as a warranty for the conduct of his brethren; and the Jesuits made of this offensive clause the very pivot of their fortunes. The preacher became the confessor of the kings, and France will but too soon feel the persecuting power of Fathers Lachaise and Letellier. Before, however, they had attained the height of their power, they had to endure a passing storm. In 1610, Henry IV., while proceeding in his coach to visit his faithful Sully, who was dangerously ill, was stabbed to the heart. The Jesuits were accused by the parliament and the university, and even by some curates from the pulpit, of being the accomplices and the instigators of Ravaillac the assassin; but no proof whatever was adduced in support of this accusation. Public opinion absolved them from any participation in the crime, and to that judgment we ourselves subscribe; unless, indeed, we charge them with being morally accessory to the murder by their doctrines, and the abominable writings commending the murder of Sovening, with which they had covered France at the time of the League. The Jesuits had too great ascendancy over Henry’s mind, they derived from him too many benefits, to render credible the supposition of their connivance in the parricide. Some authors, too eager to find the Jesuits guilty of every crime, and not reflecting that by asserting controvertible facts they diminish the credit of their other assertions, have suggested that, as Henry was preparing to send an army to succour the German Protestants, the Jesuits contrived to have him murdered. But those authors are quite ignorant of the true spirit of Jesuitism. The great end which the Jesuits have ever in their view, the criterion by which alone we are able to judge of the probability of their acting in any particular way, is their own interest, and in no way the advantage of religion or the glory of God; and, as in this instance the interest of the Jesuits, and especially of those of France, was to preserve rather than destroy Henry’s life, we repeat our assertion—we do not believe them guilty. We do not think it necessary to fill our pages even with an analysis of the writings poured forth by both parties on this tragic event. The _Anti-Cotton_, a virulent pamphlet against the Jesuits, and, above all, against some assertions of Father Cotton, the late king’s confessor, who had addressed some apologetic letters to the queen on the subject, and who had now gone, according to Henry’s testamentary disposition, to deposit that prince’s heart in the Jesuits’ college of La Flèche, was and has continued to be famous in France, more for the sarcastic wit with which it is written than because it gives any proofs of the Jesuits’ guilt; and, therefore, we need not give any account of it.