The greatest evil of the time was unquestionably the church, which controlled the mind and conscience of the nation and repressed all independent thinking. The life of France was beset by a horde of spies, the secret agents of a predatory power, the Jesuits; nothing could be hid from them, because they controlled the salvation of souls, and through the instrument of the confessional were able to dominate political and social life. They worked, as always, upon the ignorance and emotionalism of women; they beset the mind of the king, and in the end they got him, forcing the revocation of the law tolerating Protestants, and beginning another monstrous persecution. Molière saw all that going on around him, and he wrote about it one of the most terrible plays in the world. It is called “Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite,” and shows a religious intriguer, worming his way into a middle-class family and seducing the wife of his benefactor. The drama is an utterance of blazing anger, a veritable harpooning of hypocrisy. As a weapon of propaganda it is exactly as powerful today as it was three hundred years ago. Of course it raised a storm in the little world of Paris and Versailles. The clerical party besieged the king, and the play was barred from public performance, though it was shown privately to some of the great nobles. The archbishop threatened to excommunicate those who even read the play, and Bossuet, the ruling-class literary pope of the time, took Molière’s untimely death from tuberculosis as a divine judgment upon him for the writing of this infamous work. Two years later the king again permitted the play to be shown; but when the performance came on he was away at one of his wars, and an official closed the theater, and Molière’s appeals to the king were in vain. For five years the fight over this play went on, before at last it could be freely shown. They were years of incessant struggle for Molière. He produced “Don Juan,” and the clerical critics objected to that also, because it portrayed an intellectual and free thinker. To be sure, it portrayed him as a very immoral man; but that did not satisfy the clerical party, for few of them could meet that test. It was the irony of fate that the archbishop, who forbade to Molière’s body a church service, was himself a man of notoriously vile habits. Then came a play called “The Misanthrope,” a name doubtless given as a sop to Molière’s critics. There is really nothing misanthropic about the hero; he is simply a man of fine ideals, who is stunned by his discovery of the powers of evil in the world about him, and their ability to destroy human life. He is married to a woman whom he loves, but who will not give up this evil world, and gives up her husband instead. Molière himself had made a bitterly unhappy marriage with a young actress who preferred the world to her husband, and the hero of this play is generally taken as Molière’s own voice, just as Hamlet is taken as Shakespeare’s voice.