World history; World history -- Juvenile literature
In many of these tasks they were assisted by the clergy. The church
had suffered greatly during the days of the revolution. The church
property had been confiscated. Several priests had been killed and the
generation that had learned its cathechism from Voltaire and Rousseau
and the other French philosophers had danced around the Altar of Reason
when the Committee of Public Safety had abolished the worship of God in
October of the year 1798. The priests had followed the “émigrés” into
their long exile. Now they returned in the wake of the allied armies
and they set to work with a vengeance.
Even the Jesuits came back in 1814 and resumed their former labours
of educating the young. Their order had been a little too successful
in its fight against the enemies of the church. It had established
“provinces” in every part of the world, to teach the natives the
blessings of Christianity, but soon it had developed into a regular
trading company which was for ever interfering with the civil
authorities. During the reign of the Marquis de Pombal, the great
reforming minister of Portugal, they had been driven out of the
Portuguese lands and in the year 1773 at the request of most of the
Catholic powers of Europe, the order had been suppressed by Pope
Clement XIV. Now they were back on the job, and preached the principles
of “obedience” and “love for the legitimate dynasty” to children
whose parents had hired shop windows that they might laugh at Marie
Antoinette driving to the scaffold which was to end her misery.
But in the Protestant countries like Prussia, things were not a whit
better. The great patriotic leaders of the year 1812, the poets and
the writers who had preached a holy war upon the usurper, were now
branded as dangerous “demagogues.” Their houses were searched. Their
letters were read. They were obliged to report to the police at regular
intervals and give an account of themselves. The Prussian drill master
was let loose in all his fury upon the younger generation. When a
party of students celebrated the tercentenary of the Reformation with
noisy but harmless festivities on the old Wartburg, the Prussian
bureaucrats had visions of an imminent revolution. When a theological
student, more honest than intelligent, killed a Russian government
spy who was operating in Germany, the universities were placed under
police-supervision and professors were jailed or dismissed without any
form of trial.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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