With regard to the other monks in general, it belongs to the wisdom of government to judge of the method they ought to take with them; but supposing they should one day want to destroy them, or at least to weaken them enough to prevent their being hurtful, there is an infallible way of succeeding therein, without employing violence, which must be avoided even with them: this would be to revive the ancient laws, which forbid monastick vows before twenty-five years of age. May the government yield in this respect to the unanimous desire of enlightened citizens! In expectation of this disaster of the monastick communities and the happiness of the state, let us continue and finish the account of the annihilation of the Jesuits. In spite of the war declared against the society by the magistrates, those fathers did not think their destruction unavoidable: the parliament of Paris, which had given them the first blow, had assigned them a year to judge of their institution: the party which desired their ruin, blind with hatred, and knowing neither the laws nor its forms, reproached the parliament with having granted them so long a term: they were afraid, that the friends which they had still left at court, would obtain from the king an evocation to himself alone of the judgement of this affair. These apprehensions appeared so much the better founded, as, in the interval of the time assigned for judgement, they had again received from court pretty striking marks of protection. The parliament, by the arrêt of the 6th of August, 1761, which adjourned them to appear at the end of the year for the judgement of their constitutions, had ordained provisionally the shutting up of their college on the first of October following: the king, notwithstanding the representations of the parliament, prorogued this time till the 1st of April; and this prorogation made it be apprehended, that they might obtain marks of favour still more signal. Nobody moreover could imagine that a society, lately so powerful, could ever be annihilated: their very enemies dared not flatter themselves with it fully; but they wished at least to deprive them, if it were possible, of the two principal branches of their credit, the place of confessor to their kings, and the education of the gentry.