First Sentence

"AT the time when a variety of causes, the respective shares of which in producing the great European convulsion of the last century have formed the theme of hundreds of volumes, were operating towards the production of that tremendous political and social tornado, the professorship of canon law in the university of Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, was held by Dr. Adam Weishaupt, a man possessing moral and intellectual qualities of a rare order, but who had not, in the first year of the period under review, made any mark in the world."