Maynard also refers to this approvingly, and the Jesuits make it a matter of boasting, in order to support their claim to superior merit for having extirpated so much Protestant heresy, and for bringing back such multitudes of people to papal obedience. Nine Protestants to one papist! Germany, then, was a Protestant nation, governed by Protestant authorities, under Protestant laws, tolerant towards all who adhered to the ancient faith, allowing no interference with the freedom of religious opinions, happy, prosperous, and free, under her own institutions. In these respects she was in the same condition as the United States is to-day, so far as she could be in the absence of written constitutional guarantees. What people upon earth, other than the Germans themselves, had the just right, under the law of nations or any other human law, to interfere with their condition, or to plot, openly or secretly, against their independence? What was all this, however, to the pope or to the Jesuits? From whence did they derive the authority to form a conspiracy _at Rome_ to invade Germany, overthrow her existing institutions, bind the limbs of her people with fetters they had already broken, to gather up the rusty iron they had cast away, and reforge it into manacles to hold them in obedience to an alien and foreign power? Was this conspiracy commanded by the law of God? If it was, wherein is that law changed? If not changed, and God's laws are all immutable, may not the Jesuits of to-day enter into fresh conspiracies to subvert the present institutions of Germany, or of Great Britain, or of the United States, or of any other nation that maintains the principles of Protestantism and the freedom of conscience? These questions command the most serious thought, and are pregnant with considerations we are not allowed to put aside. Before this volume closes, answers to all of them may be so plainly discovered as to enable the friends of free thought and popular government to see wherein their greatest danger lies. "The Jesuits," says Ranke, "conquered the Germans on their own soil, in their very home, and wrested from them a part of their native land." Will there not be other conquests to be achieved by them so long as the freedom of conscience is sheltered and guaranteed by Protestant institutions? FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 67: History of the Jesuits. By Greisinger. Page 212.] [Footnote 68: _Ibid._, p. 213, note.] [Footnote 69: Greisinger, p. 48, etc.] [Footnote 70: _Ibid._, p. 63.] [Footnote 71: History of the Popes. By Ranke. Book V, p. 172, etc. Lea and Blanchard's edition. Nicolini, p. 199. Greisinger, p. 211, etc. History of Germany. By Lewis. Chap, xvii, p. 398, etc.] [Footnote 72: Nicolini, pp. 201-202. For these particulars see also Ranke, Griesinger, Steinmetz, and Lewis.] [Footnote 73: The Studies and Teachings of the Jesuits. By M. L'Abbé Maynard. Page 89.] [Footnote 74: Ranke, Book V, p. 165.] CHAPTER VIII. THE JESUITS IN ENGLAND.