For this immense organization had been almost entirely destroyed by the stroke of a pen--the signature of Clement XIV given in pencil. They dispute whether he gave it at all; or, at least, whether he meant it. Howsoever that be, the Order, which had been erected on the principle of obedience, received the word and disappeared. The rock on which it had set its foot became the altar of a sacrifice; and that a sacrifice offered without a struggle or a remonstrance, to betray any change in the spirit, with which Ignatius, two hundred and thirty-three years before, had vowed obedience to the Vicar of Christ. An epigram had been written, on the occasion of the first centenary, under a picture of Archimedes and his lever; Archimedes is getting a foothold for his lever to move the world; and beneath is the epigram:-- Fac pedem figat, et terram movebit. Its footing was now taken away, and it vanished from the world. While the Catholic Bourbon courts were thus successful in accomplishing a manoeuvre, which at fitful intervals they had essayed heretofore, the schismatical Empress, Catherine II of Russia, denounced it and endeavored to counteract it. She wrote to the Pope in 1783, "that she was resolved to maintain these Priests against any power, whatsoever it was"; and she was good to her word; the Society remained unsuppressed in White Russia. The Protestant King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, without exhibiting all the temper of the irascible lady, manipulated things as best he could to preserve the Society. To sum up the Order's experiences, it may well be said that in public life there is no resurrection; and the State which dies is dead forever. From infancy on through maturity it goes its way decrepit to the grave. Yet Balmez observes, "the Society of Jesus did not follow the common course of others, either in its foundation, its development, or its fall; that Order, of which it is truly and correctly said, that it had neither infancy nor old age."[134] It rose again; and the flag of the Knight of Loyola, though worn and torn, was none the less fair for that:-- Jam se ipso formosius est. For neither the violence of endurance, nor the vehemence of energy, although begetting intensest fatigue, is to be confounded with decay.