The contradiction which exists between the Protestant and Catholic writers, regarding the treatment, trial, and execution of the Jesuits, renders it almost impossible for us to arrive at the exact truth. The one party calls them innocent martyrs, the other infernal traitors. The one complains that they were most unmercifully treated, the other, that they had too much lenity shewn them. It is, however, an incontestible fact that they were put to the torture, and Crétineau is right when he exclaims against the Protestants, who, while professing to abhor the Papal Inquisition so much, now adopted all its barbarous proceedings. It may be also true, that a jury sitting now at Westminster would not find sufficient material from which to condemn them. But we must remind the Catholics, that to judge of these events with impartiality, we must transport ourselves to those times, when Ireland was in an almost continual state of rebellion; when England was daily menaced with invasion; when the Roman Catholics of all Europe spoke of another Saint Bartholomew; when torrents of imprecations were poured out against Elizabeth, her ministers, and all her Protestant subjects. We must go back to those times when the Jesuits persuaded the Roman Catholics that it was a mortal sin for them to acknowledge Elizabeth’s right to the throne; to those times in which the Jesuitical doctrine, that it was lawful, nay meritorious, to kill an excommunicated king, had already been proclaimed; finally, to those times when the contest had come to this,—“Whether England should be Protestant under the sway of Elizabeth, or Catholic under Mary of Scotland, or Philip of Spain.” That the Jesuits and the Pope caused all this agitation, there can be no doubt whatever. Hume, quoting a passage from Camden, and Walsingham’s letter in Burnet, appears to me to assign the most plausible reason for it in the following words:—“And though the exercise of every religion but the established one was prohibited by the statute, the violation of this law, by saying mass, and receiving the sacrament in private houses, was, in many instances, connived at; while, on the other hand, the Catholics, at the beginning of her reign, shewed little reluctance against going to church, or frequenting the ordinary duties of public worship. The Pope, sensible that this practice would by degrees reconcile all his partisans to the Reformed religion, hastened the publication of the bull, which excommunicated the queen, and freed her subjects from their oath of allegiance; and great pains were taken by the emissaries of Rome to render the breach between the two religions as wide as possible, and to make the frequenting of Protestant churches appear highly criminal in the Catholics. These practices, with the rebellion which ensued, increased the vigilance and severity of the government; but the Romanists, if their condition were compared with that of the nonconformists in other