Palafox was a man of the greatest piety, of a pure and uncontaminated life, and, after his death, was even proposed for canonisation. He bore no ill-will to the Jesuits; on the contrary, as a good Papist which he was, he even overrated their merits. In his letter to the King of Spain, he says of them, “The Company of the holy name of Jesus is an admirable institution, learned, useful, sainted, worthy not only of the protection of your majesty, but of all the Catholic prelates.”[295] A man who thus speaks of the order cannot be suspected of enmity; and it must be inferred that he would not have attacked the Society, unless constrained by duty or necessity. He attempted at first to bring them to reason by remonstrance.[296] He afterwards wrote a strong letter to Pope Innocent X., and asked for a reform of the Society, indispensable, he said, for the good of the Christian community. The result was, that the Jesuits raised such a storm, and excited so many bad passions against the virtuous prelate, that he, “not to be imprisoned or murdered, was obliged to fly, and to wander,” as he wrote to the Pope, “through inhospitable mountains and forests; to appease his hunger with the bread of affliction; to quench his thirst with the water of his eyes; to have no other house than caverns and the hard ground; and to pass his life with serpents and scorpions.”[297] Such was the life to which the Jesuits had reduced the poor bishop. But even this did not satisfy them. To satiate their spirit of revenge, they did not scruple to profane the episcopal dignity, and the most sacred mysteries of that religion which they professed to uphold. In 1647, on the day of the festival of their founder Loyola, the pupils of the college got up a procession, of which the following were the principal features. One of the scholars had the crozier hanging from the tail of his horse, and the mitre at the stirrup. Another carried an image of the bishop in caricature; others carried indecent images of highly respectable priests. This one gave a blessing with the horns of a bullock, saying, “Such are the true armorial of the Christians.” That others _held up with one hand the image of the Saviour, and with the other an infamous thing which decency forbids us to name_. All of them shouted out the Lord’s Prayer, at the end of which they repeated with thundering shouts, “Libera nos a Palafox—Deliver us from Palafox.”[298]