren enrolled as pupils. Ashmole, whose
“Astrological and Hermetical Association” permeated Europe and
reached its zenith in 1675, had become a Mason in 1646, with
Newton very probably doing likewise in due time.
It was Newton, says Bernard Fay in Freemasonry and
Revolution, who made possible the great Masonic crusade of the
18th century now know as “the Enlightenment,” which produced
not only our American Revolution, but all the others, especially
the Industrial one. By proposing his cosmic theory, which became
a veritable cult among the intelligentsia, Newton united scientific
astrology, pantheism and deism all under the same banner. As
“science” they have marched together ever since.
Fay, who disclaims knowing whether or not the Jew Albert
Einstein, the “new Newton,” was ever a Mason, nevertheless
points out that whole pages of his personal credo as enunciated in
his Religion and Science are in perfect accord not only with
Judaism, but especially with the Rosicrucian founders of modern
Masonry, who saw religion as a kind of enthusiasm for the
wonders of nature. Others allege that Einstein’s space/time
continuum lay concealed for centuries in the obscure language of
the eighth of the Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistus,
legendary founder of Alchemy, where it can be deciphered today
by the initiate.

The foundation of the Grand Lodge of England, whereby Free

and Accepted Masons officially merged with the Alchemical
Society of the Rosicrucians, took place in London on June 24,
1717. The seven founders, all prominent alchemists, were the
naturalist Jean-Theophile Desaguliers, a close friend of Newton’s,
who had been named Chaplain to the Prince of Wales by George
II; the libertine Scotch clergyman James Anderson, Oxford
graduate and preacher to the king; plus George Payne, James
King, a certain Calvert, Lumden-Madden and Elliott. According to
an Italian Masonic document which came to light in 1945, these
men offered Masonry the advantages of their widespread wealth
and influence, in return for which they were able to shelter their
 The Faith of Our Founding Fathers 13

alchemical researches behind the respectable facade of the

Fraternity.
It was a congenial alliance. “Freemasonry and alchemy have
sought the same results,” says Mackey in his Encyclopedia of
Freemasonry:

...and they have both sought it by the same method of

symbolism. It is not, therefore, strange that in the eighteenth
century, and perhaps before, we find an incorporation of much
of the science of alchemy into that of Freemasonry.

Indeed not. The aforementioned Fr. Damiano wrote in his

memoirs that once while listening to the Emperor voice his
aspirations concerning the Great Work in the imperial apartments,
“Without thinking, I heard myself murmur, ‘So mote it be!’ The
Emperor looked at me in astonishment, realizing that I had spoken
the magical formula adepts use when invoking the higher powers.”
He would have been even more astonished had he been able to
hear a future Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, Paul VI, use
this now well-known Masonic phrase not once, but twice in the
course of a speech he delivered before the assembled body of the
United Nations of the World on October 4, 1965.
In the Great Work, of course, gold-making was the merest
preparatory maneuver. As Pike explains:

The Great Work is, above all things, the creation of man
by himself; that is to say, the full and entire conquest which he
effects of his faculties and his future. It is, above all, the
perfect emancipation of his will, which assures him the
universal empire of Azoth, and the domain of magnetism, that
is, complete power over the universal Magical agent. This
Magical agent, which the Ancient Hermetic philosophers
disguised under the name of ‘Prima Materia,’ determines the
forms of the modifiable Substance; and the Alchemists said by
means of it they could attain the transmutation of metals and
the universal medicine.

Although “occult,” the Great Work is in no sense unnatural in

the means it employs. On the contrary, it demands man’s total
descent into the natural. Alchemy has never pretended to create
14 Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism

anything out of nothing. It will not admit that even God can do
that, for God must “evolve” like the rest of the universe. Pike
quotes Bl. Raymond Lulle, who postulates that even to make gold,
one must start with some gold, for “Nothing is made out of
nothing.” The regeneration of man Alchemy seeks through the
perfection of matter is a glorification of matter, in complete accord
with classical Marxism and the false theory of evolution on which
Communism depends.
Masonry’s mystical theologian J.D. Buck writes:

Magic contemplates that all-around development which,

liberating the intellect from the dominion of the senses and
illuminating the spiritual perceptions, places the individual on
the lines of least resistance with the inflexible laws of nature,
and he becomes nature’s co-worker or hand-maid. To all
such, Nature makes obeisance, and delegates her powers, and
they become Masters.

Rather, they become God, for Buck blasphemously contends:

In the Early Church, as in the Secret Doctrine, there was

not one Christ for the whole world, but a potential Christ in
every man. Theologians first made a fetish of the Impersonal,
Omnipresent Divinity, and then tore the Christos from the
hearts of all humanity in order to deify Jesus ... The hand of
Providence is always a human hand. Humanity is both the
vehicle and the agent of what man has called the providence
of God. Humanity in toto, then, is the only Personal God; and
Christos is the realization, or perfection of this Divine
Persona, in Individual conscious experience ... It is far more
important that men should strive to become Christs than that
they should believe that Jesus was Christ, etc., etc.

This is easily recognized as New Age religion.

Buck proves himself a true alchemist when he states:

Man’s knowledge and power are no longer confined to, or

circumscribed by, the lower plane, or the physical body: but,
by transcending these by Regeneration and becoming perfect
in Humanity, man attains Divinity. In other words, he becomes
 The Faith of Our Founding Fathers 15

CHRISTOS. This is the meaning, aim and consummation of

Human Evolution; and this Philosophy defines the one-only
process by which it may be attained. The Perfect Man is
Christ: and Christ is God.

Thus spoke the Serpent to Eve, explaining how she could

become God through her own natural efforts. That such highly
heretical doctrine is now heard even from Catholic pulpits in the
United States shows how thoroughly the Ouroboros sponsored by
Benjamin Franklin has anchored his Great Work in American
minds. Swallowing his tail at an ever faster rate, he is bent on
making us believe that this is the way to transform ourselves into
an ever higher form of something already inherent within us. He
says the Great Work works.

“If you would study the secrets of Alchemy,” nevertheless

warns Albert Pike:

...you must study the works of the Masters with patience

and assiduity. Every word is often an enigma; and to him who
reads in haste, the whole will seem absurd. Even when they
seem to teach that the Great Work is the purification of the
Soul, and so to deal only with morals, they must conceal their
meaning, and deceive all but the Initiates.

There has hardly been a more devoted student of Alchemy

than Franklin, who was well aware that the real aim of the Great
Work was also social and political. A leaflet distributed by the
Christophers in March, 1975 featured the following Prayer
composed by him:

God grant, that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough
knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of
the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on
its surface and say, ‘This is my country.’

And this is followed by a truly singular rendition of the first

verse of Psalm 126: “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain
16 Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism

the masons (!) toil.” Let him who reads understand where and by
whom the dream of a man-made world government is nourished.
Franklin’s religion does not have to be conjectured. Not only
do we know he assisted David Williams in his Apology for
Professing the Religion of Nature (complete with liturgy!), but he
also left in writing his own “Articles of Belief,” a document
conveniently overlooked by those who would like to regard him as
a Christian. Stirred by Newton’s novel theories of the universe, he
espoused the cosmic spiritualism of Alchemy based on
hierarchies, much as described by Dr. Taylor.
He says furthermore:

I cannot conceive otherwise than that the Infinite Father

expects or requires no Worship or Praise from us, but that he
is even infinitely above it. But, since there is in Men something
like a natural principle, which inclines them to DEVOTION,
or to worship of some unseen Power; and since Men are
endued with Reason superior to all other Animals, that we are
in our World acquainted with: Therefore I think it seems
required of me, and my Duty as a Man, to pay Regards to
SOMETHING.
I conceive then, that the INFINITE has created many
beings of Gods, vastly superior to Man, who can better
conceive his Perfections than we, and return him a more
rational and glorious Praise ... It may be that these created
Gods are immortal; or it may be that after many Ages, they
are changed, and others supply their Places ... It is that
particular Wise and good God who is the author and owner of
our system, that I propose for the object of my praise and
adoration. For I conceive that he has in himself some of those
Passions he has planted in us.

Franklin concludes from this that his God might like some
praise after all. “Let me then not fail to praise my God continually,
for it is his Due, and it is all I can return for his many Favours and
great Goodness to me.”
Clearly this created God with human passions, one among
many, who made man merely one of the animals, is not the God of
the Christians, but only Franklin’s. Bernard Fay notes, “It is
difficult to affirm that Franklin’s credo was the Freemason’s
 The Faith of Our Founding Fathers 17

credo; but it is clear that it was a Masonic creed,” corresponding

“more exactly than any other to the tendencies of Freemasonry and
to the phraseology which Desaguliers and Anderson utilized in
their ‘Constitutions of the Free-Masons.’” And we might add,
corresponding to the tendencies of the dawning space-age: “This
Masonic religiosity, as found in Desaguliers and Franklin, did not
intervene as a conservative element in society, but as a ferment of
transformation,” precisely the stuff of the Great Work, now carried
on in the New World as in the old.
Like all sophisticated Gnostics of any age, Franklin publicly
supported the prevalent religion. Using the handy, ambiguous
language of Masonry, his utterances are often accepted as
orthodox Christianity by believers or half-believers, but
interpreted correctly enough by the initiated. Franklin was a
member in good standing of the Presbyterian Church and never
missed a sermon of the young liberal Rev. Hemphill, who seldom
mentioned God. When despite Franklin’s defense Hemphill was
evicted by his frustrated congregation, Franklin joined the
Anglican Church.
He seldom attended its services, but when the famous preacher
George Whitefield brought the “Great Awakening” to America,
Franklin became one of his most ardent supporters. This led many
to believe he had suffered a conversion, but Fay remarks wryly,
“The support given by Franklin was only a Masonic support
conforming with Masonic doctrines and the spirit of
Desaguliers,”- indeed an early form of Marxist dialectics in action,
for, “It is true Whitefield ... converted the crowds, but wherever he
preached the parishes became detached from their pastors;
wherever he passed, the life of the Church was disorganized” and
the work of revolution furthered. As for Franklin, he said he saw
“a positive advantage in the existence of many different churches,
for that created competition, and after all, competition was good
for every kind of trade.”
He seems to have believed in some sort of immortality, if we
are to credit the famous Epitaph he wrote for his tombstone:

The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer, like the cover of

an old book, its contents torn out and stript of its lettering and
gilding, lies here food for worms. Yet the work itself shall not
18 Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism

be lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new

and beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the Author.

This is no Christian Resurrection of the body, glorified

through the Son of God. The immortality he expects would be
only natural, a re-incarnation into another body of some kind. The
“work itself,” as Franklin calls himself, is subject only to
alchemical transmutation according to the alchemical maxim
known to every neophyte: “No generation without corruption.”
That Franklin recognized no extra-natural forces is easily
proved by a celebrated anecdote. At a party at Lord Shelburne’s in
England, Fay relates:

There were a number of scholars from both the continent

and England, some able ministers who succeeded in purifying
God, such as Priestley and Price; other churchmen who were
expert in avoiding God, like the Abbé Morellet of France who
ministered to courtesans and atheists.

Franklin and the Abbé were conversing:

...about the Bible and Christ, and Franklin, half-smiling,

said that the Biblical miracles no longer seemed like miracles
to him, that he could calm the waters quite as easily as Jesus
Christ. The Abbé was too polite to contradict him but too
educated to believe the statement...
Franklin sensed what was going on in his mind, and
calling the company together, they went to the pond. A slight
breeze was ruffling its surface with a thousand tiny ripples,
and Franklin slowly encircled it while the party waited in a
curious silence. Then, raising his staff abruptly, Franklin
whirled it three times above the water and inscribed some
magic hieroglyph in the air. With a wave of his hand, Franklin
then turned to the company and showed that the water was
calming down.
In a few moments the pond was as glassy as a mirror and
a vague light glimmered over the immobile watery surface.
The spectators stared at each other without knowing what to
think. Then they surrounded the doctor, overwhelming him
with compliments and adulation, but he escaped from them
 The Faith of Our Founding Fathers 19

and disappeared down a shady walk, still conversing with

Morellet. He leaned on his cane heavily and laughed softly.
The Abbé was frankly mystified, so Franklin then showed him
that his staff was hollow and that he had filled it with oil. It
was this oil, spread over the water, which had stilled it. A
hedge fortunately hid them from the others, for the Abbé burst
into a clear peal of laughter which was joined by Franklin’s.
They laughed all the more when they saw through the
twigs that the party was still standing by the pond, fearfully
exclaiming over the event. Franklin’s miracles were the
delight of the crowd, and deeply appreciated by the
philosophers and Masons, for they enlightened humanity and
made for progress. All the lodges of France and England sang
the praises of their illustrious brother.

Disbelief in the miraculous explains Franklin’s presence at the

opening of the first Unitarian Chapel founded in England by
Theophilus Lindsay, which became the meeting place for liberal
reformers hoping to replace “outworn” Christianity by scientific
truth, and where the aforementioned Joseph Priestley, discoverer
of oxygen, was one of the clergy. Another companion of
Franklin’s at this event was his close friend Francis Dashwood,
Lord Le Despencer, who had asked his help in revising the Church
of England’s Book of Common Prayer. Franklin himself tells us of
the happy days he spent at the estate of this notorious libertine and
student of the occult, who all the while supporting the village
curate, was said to celebrate black Masses amid the ruins of an old
abbey where he officiated as “Prior” to a community known as
“the mad monks of Medmenharn.” His Lordship’s American
friend says of him, however:

But a pleasanter thing is the kind countenance, the

facetious and very intelligent conversation of mine host, who
having been for many years engaged in public affairs, seen all
parts of Europe, and kept the best company in the world, is
himself the best existing!

He and Franklin “decided that the prayer-book was entirely

too long,” writes Sydney George Fisher in The True Benjamin
Franklin:
20 Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism

Its prolixity kept people from going to church. The aged

and infirm did not like to sit so long in cold churches in
winter, and even the young and sinful might attend more
willingly if the service were shorter ... All references to the
sacraments and to the divinity of the Saviour were, of course,
stricken out and short work made of the Athanasian and the
Apostles’ Creed. Even the commandments in the catechism
had the pen drawn through them, which was rather
inconsistent with the importance Franklin attached to morals
as against dogma. But both editors, no doubt, had painful
recollections on this subject; and as Franklin would have been
somewhat embarrassed by the seventh (the Sixth
Commandment in Catholic catechisms), he settled the question
by disposing of them all.

The Te Deum and the Venite were both deleted.

The beautiful canticle ‘All ye works of the Lord’ ... was

entirely marked out. As this canticle is the nearest approach in
the prayer-book to anything like the religion of nature, it is
strange that it should have suffered.

Strange, too, that the only phrase Franklin asked Le Despencer

to omit from his first Preface was the description of the Old
Testament as “a Jewish book very curious, perhaps more fit for the
perusal of the learned than suited to the capacities of the general
illiterate part of mankind.” His reasons for this, who knows?
Although eventually he wrote only the final Preface, in America
the work - purged of all references to king and parliament -
became known far and wide as “Franklin’s Prayer Book,” doing
much to strengthen his public image as a believer.

The popular scientific writer Roger Burlingame coined the

phrase, “America was discovered; the United States was
invented.” He meant only to make a distinction between a
principle and its application, but the eyes of faith see deeper than
that: America is the creation of Almighty God and can indeed only
be discovered, whereas the United States, being merely a political
 The Faith of Our Founding Fathers 21

contrivance, can qualify only as a human invention. Mistaking one

for the other has disastrous consequences, for contrivances may
fall apart without warning, as the United States nearly did during
its so-called Civil War and may do now by internal collapse.
Catholics who mistake the United States for God’s America
may furthermore easily fall into the heresy formally defined by
Pope Leo XIII as Americanism. Basically, it is naturalism in
American dress, and it accommodates itself to all the ideals of the
Enlightenment. French radicals of the last century expected it then
to produce a major schism in the Church under the able leadership
of Catholic bishops in the United States, some of whom even
dared preach Americanism to Europe. It was a threat, apparently,
which drove Leo XIII to approve of democracy in practice, if not
in principle rather than antagonize the enemy.
“But over there in America,” wrote Emile Zola:

...what fertile virgin soil for a triumphant heresy! How

easy to see a Bishop Ireland one fine day like the banner of
revolt and become the apostle of the new religion, A
RELIGION RELEASED FROM DOGMAS, MORE HUMAN,
THE RELIGION WE DEMOCRATS ARE WAITING FOR!

The United States had been only too well prepared for such
regrettable leadership. Like Franklin, most of its Founding Fathers
were not Christians. Although they often made references to the
Deity, the God they invoked was their God, the alchemical God of
nature in Christian dress. In fact the most influential among them
were not so much deists as thoroughgoing pantheists, for, being
avowed rationalists, they looked for divinity only in nature.
Themselves products of the Enlightenment, they could hardly have
been anything else.
In Alchemy, a Green Dragon signifies the Great Work in its
beginnings, and it cannot have been coincidence that the
Revolution was planned and carried out by men who met regularly
in a Boston tavern of that very name. So diligently did they
promote the serpent’s cause that America today finds herself
immersed in a sea of neo-Gnosticism so pervading and controlling
her moral, intellectual and political life that, by comparison, the
Albigensian heresy which once ravaged the whole of Christendom
now looks like a harmless childhood disease. God preserve us
22 Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism

from the Red Dragon, alchemical sign for the Great Work in its
completion!