We cannot better compare this society, every where surrounded with enemies, and every where triumphant for the space of two centuries, than to the marshes of Holland, cultivated by obstinate labour, besieged by the sea, which threatens every instant to swallow them up, and perpetually opposing their dikes to that destructive element. Let these dikes be pierced but in one single place, Holland will be laid under water after so many ages of labour and of vigilance. This is what has happened to the society; its enemies have at last found out the weak part, and pierced its dike; yet those who had raised it with so much care and patience, those who had afterwards watched so long over its preservation, those who have cultivated, with so much success, the soil which was protected by this dike, merit nevertheless commendation on that account. Scarce had the company of Jesus (for that is the name which it had taken), begun to shew itself in France, when it met with numberless difficulties in establishing itself there. The universities especially made the greatest efforts to expel these new comers; it is difficult to decide, whether this opposition does honour or discredit to the Jesuits who experienced it. They gave themselves out for the instructors of youth gratis; they counted already amongst them some learned and famous men, superior perhaps to those of whom the universities could boast: interest and vanity might therefore be sufficient motives to their adversaries, at least in these first moments, to seek to exclude them. We may recollect the like opposition which the Mendicant orders underwent from these very universities when they wanted to introduce themselves there; opposition founded on pretty nearly the same motives, and which ceased not but by the state into which these orders are fallen, now become incapable of exciting envy. On the other side, it is very probable that the society, proud of that support which it found amidst so many storms, furnished arms to its adversaries by braving them; it seemed to shew itself, from this time, with that spirit of invasion which it has but too much displayed since, but which it has carefully covered at all times with the mask of religion, and of zeal for the salvation of souls. This desire of extending itself, and of domineering, appeared already on all sides: the society insinuated itself into the confidence of several sovereigns; it caballed at the courts of some others; it rendered itself formidable to the bishops, by the dependance which it affected on the court of Rome alone; in short, the more it aggrandized itself, the more it seemed to justify, by its credit and its intrigues, the rancour of its enemies against it. To govern the universe, not by force, but by religion, such appeared to have been the device of this society from its origin; a device which it has made appear further to proportion as its existence and its authority gained strength.