Just at the juncture when the split into two creeds threatened to divide the joints and marrow of the supreme power of the Church, the man appeared who most effectually contributed to restore it by founding a new ecclesiastical order, with a very peculiar organisation. This was Ignatius Loyola. And if we seek for the explanation of the profound influence gained by this corporation in all parts of the world, and every grade of society, we shall find it in four factors: the highest enthusiasm for the common cause; willing obedience to the central authority—the general for the time being; utter unscrupulousness as to means; and the supremacy which knowledge always confers. Far from occupying themselves, like the Protestant clergy, exclusively with theology, there was no branch of knowledge that was not cultivated by these champions of the Church; indeed they stood for a century at the summit of learning.[262] And now, in the most recent epoch of that stigmatised century, Galileo the layman steps forth upon the arena of the science of the heavens and the earth, and teaches the astonished world truths before which the whole edifice of scholastic sophistry must fall to the ground. The Jesuit monopoly of the education of youth and of teaching altogether, became day by day more insecure, and the influence of the society was threatened in proportion. Was it to be wondered at that the pious fathers strained every nerve in this final conflict for mastery, and in the attempt to prevent their world-wide mission of educating the people from being torn from their hands? This explains why the reformers of science appeared just as dangerous to them as those of religion; and they resisted the former, as they had done the latter, with all the resources at their command. Galileo, as one of the most advanced pioneers of science, was in the highest degree inconvenient to the Jesuits; members of their order had also repeatedly measured lances with the great man in scientific discussion—Fathers Grassi and Scheiner, for instance—with very unfortunate results, by no means calculated to make the Society of Jesus more favourable to him. But now that his “Dialogues on the Two Systems of the World” had appeared, which, as every intelligent man must perceive, annihilated with its overwhelming mass of evidence the doctrines of the old school, and raised the modern system upon its ruins, the Jesuits set every lever in motion, first to suppress this revolutionary book, and then to compass the ruin of the author. Riccardi himself remarked to Count Magalotti at that time: “The Jesuits will persecute Galileo with the utmost bitterness.”[263]