If the outlines of education, which have been {209} here traced from the book of the Jesuits' institute[72], do not win approbation, they may be presented to the reader, at least, as an object of curiosity. Serious men will, perhaps, think them more deserving of attention than are many of the ephemeral vagaries, which modern adventurers in the art of training youth daily obtrude upon the public. The Jesuits' system is recommended by the experimental success of two centuries; and, whether the plan was originally conceived, or only adopted and methodised, by Ignatius and his followers, certain it is, that, from the close of the council of Trent to the opening of the Gallic revolution, the main principles, on which it rests, even the practical details of it, with little variation, pervaded the education of the catholic clergy in all distinguished seminaries, whether directed by Jesuits or by others; and they may, therefore, be regarded as {210} the source of all the virtue and learning which adorned the catholic church in that period, and which the Gallic revolutioners were sworn to destroy. If these antichristian conspirators first doomed the Jesuits to annihilation, it was because their schools were widely diffused through Europe, and were marked by them as hotbeds of every thing which they chose to term fanaticism, bigotry, and superstition; that is to say, zeal, faith, and devotion. These were to be extirpated, to make room for fanaticism, bigotry, and superstition of another kind; those of equality, reason, and philosophy. And mark with what avidity they seized upon the spurious maxim, which had been attributed to the Jesuits, "that it was lawful to do evil, that their expected good might come:" falsehood, forgery, blasphemy, false witness, murder, regicide; every crime that a bad heart could suggest, a perverted head direct, or a venal arm perpetrate, was resorted to, to attain that _summum bonum_, jacobinism. They had before them the _Monita Secreta_ and the Institute, and they chose the {211} former for the basis of their constitutions. I need not repeat the infamous doctrines collected in that forgery, which was published at the end of the pamphlet, that induced me to undertake to write these pages, and of which Clericus has given us an account in the following Letters; suffice it to say, by way of contrast, that horrors are there piled high one upon another, and said to be the secret code of regulations of men, who profess to take the institute of Ignatius for their guide, a code replete with piety and virtue. I have already said enough to silence the remark, that men may profess only and not act, for I have shown, that, if ever men acted up to their professions, the Jesuits have; but it will be an agreeable task to put some of the points of the institute, which have been distorted, into the view in which truth requires they should be seen.