The question whether the Jesuits were implicated in the crime of Ravaillac is one of the hundred almost insoluble problems of their history. On this occasion, indeed, it is exceptionally difficult to reach a confident verdict, because an entirely pro-Spanish and pro-Jesuit régime was set up by the death of Henry, and inconvenient testimony could easily be suppressed. It seems to me that a consideration of great importance is generally overlooked in the discussion of these problems. When the evidence is scanty or obscure, we give the Jesuits "the benefit of the doubt," as if we were arraigning them for something they regarded as a crime. This is a false attitude, of which they take full advantage. Crétineau-Joly quotes a dozen distinguished theologians of the time who taught that it was just and proper to remove a monarch whose rule was gravely injurious, and hardly a single eminent theologian who taught the contrary. We have merely to suppose that the Jesuit fathers were divided in anything like the same proportion, and we see at once that there must have been--and we know that there were--numbers of Jesuits in every province who would regard the assassination of a king who threatened the faith in his country as a quite moral and meritorious deed. Mariana's claim that Jacques Clément, the murderer of Henry III., was "the eternal glory of France" was echoed by thousands of his colleagues. It seems to me very material to bear this in mind in all these cases of assassination. The attitude of their apologists is singular: they admit that the Jesuits as a body regarded the assassination of kings who menaced the faith as a just and proper action, yet are remarkably eager to prove that the Jesuits never acted on their belief. On Jesuit principles the murder of Henry IV. was not a crime.