Never did it lose sight, either of this object, or of the means (as smooth as efficacious) which it was to employ in order to succeed in it. It is perhaps the only one of all the societies, as the house of Austria is the only one of all the powers of Europe, which has observed an uniform and constant policy; an inestimable advantage to societies and sovereign houses. Individuals only pass away, and are subject in that short space to a small circle of events, which by no means permit them to have any immutable system. Bodies and great houses subsist for a long time; and if they pursue always the same projects, the scene of the world, which, changes perpetually, brings on at last, soon or late, circumstances favourable to their views. We must, when once we have declared ourselves their enemy, either annihilate them entirely, or end in being their victim; so long as they have one gasp remaining, they cease not to be formidable. “You have drawn the sword against the Jesuits,” said a man of wit to a philosopher; “well, throw the scabbard into the fire.” But individuals, how numerous and animated soever they be, have very little force against a body: accordingly the Jesuits so decryed, so attacked, so detested, would subsist perhaps still with more lustre than ever, if they had not had for irreconcileable enemies other bodies still subsisting as well as them, and as constantly taken up with the project of exterminating them, as they have been with that of aggrandizing themselves. The manner in which this society established itself in those places where it found the least resistance, discovers very plainly the project which we have attributed to them, _of governing mankind_, and of making religion subservient to that design.