I allow it, Sir; there formerly existed a body of English Jesuits. It was violently crushed and annihilated more than forty years ago. I look in vain for the yoke, which they imposed upon our fathers: I have read something of the yoke, which they themselves bore. It is described in letters of blood, in the penal statutes of Elizabeth and the first James. During a full century, half the gibbets of England witnessed the unrelenting severity of persecution, which these injured men quietly and meekly endured. They were a body of catholic priests, always esteemed and cherished by English catholics; and, at every period of their existence, they counted in their society many members of the best and most ancient families among the British gentry. They risked their lives by treading on their native soil. They devoted themselves to {322} administer the comforts of religion in secret to their suffering brethren; and they then slunk back to their hiding holes in the hollows of walls and roofs of houses. They never possessed a single house, school, or chapel, in which they could recommend themselves to their countrymen, by the peaceable functions of their profession: they were never otherwise known to the British public than when, surprised by priest-catchers, they were dragged to jail, and from jail to the gallows. Thus lived the Jesuits, in this their free country, from the twenty-second year of Elizabeth to the thirtieth of Charles II. This is all the progress that they made, in a full century, towards _their own aggrandizement_, which, says Laicus, "is the main object of all their labours[119]." When the scene of blood was finally closed, in 1680, by the execution of eight innocent Jesuits in one year, not to mention a dozen {323} others, who died in jail, many of them under sentence of death, the Jesuits still remained an inoffensive body of catholic missionary priests. Their object was to assist their catholic brethren; and, having obtained some foundations from the liberality of foreign potentates, they applied themselves to give to the expatriated youth of their own country the education, which the partiality of the laws denied them at home. In these pacific occupations they persevered, without experiencing any jealousy on the part of government, even during the two rebellions of 1715 and 1745; because, since the accession of the House of Brunswick, it has been a principle with our monarchs never to persecute any man for conscience, never to harass inoffensive subjects.