These revolutions followed each other so rapidly as to prove the existence of a common purpose; and the nearer they were to Rome, the more violent were the passions which incited and followed them. The masses of the people were unwilling to submit longer to their own humiliation, even in face of the fact that Pius VII had, by assuming infallibility never authorized, placed the Church in the attitude of approving the doctrines and purposes of the "Holy Alliance." They accepted, with reverential fidelity, the faith proclaimed by "the fathers" of the Apostolic Age, the Conciliar Decrees and the true traditions of the Church, but were unwilling to have it perverted by either the papacy or the Jesuits, so that it should be made the pretext for holding them and their posterity in vassalage. They courageously determined, therefore, to free themselves from bondage--being no longer willing to be bound with fetters, whether drawn from the arsenals of the papacy or newly forged in the workshops of the Jesuits. These revolutions might have been avoided, and might have been arrested after they broke out, by the authority of the Church in the hands of a pope less intent upon the possession of temporal and monarchical powers than Pius VII, and less willing than he to patronize the Jesuits and participate in the purposes of the "Holy Alliance" for political and ambitious ends. But Pius VII was constrained by the circumstances surrounding him, as the representative of the papacy, to discard all other considerations except such as promised success to the allied powers, to whose triumph over the people he contributed, as far as he could, all the authority of the Church. To him the Jesuits appeared merely as "experienced rowers," who could "break the waves" of the revolutionary sea; and having taken them on board the papal bark, freighted with the richest treasures, he defied alike the complaints of the oppressed peoples and the dangers of shipwreck.