It is not that they were not very ready to expose themselves to the greatest dangers, and even to death, for the sake of that religion which they burlesqued in their manner of preaching it, and which served only as an instrument to their ambition. When the emperor of Japan judged it proper (for reasons which appeared to him indispensible) to exterminate Christianity from his territories, the Jesuits had there their martyrs as well as others, and even in greater numbers. The reader will not be surprised at it, when he knows what was told me by a person extremely worthy of credit. He was particularly acquainted with a Jesuit, who had been employed twenty years in the missions of Canada; and who, while he did not believe a God, as he owned privately to this friend, had faced death twenty times for the sake of the religion which he preached with success to the savages. This friend represented to the Jesuit the inconsistency of his zeal: “Ah!” replied the missionary, “you have no idea of the pleasure which is felt in commanding the attention of twenty thousand people, and in persuading them to what we believe not ourselves.” Such is the spirit of the method which the Jesuits have followed, for teaching with success to mankind what they called religion and Christian morality. Such was the moderate doctrine which they preached at the court of Louis XIV. and by means of which they succeeded in rendering themselves so agreeable. Accordingly it was principally under the reign of that prince that the power, the credit, and opulence of the Jesuits received in France such prodigious aggrandizements: it was under this reign that they succeeded in rendering the clergy dependent on them (we may even say their slaves) by the disposal of benefices, with which the fathers la Chaize and le Tellier, the king’s confessors, were successively entrusted: it was in this reign that they succeeded, in consequence of the need which the bishops stood in of them, in extorting, even while they braved them, their confidence, or the appearance of their confidence, and in obtaining the direction of several seminaries; in which the youth, destined to the church, were brought up in their doctrines, and in the hatred of their enemies: it was under this reign that they succeeded, by decrying or vilifying the other orders and the secular ecclesiasticks, in invading a great number of colleges, or at least in obtaining permission for establishing new ones: it was under this reign that they succeeded so far, through the confidence and consideration which Louis XIV. gave them, as to draw all the court to their college of Clermont. We remember still the mark of flattery which they bestowed on that monarch, by divesting that college of the name which it bore of the _Society of Jesus_, in order to call it the college of _Louis the Great_; and nobody is ignorant of the Latin distich which was made on that occasion, and in which the society was