It is assured that the late cardinal Passionei, who detested these fathers, (for which he might have good reasons) pushed his hatred against them so far, as not to admit into his fine and numerous library any writer of the society. I regret this, for the sake both of the library and of the master; the one lost a number of good books by it; and the other, so philosophical, as we are assured, in other respects, was not at all so on this occasion. If any thing can console the Jesuits, it is that the same cardinal, so sworn an enemy of all their works, had the misfortune to countenance and extol the rhapsodies of that same Abraham Chaumeix, whose very name now is become ridiculous, and who is at present turned down to his proper place, after having been quoted and celebrated as a kind of father of the church[4]. The society owes to the form of its institution (so decried in other respects) this variety of talents which distinguish it. They reject no sort of abilities, and require no other condition, in order to be admitted among its members, but a capacity of being useful. To engage our liberty, we must pay every where, even among the Mendicants. The Jesuits know nothing of this paltry interest; they receive with pleasure and gratuitously every person from whom they hope to draw any good; nobody is useless among them; of those from whom they expect the least, they make, according to their own expression, _missionaries_ for the villages, or _martyrs_ for the Indies. They have not even disdained very great personages, little worthy of the titles which they bore when they made themselves Jesuits, as a Charles of Lorrain, and several others: their names have served at least as a decoration to the order, if they were good for nothing else: we may call them the _honoraries_ of the society. Two other reasons seem to have contributed to give the Jesuits, above all the other orders, the advantage of a greater number of men estimable for their talents and their works: the first is the duration of their noviciate, and the law which permits them not to bind themselves by the last vows before the age of thirty-three. The superiours have the more time to know their subjects, to judge of them, and to direct them towards the object for which they are most proper: these subjects moreover, being engaged at a mature age, after a long probation, and all the time necessary for reflexion, are less exposed to disgust and to repentance, more attached to the society, and more disposed to employ their talents for its glory, and for their own, which comes only afterward.