Then, as the scene shifts, Philip II will appear, with his vicegerent, the Duke of Alva, and his bloodthirsty crew, the sounds of whose warlike bugles were drowned by the piercing cries of their Protestant victims. Then may also be seen, passing in panoramic view, the whole land of the Netherlands drenched in the blood of innocent and persecuted Protestants; the Spanish and Italian Inquisitions carrying on their horrible work with so much activity that its machinery was never still; France trembling upon the threshold of ruin, and her kings and queens forming leagues with the Huguenots, to be immediately and perfidiously violated; and Germany, torn into factions by the discord between princes and people which was born of Jesuit intrigue, offering a tempting field to the emissaries of the papacy, wherein usurped and illegitimate authority might revel whilst the "sacred militia" of Loyola rejoiced at the triumph they had won over Protestantism and free religious thought. Through all these courses of events the Jesuits steadily appeared--alike indifferent to the wounds they inflicted upon the Church and the agonies of their unnumbered victims. As confessors and confidants of kings, their exertions to enshroud the world in the pall of monarchism were ceaseless and untiring. They climbed into offices of state, and molded the temporal policy of popes and kings. They moved sovereigns from right to left, forward or backward, as children amuse themselves with toys. They exchanged the humble worship of the altar for the glitter of courts, as if Christ in his life had set the example of ambitious display. They enrolled sovereigns and princes in the ranks of their defenders, and by their help drove Protestant preachers from their pulpits, Protestant professors and teachers from their colleges and schools, and Protestant people into the deepest depths of humiliation, by such measures of compulsion and repression as it must have required the inventive faculties of fiends to discover. All these things transpired in Europe during the terrible conflict between Protestantism and reaction. But in no other portion of the Continental States was the difference between the opposing forces more distinctly marked than in Germany, after the Jesuits, by means of their control of education, became enabled to check the progress of popular enlightenment, and force the nation back again into the old grooves of ignorance and superstition.