The long training, too, prior to the taking of final vows, affords such a guarantee of human liberty as there is in no other state of life, for during all this period--extending, as I have said, to fifteen or seventeen years--each of us may be released from the society, as he surely will be if he have not a real vocation. As a matter of fact, our enemies in Portugal provided us with abundant arguments to refute this charge. For some weeks before the republic was proclaimed the revolutionary newspapers published various letters of one of our fathers to a young man who had intended for some time to join the society. These letters are models of prudence, moderation and spiritual honor, and whoever without prejudice or heed of the malicious comments in which they were embedded, will but study these harmless epistles, so worthy of a good religious, will find in them a conclusive answer to the slander against us. _4. OUR SECRET ASSOCIATIONS._ If there were any such amongst us would it not be somewhat curious to find that those who prosecute us on this account are amongst the most influential patrons of secret societies? However this may be, there is no accusation more utterly false than this. The institute and rules of the society are today--more than ever--open to all the world in every public library. It is true that since 1901 the society has assumed a kind of pseudo character in the eyes of the public and the law. But this was imposed upon us by statesmen who, though at the head of a Catholic government, did not dare to grant to a religious order approved by the Holy See that liberty given us even in Protestant countries which have a true notion of freedom. We had therefore to assume the pseudonym of "Association for Faith and Fatherland" ("Associao Fe e Patria"). I must acknowledge that, threatened as we were with dispersion and banishment, we were but too glad to obtain this simulacrum of liberty, and to avail ourselves of any title under which we might devote ourselves to the utmost for the benefit of religion and of Portugal. But, I repeat, it was unwillingly that we adopted this incognito, which moreover hoodwinked nobody. The actual Republican Government took possession of our own official catalogues, in which were recorded all our names and occupations. They may thus see that we never thought there was any reason to make a mystery of our existence or to shrink from letting it be known to the full that we bear a title which esteem next to that of Christian, namely of religious of the Society of Jesus. _5. POLITICAL AND ANTI-REPUBLICAN ACTIVITY._ Opinions expressed in certain articles of the Mensageiro whispers of later years concerning our share in the polemics of the newspaper named Portugal, and innumerable fictions about the Jesuits, on occasions of the late elections; such were the causes of the accusation that we meddled with politics.