It is well known what answer the General, Ricci, made to this application—“Sint ut sunt aut non sint,” Let them be as they are, or be no longer. The parliament first abolished and suppressed all the congregations, those powerful engines of the order; then, on the 6th of August 1762, it declared that the Institute of the Jesuits was opposed to all authority, spiritual and temporal, ecclesiastical and civil, and was calculated to render them entirely independent of such authority by all sort of means, and even to favour their usurpation of the government; it therefore declared that the order should be irrevocably and for ever expelled from the kingdom.[344] In consequence of this decree, the eighty-four colleges of the Jesuits were shut up. The fathers were expelled from all their houses, their properties were confiscated;[345] each individual, however, being allowed a small income from the public treasury, and being permitted for the moment to reside in France, separately, and as secular clergymen. This permission was withdrawn two years after, and in 1764, the repugnance of Louis XV. having been overcome, the Jesuits were ordered to quit the French territories. But a more serious and unexpected calamity befel the Company only three years after. Till the present moment, the Jesuits and their partisans had boasted of their defeats and persecution, and had haughtily proclaimed in the face of the world that they were only persecuted by the philosophic spirit which had pervaded Europe, and which, its principal aim being the destruction of the Catholic religion, had begun by attacking its firmest bulwark—the Society of Jesus. Pombal and Choiseul were but the emissaries of Voltaire; Joseph and Louis, indolent and voluptuous monarchs, entirely under the guidance and yoke of the two ministers. But what had they to say, now that they were going to be expelled from the dominions of a king not only adverse to the philosophers, not only a bigoted Roman Catholic, but, till the present moment, the friend and the protector of the Order? What had they to say against this exemplary Christian, Charles III. of Spain, loyal, frank, virtuous, chaste, and irreproachable, as he was? Narrow-minded, indeed, he may have been, but no less clear-sighted, active, and considerate; self-willed rather than disposed to succumb to the influence of any person; and if he can be reproached with anything, it were with the fault of having been rather partial to that nursery of monks and nuns which infested Spain, and for one or other of whom he was continually petitioning Rome for a canonisation. Yet this man, more than any other, contributed to the abolition of the order.