But the best defence of Clement and the decisive answer to his detractors is the brief itself which he signed on 21st July, and at the composition of which he had worked assiduously during his two "retreats." It is an exceedingly able and convincing document. Jesuit writers constantly say that Clement XIV. abolished the Society only on the ground that the peace of Christendom demanded that step, and that he passed no judgment on the Society itself. Even the recent American _Catholic Encyclopædia_, which affects candour and accuracy, states, in the article on Clement XIV. that "no blame is laid by the Pope on the rules of the Order, or the present condition of its members, or the orthodoxy of their teaching." This is a disingenuous and most misleading description of the brief. Clement gives a masterly summary of the irregularities which had been charged against the Society during the two hundred years of its activity. While, however, he is frequently content to speak of these past matters as "charges," he is careful to add that, time after time, they were endorsed by his predecessors, who were condemned to take drastic action against the Society; and, when he comes to deal with the existing Society, which properly concerns him, he plainly observes that it "can no longer produce the abundant fruits and the considerable advantages for which it was created," and he therefore abolishes it for ever. It is impossible to insert here the whole text of the lengthy brief, but an analysis and some extracts will suffice to show this. The brief opens, after a few introductory remarks of a general nature, with a long list of religious congregations which had been dissolved by the papacy. These bodies had been suppressed for their deterioration or irregularities, and the list is therefore a fitting introduction to the main work of the brief. The Pope then tells that he has made a thorough study of the foundation of the Society and the early papal documents issued in regard to it. He adds: "The very tenor and terms of these apostolic constitutions [the letters of his predecessors] teach us that the Society, almost from the beginning, produced within it the germs of discord and jealousy, and that these not only rent the Society itself, but impelled its members to rise against the other religious orders, the secular clergy, the academies, the universities, the colleges, the public schools, and even against the monarchs who had received them into their States." Here we have, in categorical form, an endorsement of all the charges that were made against the Jesuits in the first century of their existence.