And, while the superior speaks in this manner, he not only knows that he cants, but he is also perfectly convinced that his hearers know it, and yet he will never speak otherwise. And it is to us altogether inconceivable, that men who are thus mutually conscious that they are playing a part—who, in their common intercourse, and even when forming the basest designs, are careful always to speak in the character of the pious devotee—should so far forget their cue as to give a broad unvarnished statement of their whole system of roguery. For these, and many other reasons which we might adduce, we believe that the book is apocryphal; but, though apocryphal, it certainly gives a true representation of the horrible arts and practices of the Jesuits; and we are inclined to credit the Jesuits when they assert that the book is the work of a discarded brother, so deeply does it initiate us in the secret arts of the Society. However, as we have thousands of unimpugnable testimonies to their impious and infernal doctrines, we shall not weaken the authority of our narrative by adducing contested proofs. CHAPTER XII. 1608-1700. OVERGROWING INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIETY. We now enter on a new phase of our history. Up to the period at which we are arrived (the beginning of the seventeenth century), the Jesuits have been obliged more or less to struggle for existence. Now they contend for supremacy and a domineering power in those same countries into which they had been at first refused admittance. Vagrant monks, who had but an hospital for a place of refuge, they now possess all over the surface of the earth hundreds of magnificent establishments, endowed with princely revenues, and in the West Indies are laying the foundations of a kingdom of their own. Cherished by the populace, in league with the nobility, they are become so powerful, that great monarchs themselves are obliged to put the fate of the Jesuits in the same balance in which are weighed the destinies of nations. Two of Ignatius’ disciples have a seat in the College of Cardinals, and the order, by the many exorbitant privileges it has obtained, forms a sort of separate church within the Church—the envy of other religious orders, the rival of bishops, and the dread of the Court of Rome itself. They possess the supreme sway in Portugal, Poland, Bavaria, have the utmost influence in Spain, Austria, Italy, and are rapidly advancing towards that power which they at last obtained in France, and which was productive of so many miseries to the French nation. In fact, the principal seat of the Jesuits’ power will henceforth be in France, as, of the many sovereigns whom the Jesuits more or less govern, the French monarch is the most powerful of them all. Henry IV., as a measure of precaution, in the letters-patent by which he re-established the Jesuits, had enacted that a man of authority in the order should always be near the king’s person, as preacher, and