The English Province of the Society continued to exist, and had a large number of members, until the suppression. Although the penal laws were again enforced, and it was decreed that any Jesuit who was found in the kingdom after 25th March 1700 would be imprisoned for life, the fathers still exhibited the courage and devotion which do so much to redeem their errors. In 1701 there were 340 members of the Province, though most of these were in Belgium or with the Catholic colonists in Maryland. In 1708 we find 158 members of the Society in England, generally living in the houses of the Catholic nobility and gentry. Their work was now almost confined to a ministration to the depressed Catholics. They reported only 3000 conversions to the faith between 1700 and 1708, and many of these were soldiers quartered in Belgium. In 1711 they had 12,000 Catholics under their spiritual charge. But even in this restricted sphere they maintained the struggle against the secular clergy, and published many pamphlets against them. "Jansenism" was the latest heresy they had discovered, and they denounced the secular clergy to Rome as tainted with it. At last, as the eighteenth century wore on, they realised that all these old conflicts were yielding to a mighty struggle. The Society is fighting for its life against Catholic opponents. In 1759 it is suppressed, with great ignominy, in Portugal; in 1762 it is suppressed in France; in 1767 even Spain ruthlessly expels the body to which it had given birth. The English Jesuits had already begun to suffer from this terrible campaign. When Louis XV. ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits from his kingdom, the Paris Parlement saw to the closing of their college at St. Omer. A long procession of waggons, containing the teachers and pupils, trailed drearily across the country, and deposited them, in great misery and dejection, at Bruges. There, ten years later, they suffer the supreme punishment of suppression by the Papacy, and the Privy Council of Brussels carries out the sentence with the harshness which in every country teaches them how deeply they are hated. The 90 members of the English Province who are found in Belgium, and the 184 fathers who are at work in England, sadly divest themselves of the familiar costume and face the bleak future. This is the tragic culmination of two centuries of heroic struggle and sacrifice; it is the price of the blunders and crimes of their politicians and the casuistic excesses of their theologians. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 22: It may be well to state that no theologian ever said, in so many words: "The end justifies the means." The nearest approach is, perhaps, the saying of the Jesuit Busenbaum-- "To him to whom the end is lawful, the means also is lawful."]