Howsoever sick at heart the pope may have been at this prospect so fatal to his ambition, he was not reduced to entire despair. He did not abandon the hope of bringing back the German princes to the old religion, and employing them as secular aids in such measures of coercion as should be found necessary to reduce the people into obedience. He found the old ecclesiastical weapons somewhat blunted, and looked around for others. Fortune seemed, at last, to smile upon the pope when, casting his eyes around, they rested upon the Jesuits--the freshly enlisted "militia of the Church"--who, without any sense of either pride or shame, were trained to implicit obedience, without stopping to inquire whether the work required of them was good or bad, noble or ignoble. Called upon by the pope, probably at the suggestion of Loyola himself, the Jesuits were as ready to obey as the latter was to command, even to the extent of conspiring against the peace of Germany, or any other country where barriers had been constructed to protect society against aggression. But the method of procedure was by no means clear. Courageous as Loyola was, he could not venture to send his small army into Germany with an open display of the instruments of persecution in their hands. They could not go as the open defenders of the papal dogmas, for they were unable to speak or understand the German language. If they had even been able to make known their opinions and purposes, they could not have withstood the intense indignation and fiery eloquence of the disciples of Luther and Calvin. The occasion, therefore, demanded of Loyola the exercise of his keen penetration--of that wonderful sagacity which never deserted him, and which, at his death, he succeeded in imparting to his successor. The manner of procedure he finally adopted is suggestive of serious reflection, especially to the people of the United States. If it be true that "history repeats itself," and that nations, moving in fixed cycles, follow each other in their courses, the remembrance of the fact that many of them, once prosperous, have passed out of existence, admonishes us to inquire with exceeding caution into the relations which these same Jesuits have created between themselves and our institutions. They have not changed, but are still the infatuated and vindictive followers of Loyola, and it is well for us to know whether there are not evidences that, if permitted, they may repeat here what their society, at the command of its founder, attempted in Germany, under the pretense that God had appointed them to conspire against any free and independent nation they could not otherwise subjugate. The people of the United States spend their time in the pursuit of a thousand objects, and in the investigation of a thousand questions, not the thousandth part as important to them as this.