Never was the name of the blessed Jesus more grossly prostituted than when applied to a Society which is certainly the very opposite, in spirit and character, to Him who was “meek and lowly,” “holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners.” The Jesuits may be said to have invented, for their own peculiar use, an entirely new system of ethics. In place of the divine law, they prescribed, as the rule of their conduct, a “blind obedience” to the will of their superiors, whom they are bound to recognize as “standing in the place of God,” and in fulfilling whose orders they are to have no more will of their own “than a corpse, or an old man’s staff.” The glory of God they identify with the aggrandizement of their Society; and holding that “the end sanctifies the means,” they scruple at no means, foul or fair, which they conceive may advance such an end.[10] The supreme power is vested in the general, who is not responsible to any other authority, civil or ecclesiastical. A system of mutual espionage, and a secret correspondence with head-quarters at Rome, in which everything that can, in the remotest degree, affect the interests of the Society is made known, and by means of which the whole machinery of Jesuitism can be set in motion at once, or its minutest feelers directed to any object at pleasure, presents the most complete system of organization in the world. Every member is sworn, by secret oath, to obey the orders, and all are confederated in a solemn league to advance the cause of the Society. It has been defined to be “a naked sword, the hilt of which is at Rome.” Such a monstrous combination could not fail to render itself obnoxious. Constantly aiming at ascendency in the Church, in which it is an _imperium in imperio_, the Society has not only been embroiled in perpetual feuds with the other orders, but has repeatedly provoked the thunders of the Vatican. Ever intermeddling with the affairs of civil governments, with allegiance to which, under any form, its principles are utterly at variance, it has been expelled in turn from almost every European State, as a political nuisance. But Jesuitism is the very soul of Popery; both have revived or declined together; and accordingly, though the order was abolished by Clement XIV. in 1775, it was found necessary to resuscitate it under Pius VII. in 1814; and the Society was never in greater power, nor more active operation, than it is at the present moment. It boasts of immortality, and, in all probability, it will last as long as the Church of Rome. It has been termed “a militia called out to combat the Reformation,” and exhibiting, as it does to this day, the same features of ambition, treachery, and intolerance, it seems destined to fall only in the ruins of that Church of whose unchanging spirit it is the genuine type and representative.[11]