Without the indorsement obtained by the Jesuits from the Council of Trent, they might have been kept out of Paris entirely, or, at all events, their entry into that city would have been greatly delayed. As it was, the antipathy against them remained so great and universal among the Gallican Christians, that their admission at last was obtained only upon the condition that they should take a solemn oath to do nothing to impair the liberties of the Gallican Church; that they would submit to the laws of the nation, which recognized the pope as the head of the Church, but denied to him the power to excommunicate the king; or to lay an interdict upon the kingdom; or to exercise any jurisdiction over temporal matters; or to dismiss bishops from their office; or to exercise any authority by a legate, unless empowered by the king; and that they would, moreover, maintain those provisions of law which assigned to a General Council of the Church power superior to that of a pope--in other words, that papal infallibility was not a part of Christian faith.[65] There is abundant reason for believing, in view of both preceding and subsequent events, that when the Jesuits took this oath, they had not the least idea of being bound by it. No Jesuit's conscience was ever bound by such an oath. The authority of Laynez, under the circumstances related, became potential enough to enable him to influence the decisions of the queen-mother and the court of France, and finding himself thus sustained, it was not long before the Jesuit policy began to bear its legitimate fruits. Of course, his most heavily charged batteries were immediately opened upon the Protestants, to whose heresies he traced all the existing evils of the times. An occasion for this soon occurred. The Protestants petitioned for "places of worship;" that is, merely to be allowed to worship at designated places according to their consciences. Laynez fully understood the meaning of this, and the ends it would ultimately accomplish if the Protestant petition were allowed. His keen sagacity enabled him to know that if the differences between Protestantism and the papacy became the subject of intellectual discussion, upon a forum where human reason had the right to assert itself, the triumph of the former over the latter would be assured. Therefore, true to his own instincts and the teachings of his society, he remonstrated with Catharine de Medicis against granting the prayer of the Protestants, and in his memorial upon the subject "pointed out to her so forcibly the danger to the Church and State that such a concession would entail, that, appreciating his arguments, she refused to sanction the erection of Protestant places of worship."[66]