[Footnote 23: He joined the Society afterwards, in 1624, and was arrested (on a Catholic denunciation) and executed in 1628. This section of the French historian's work is particularly inaccurate and fantastic. See Father Foley's _Records_, ii. p. 32, for Arrowsmith.] [Footnote 24: J. Pollock, _The Popish Plot_, 1903. For a desperate defence of the Catholic position, in opposition to Mr. Pollock, see A. Marks, _Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?_ 1905.] [Footnote 25: As the letter is inconvenient, Crétineau-Joly suggests that it was forged. But it is admitted by the Jesuit Father Foley, without demur, in his _Records_.] CHAPTER IX THE STRUGGLE WITH THE JANSENISTS The story of the Jesuits in France from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century is rich in material for the interpretation of their character. We find every conceivable type of Jesuit rising to prominence at some period in the long chronicle. While a Father François Régis or a Julien Manvir sustains the finest traditions of the Society by a splendid expenditure of a noble character in the service of the squalid peasantry, his colleagues smile indulgently upon the perfumed vices of nobles and princes, enter into the most unscrupulous intrigues for the destruction of their theological opponents, and encourage Louis XIV. in the belief that he may do penance for his sins on the backs of the Jansenists and Protestants. While, during a whole generation, they direct the fingers of the Pope in virtue of their supreme and peculiar zeal for his authority, they, in the next generation, secure the praise of the Parlement and the gratitude of the court by a most extraordinary intrigue against the Papacy. In the new-built palace of Versailles they obtain a paramount influence over the greatest autocrat of modern history; they fill the Gallican Church with prelates who will obey their commands; they crush Protestantism in France; and they seem to have almost attained the great ideal of their Society--the control of the courts which control the earth. And within another generation their varied enemies unite and drive them ignominiously from the country.