"Their blind obedience! To be as unresisting as _a dead body_, or as tractable as _a stick_ in the hands of an old man![74]." This language, taken disjointedly, is among the bugbears held up by the new conspirators against the Jesuits. It must surely be allowed, that obedience is necessary in every institution, where training the mind is an object, and the institute is not reprehensible for excluding wilful argumentation, while it allows every one the use of his reason. _Blind obedience_ is not required for the commission of a crime, but in duties known to be pious {215} and moral, in actions evidently laudable. Nor is the expression of the text _cæca obedientia_, but _cæca quadam obedientia_[75]. The rule is for the better training of the young and the inexperienced; and what school does not proceed upon it to the extent required by the institute, which excepts whatever is criminal, or morally wrong? It literally prescribes, that this _kind_ of _blind obedience_ shall, nevertheless, be conformable to justice and to charity; _omnibus in rebus ad quas potest cum charitate se obedientia extendere_[76]. Nay, the order of the superior is not only to be examined, to see that it is free from a capital sin, but from any sin whatever; _in omnibus quæ a superiore disponuntur ubi definiri non possit (quemadmodum dictum est) aliquod peccati genus intercedere_[77]. In a word, discussion is not forbidden by the institute, but in cases where it is evident that there is no sin; {216} _ubi non cerneretur peccatum_[78]; a doctrine continually repeated on this head, _quemadmodum dictum est_, that is, _in quibus nullum manifestum est peccatum_[79]. Where now is the horror of this obedience? It will seem a paradox to say, that the rigour of it arises from the mildness of the Jesuit government: but it is not less the fact; for, as all violent measures and corporal punishments are excluded from the society, a prompt moral obedience is absolutely necessary to its existence. It thus becomes an amiable, as well as an indispensable law.