state in life seemed to permit, were sacrificed by the society to the clamours which they had excited; the one by approving a work, in which the regent of the kingdom (who had been dead about twenty years before) was indirectly attacked; the other, by a philosophical joke on “the language of beasts,” for which they obliged him to make reparation, by confining him to the college of la Flêche, and charging him with the _making_ of a catechism, which brought him down to the grave, overwhelmed with disgust and vexation. A hundred years before, Petau, the famous Petau, had like to have experienced fate very nearly similar, for having pretended, that before the council of Nice the church was not fully determined on the divinity of the word[7]. He died in the college of the Jesuits at Paris, abandoned and in want of every thing. It seems as if the device of the society had been that of the ancient Romans; _Salus populi suprema lex esto_[8]. To all these means of augmenting their consideration and their credit, they join another no less efficacious: this is the regularity of their conduct and manners. Their discipline on this point is as severe as it is prudent; and whatever calumny may have published concerning it, it must be confessed, that no religious order gives less handle in this respect. Even those among them who have taught the most monstrous doctrine, who have written on the most obscene subjects, have led the most edifying and the most exemplary lives. It was at the feet of the crucifix that the pious Sanchez wrote his abominable and disgusting work: and it has been said, in particular, of Escobar, equally known by the austerity of his manners, and the looseness of his doctrines, that he purchased heaven very dear for himself, but bestowed it at an easy rate upon others. We have seen what success the Jesuits had the art to procure themselves at the court of France: their progress was nearly the same in almost all the other courts: at the beginning of the present century there was not in Europe a catholic prince, of whose conscience they were not the directors, and from whom they had not obtained the most signal favours; in all parts their enemies raged, and in all parts they made a jest of their enemies. They confined not their ambition to Europe; perpetually full of the project of governing, and of governing by religion, they sent to the Indies, and to China, missionaries, who carried thither christianity for the people, and the profane sciences for the princes, for the grandees, and for the more enlightened persons, whom by these means they might render favourable to them. Let us stop here a moment, and examine more particularly, by what kind of learning and doctrine the Jesuits were able to make such great progress among the Christians, and among those who were not so.