dangerous and rather disgraceful secrets, and that man, immediately after he had accomplished his mission, was driven to extremities for want of food! Alas! Monsieur Crétineau, your attempted justification proves the culpability of your Jesuits more forcibly than any other proof could. A severe law was now passed by parliament against the Jesuits. The law enacted that they should depart the kingdom within forty days; that those who should remain beyond that time, or should afterwards return, should be guilty of treason; that those who harboured or relieved them should be guilty of felony; that those who were educated in seminaries, if they did not return in six months after notice given, and did not submit themselves to the queen, before a bishop, or two justices, should be guilty of treason; and that, if any so submitting themselves, should within ten years approach the court, or come within ten miles of it, their submission should be void.[155] Of fifty or sixty Jesuits, a part being frightened, left England of their own accord, while the rest were discovered and sent away, but only to become still more dangerous enemies. We beg to quote a passage from Hume regarding the too famous conspiracy of Babington, which passage exactly expresses our ideas upon the subject:— “The English seminary at Rheims had wrought themselves up to a high pitch of rage and animosity against the queen. The recent persecutions from which they had escaped; the new rigours which they knew awaited them in the course of their missions; the liberty which at present they enjoyed, of declaiming against that princess; and the contagion of that religious fury which everywhere surrounded them in France;—all these causes had obliterated within them every maxim of common sense, and every principle of morals or humanity. Intoxicated with admiration of the Divine power and infallibility of the Pope, they revered his bull, by which he excommunicated and deposed the queen; and some of them had gone to that height of extravagance as to assert, that the performance had been immediately dictated by the Holy Ghost. The assassination of heretical sovereigns, and of that princess in particular, was represented as the most meritorious of all enterprises; and they taught, that whoever perished in such attempts, enjoyed without dispute the glorious and never-fading crown of martyrdom. By such doctrines they instigated a man of desperate courage, who had served some years in the low countries under the Prince of Parma, to attempt the life of Elizabeth; and this assassin having made a vow to persevere in his design, was sent over to England, and recommended to the confidence of the more zealous Catholics.”[156]