<P> In addition to debates on religion, societies discussed issues such as politics and the role of women . However, it is important to note that the critical subject matter of these debates did not necessarily translate into opposition to the government . In other words, the results of the debate quite frequently upheld the status quo . From a historical standpoint, one of the most important features of the debating society was their openness to the public, as women attended and even participated in almost every debating society, which were likewise open to all classes providing they could pay the entrance fee . Once inside, spectators were able to participate in a largely egalitarian form of sociability that helped spread Enlightenment ideas . </P> <P> Historians have long debated the extent to which the secret network of Freemasonry was a main factor in the Enlightenment . The leaders of the Enlightenment included Freemasons such as Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Lessing, Pope, Horace Walpole, Sir Robert Walpole, Mozart, Goethe, Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington . Norman Davies said that Freemasonry was a powerful force on behalf of liberalism in Europe from about 1700 to the twentieth century . It expanded rapidly during the Age of Enlightenment, reaching practically every country in Europe . It was especially attractive to powerful aristocrats and politicians as well as intellectuals, artists and political activists . </P> <P> During the Age of Enlightenment, Freemasons comprised an international network of like - minded men, often meeting in secret in ritualistic programs at their lodges . They promoted the ideals of the Enlightenment and helped diffuse these values across Britain and France and other places . Freemasonry as a systematic creed with its own myths, values and set of rituals originated in Scotland around 1600 and spread first to England and then across the Continent in the eighteenth century . They fostered new codes of conduct--including a communal understanding of liberty and equality inherited from guild sociability--"liberty, fraternity and equality". Scottish soldiers and Jacobite Scots brought to the Continent ideals of fraternity which reflected not the local system of Scottish customs but the institutions and ideals originating in the English Revolution against royal absolutism . Freemasonry was particularly prevalent in France--by 1789, there were perhaps as many as 100,000 French Masons, making Freemasonry the most popular of all Enlightenment associations . The Freemasons displayed a passion for secrecy and created new degrees and ceremonies . Similar societies, partially imitating Freemasonry, emerged in France, Germany, Sweden and Russia . One example was the Illuminati founded in Bavaria in 1776, which was copied after the Freemasons, but was never part of the movement . The Illuminati was an overtly political group, which most Masonic lodges decidedly were not . </P> <P> Masonic lodges created a private model for public affairs . They "reconstituted the polity and established a constitutional form of self - government, complete with constitutions and laws, elections and representatives". In other words, the micro-society set up within the lodges constituted a normative model for society as a whole . This was especially true on the continent: when the first lodges began to appear in the 1730s, their embodiment of British values was often seen as threatening by state authorities . For example, the Parisian lodge that met in the mid 1720s was composed of English Jacobite exiles . Furthermore, freemasons all across Europe explicitly linked themselves to the Enlightenment as a whole . For example, in French lodges the line "As the means to be enlightened I search for the enlightened" was a part of their initiation rites . British lodges assigned themselves the duty to "initiate the unenlightened". This did not necessarily link lodges to the irreligious, but neither did this exclude them from the occasional heresy . In fact, many lodges praised the Grand Architect, the masonic terminology for the deistic divine being who created a scientifically ordered universe . </P>

The major ideas of enlightenment philosophers had the most direct impact on the american founders