It is true, that this small number of men, who set all the tribunals of the kingdom in motion against the Jesuits, found the nation favourably disposed for that fermentation, and eager to support it by its discourses. We say _by its discourses_; for in France all that the nation can do, is to speak, right or wrong, for or against, those who govern: but it must be confessed also, that the publick cry is there held in some account. Philosophy, against which the Jansenists had declared war almost as hot as against the company of Jesus, had made, in spite of them, and happily for them, sensible progresses. The Jesuits, intolerant by system and situation, were become by it only the more odious: they were considered, if I may so say, as the giants of fanaticism; as the most dangerous enemies of reason, and as those whom it imported most to get rid of. The parliaments, when they began to attack the society, found this disposition in all minds. It was properly philosophy, which by the mouth of the magistrates, issued the decree against the Jesuits: Jansenism was only the sollicitor in it. The nation, and the philosophers at its head, wished the annihilation of these fathers, because they are intolerant, persecutors, turbulent, and formidable: the Jansenists desired it, because the Jesuits maintain _versatile grace_, and themselves _efficacious grace_. But for this ridiculous scholastick dispute, and the fatal bull which was the fruit of it, the society would perhaps still exist, after having so often merited destruction, for causes somewhat more real and more weighty. But at last it is destroyed, and reason is avenged. Qu’importe de quel bras Dieu daigne se servir? To these reflexions we may join another no less important, and formed to serve as a lesson to all religious orders, which may be tempted to imitate the Jesuits. If those fathers had been prudent enough to confine the credit of the society to what it might draw from the sciences and letters, that credit would have been more solid, less envied, and more durable. It was the spirit of intrigue and ambition which they displayed, the oppressions which they exercised; in one word, their enormous power (or what was thought such) and, above all, the insolence which they joined to it, that ruined them. There is no believing to what a height they had carried their audaciousness lately: the following is a pretty recent stroke, which will make them thoroughly known.