In the brief of suppression Clement XIV. had enumerated a series of religious congregations which the papacy had abolished on account of their decay. Most of these had faded from the memory even of ecclesiastics. Their members had bowed to the papal command, and either directed their steps to some other religious body or quietly enjoyed the pensions allotted them out of their property. But there can have been little expectation that the members of the Society of Jesus, who were especially pledged to obey the Pope, would submit to the sentence passed on them. They would, in some form, await the toll of the bells over the remains of Clement XIV., and, if necessary, over the remains of the Catholic monarchs. The form which their resistance actually took, however, was more audacious than their keenest critic could have anticipated. They persuaded two non-Catholic rulers to prevent the publication of the brief in their dominions, persuaded themselves that by this device they escaped the heavy spiritual penalties laid on rebels by the brief, and flouted every command of the Pope and his representatives to change at least their name and costume. So much has been written on the conduct of Frederick the Great and Catherine in patronising the Jesuits that we do not share the astonishment of contemporaries. In his correspondence with the free-thinker D'Alembert at Paris, Frederick lightly advances one reason after another for his action. He scouted D'Alembert's warnings. The Pope had "pared the claws" of the dangerous animals; he had "cut off the tails of the foxes," and they could not again carry torches into the cornfields of the Philistines. On the other hand, they were excellent teachers, and it was immaterial to Frederick what orders the Pope gave about their costume and domestic arrangements. Pressed more seriously, he pleaded that when he annexed Silesia he had solemnly pledged himself to respect the religious _status quo_, and he was bound in honour to leave the Jesuits there, since they were part of the situation he had sworn to respect. Even this ostensibly serious argument was too ridiculous to satisfy his friends. A Protestant ruler swearing to respect the Catholic arrangements naturally supposes that he is to do so only as long as the head of the Church desires. The truth is that, in the first place, the Jesuits provided his State with a comparatively good scheme of education without cost to his treasury; and, since they could have taught just as effectively whether or no they continued to call themselves Jesuits, it is further clear that Frederick deliberately protected and encouraged their rebellion in order to secure a larger service from them than merely teaching arithmetic. They were, as they had so often done for Catholic monarchs in outlying dominions, to teach loyalty to Prussia and disarm rebels. Add the fact that the Inquisition had put his writings on the Index,