It was, however, in France, the former seat of their power and glory during the seventeenth century, that the ruin of the order was most effectually prepared. The overthrow of Port-Royal, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the massacre of the Huguenots, and all the persecutions exercised in that country in the name of religion, were justly attributed to the Jesuits. Nor was this all; the exclusion from every office, civil or ecclesiastical, of every person who was not entirely devoted to the Order, had made their tyrannic yoke to be detested and abhorred in the highest degree. While the despotic Louis XIV. ruled France with an iron hand, and Lachaise and Letellier had a full disposal of _lettres de cachet_, few dared openly to give vent to the hatred they bore to the Society; but hardly had the bigoted prince expired, when the long-restrained animosity broke forth, and the Jesuits were assailed on every side. The Jansenists, the other religious orders, the curates, the bishops, all now attacked the monks, who, some months before, had kept them in such awe, and had been masters of their fortunes. It has also been asserted—and the Jesuits repeat it every day—that the abolition of their order was due to the then fast spreading subversive doctrines of the Encyclopædists, and that Ganganelli suppressed this bulwark of the Christian religion to please the atheist Voltaire and his disciples. But this, in the exclusive sense in which the Jesuit takes it, is by no means true. The Encyclopædists were not the Jesuits’ particular enemies, nor the auxiliaries of the Jansenists. They were, perhaps, more opposed to the strict and ascetic character of the recluses of Port-Royal, than to the worldly and accommodating morality of the progeny of Loyola. But the Jesuits had identified themselves with the Roman Catholic religion, and all its bigoted and superstitious practices, and the philosophers were happy that they had introduced into it so many ridiculous superstitions and ceremonies, upon which they could exercise their sarcastic and trenchant wit. Voltaire and his school could not have awakened in the hearts of their contemporaries such dislike, nay, contempt and abhorrence, for the religion of Christ, had not the Jesuits furnished them the means, by having introduced into it contemptible and idolatrous superstitions. The Encyclopædists’ principal aim was to destroy the Christian religion; and for this purpose, coupling with malignant sagacity the sublime doctrines and pure morality of Christ with the ridiculous practices and impure doctrines of the Papists, and especially of the Jesuits, held up the whole to the derision and profanation of a superficial public; who, unwilling to make any distinction, boldly asserted that nothing was true, nothing was holy, nothing respectable, in the Christian code. Again, the philosophers, in their praiseworthy endeavours to introduce the principles of civil and religious liberty,