I had never, however, to accuse the Italian Jesuits of keeping out of sight the political, or, as they generally say, the social aspects of the movement, and of covering them up in theological disquisitions. They did, indeed, use wondrous theological phrases with political meanings, but any one who studied their writings soon penetrated that veil. They also invariably used theology as the motive power of all their politics. But from 1850, when the movement which has characterized the present pontificate began, to 1870, when it reached its legislative climax, they set forth prominently as their object the reconstruction of society, on the model of what, in their own dialect, they call the Christian civilization. They loudly proclaimed, as the elements of that Christian civilization, the revocation of constitutions, the abolition of modern liberties, especially those of the Press and of worship, with the subjection to canon law of civil law, and, above all, the subjection to the jurisdiction of the Pope of all nations and their rulers, whatever the title of those rulers might be. They justly conceived the ills they had to repair, as, having begun with the bad teaching of John Wyclif, in which his doctrine of "dominion" was the head and front of all his offending, and of that of every succeeding age. As he had striven for the emancipation of kings from the Pope, of legislatures from the ecclesiastical powers, and of the individual from the priest, so did they set themselves to bring back again the dominion of the priest over the individual, the dominion of the ecclesiastical authorities over lawgivers, and above all, the dominion of the Pope over kings. Of this the reader will meet with evidence from their own lips, at almost every stage of our narrative. Those Italian Jesuits did not expound the Syllabus, according to the new and _naive_ notion of Cardinal Manning, as a code containing very little to which "any sincere believer in Christian revelation would, if he understood the Syllabus, object." The Italian Jesuits, ay, and even the German ones, on the contrary, made a boast of its diametrical opposition to every form of Liberalism, and in particular to Liberal Catholicism, of its efficacy as an instrument for overturning the Modern State, and of its solidity as the foundation-stone on which was to be reared the fabric of reconstructed society. In all their writings society was taken as meaning, not families, nor Churches, but nations, and each one of the nations was to form a province within a Church ruling over it and over all other nations in every one of their laws and public institutions.