spoke in the saintly tone of the primitive fathers; but with that very large part of mankind who have religion enough to make them uneasy when they do wrong, and not religion enough to keep them from doing wrong, he followed a very different system. Since he could not reclaim them from guilt, it was his business to save them from remorse. He had at his command an immense dispensary of anodynes for wounded consciences. In the books of casuistry which had been written by his brethren, and printed with the approbation of his superiors, were to be found doctrines consolatory to transgressors of every class. There the bankrupt was taught how he might, without sin, secrete his goods from his creditors. The servant was taught how he might, without sin, run off with his master's plate. The pander was assured that a Christian man might innocently earn his living by carrying letters and messages between married women and their gallants. The highspirited and punctilious gentlemen of France were gratified by a decision in favor of dueling. The Italians, accustomed to darker and baser modes of vengeance, were glad to learn that they might, without any crime, shoot at their enemies from behind hedges. To deceit was given a license sufficient to destroy the whole value of human contracts and of human testimony. In truth, if society continued to hold together, if life and property enjoyed any security, it was because common sense and common humanity restrained men from doing what the society of Jesus assured them they might with a safe conscience do.

So strangely were good and evil intermixed in the character of these celebrated brethren; and the intermixture was the secret of their gigantic power. That power could never have belonged to mere hypocrites. It could never have belonged to rigid moralists. It was to be attained only by men sincerely enthusiastic in the pursuit of a great end, and at the same time unscrupulous as to the choice of means.

From the first the Jesuits had been bound by a pecul

iar allegiance to the pope. Their mission had been not less to quell all mutiny within the Church than to repel the hostility of her avowed enemies. Their doctrine was in the highest degree what has been called on our side of the Alps Ultramontane, and differed almost as much from the doctrine of Bossuet as from that of Luther. They condemned the Gallican liberties, the claim of œcumenical councils to control the Holy See, and the claim of bishops to an independent commission from heaven. Lainez, in the name of the whole fraternity, proclaimed at Trent, amid the applause of the creatures of Pius the Fourth and the murmurs of French and Spanish prelates, that the government of the faithful had been committed by Christ to the pope alone; that in the pope alone all sacerdotal authority was concentrated; and that through the pope alone priests and bishops derived whatever divine authority they possessed. During many years the union between the supreme pontiffs and the order had continued unbroken. Had that union been still unbroken when James the Second ascended the English throne; had the influence of the Jesuits, as well as the influence of the pope, been exerted in favor of a moderate and constitutional policy, it is probable that the great revolution which in a short time changed the whole state of European affairs would never have taken place. But, even before the middle of the seventeenth century, the society, proud of its services and confident in its strength, had become impatient of the yoke. A generation of Jesuits sprang up who looked for protection and guidance rather to the court of France than to the court of Rome; and this disposition was not a little strengthened when Innocent the Eleventh was raised to the papal throne.

The Jesuits were, at that time, engaged in a war to the death against an enemy whom they had at first disdained, but whom they had at length been forced to regard with respect and fear. Just when their prosperity was at the height, they were braved by a handful of opponents, who Fra Paolo, lib. vii.; Pallavicino, lib. xviii., cap. 15.

had indeed no influence with the rulers of this world, but who were strong in religious faith and intellectual energy. Then followed a long, a strange, a glorious conflict of genius against power. The Jesuit called cabinets, tribunals, universities to his aid; and they responded to the call. Port Royal appealed not in vain to the hearts and to the understandings of millions. The dictators of Christendom found themselves, on a sudden, in the position of culprits. They were arraigned on a charge of having systematically debased the standard of evangelical morality for the purpose of increasing their own influence; and the charge was enforced in a manner which at once arrested the attention of all Europe, for the chief accuser was Blaise Pascal. His intellectual powers were such as have rarely been bestowed on any of the children of men; and the vehemence of the zeal which animated him was but too well proved by the cruel penances and vigils under which his macerated frame sank into an early grave. His spirit was the spirit of Saint Bernard; but the delicacy of his wit, the purity, the energy, the simplicity of his rhetoric, had never been equaled except by the great masters of Attic eloquence. All Europe read and admired, laughed and wept. The Jesuits attempted to reply, but their feeble answers were received by the public with shouts of mockery. They wanted, it is true, no talent or accomplishment into which men can be drilled by elaborate discipline; but such discipline, though it may bring out the powers of ordinary minds, has a tendency to suffocate, rather than to develop, original genius. It was universally acknowledged that, in the literary contest, the Jansenists were completely victorious. To the Jesuits nothing was left but to oppress the sect which they could not confute. Louis the Fourteenth was now their chief support. His conscience had, from boyhood, been in their keeping; and he had learned from them to abhor Jansenism quite as much as he abhorred Protestantism, and very much more than he abhorred atheism. Innocent the Eleventh, on the other hand, leaned to the Jansenist opin

ions. The consequence was, that the society found itself in a situation never contemplated by its founder. The Jesuits were estranged from the supreme pontiff, and they were closely allied with a prince who proclaimed himself the champion of the Gallican liberties and the enemy of Ultramontane pretensions. Thus the order became in England an instrument of the designs of Louis, and labored, with a success which the Roman Catholics afterward long and bitterly deplored, to widen the breach between the king and the Parliament, to thwart the nuncio, to undermine the power of the lord treasurer, and to support the most desperate schemes of Tyrconnel.

Thus, on one side, were the Hydes and the whole body of Tory Churchmen, Powis and all the most respectable lords and gentlemen of the king's own faith, the StatesGeneral, the house of Austria, and the pope. On the other side were a few Roman Catholic adventurers, of broken fortune and tainted reputation, backed by France and by the Jesuits.

The chief representative of the Jesuits at Whitehall was an English brother of the order, who had, during some time, acted as vice provincial, who had been long regarded by James with peculiar favor, and who had lately been made clerk of the closet. This man, named Edward Petre, was descended from an honorable family. His manners were courtly; his speech was flowing and plausible; but he was weak and vain, covetous and ambitious. Of all the evil counselors who had access to the royal ear, he bore, perhaps, the largest part in the ruin of the house of Stuart.

The obstinate and imperious nature of the king gave great advantages to those who advised him to be firm, to yield nothing, and to make himself feared. One state maxim had taken possession of his small understanding, and was not to be dislodged by reason. To reason, in

deed, he was not in the habit of attending. His mode of arguing, if it is to be so called, was one not uncommon among dull and stubborn persons, who are accustomed to

be surrounded by their inferiors. He asserted a proposition; and, as often as wiser people ventured respectfully to show that it was erroneous, he asserted it again, in exactly the same words, and conceived that, by doing so, he at once disposed of all objections. "I will make no concessions," he often repeated; "my father made concessions, and he was beheaded." If it were true that concession had been fatal to Charles the First, a man of sense would have known that a single experiment is not sufficient to establish a general rule even in sciences much less complicated than the science of government; that, since the beginning of the world, no two political experiments were ever made of which all the conditions were exactly alike; and that the only way to learn civil prudence from history is to examine and compare an immense number of cases. But, if the single instance on which the king relied proved any thing, it proved that he was in the wrong. There can be little doubt that, if Charles had frankly made to the Short Parliament, which met in the spring of 1640, but one half of the concessions which he made, a few months after, to the Long Parliament, he would have lived and died a powerful king. On the other hand, there can be no doubt whatever that, if he had refused to make any concession to the Long Parliament, and had resorted to arms in defense of the ship-money and of the Star Chamber, he would have seen, in the hostile ranks, Hyde and Falkland side by side with Hollis and Hampden. But, in truth, he would not have been able to resort to arms, for not twenty Cavaliers would have joined his standard. It was to his large concessions alone that he owed the support of that great body of noblemen and gentlemen who fought so long and so

*This was the practice of his daughter Anne; and Marlborough said that she had learned it from her father.- Vindication of the Duchess of Marlborough.

Down to the time of the trial of the bishops, James went on telling Adda that all the calamities of Charles the First were 66 per la troppa indul