in their strength so long as they cherished the illusion that those who first kindled the torch should also complete the long course and bear the lamp to the goal. When the gravity of the enterprise showed itself before them, they remained alert with all courage, but they ceased to fancy that courage necessarily makes men happy. The mantle of philosophy was rent in a hundred places, and bitter winds entered at a hundred holes, but they only drew it the more closely around them.[192] At the very last Voltaire seems to have seen something of the vast space which every ray of light has to traverse before it reaches the eye of the common understanding. ‘I now perceive,’ he wrote the year before his death, ‘that we must still wait three or four hundred years. One day it cannot but be that good men win their cause; but before that glorious day arrives how many disgusts have we to undergo, how many dark persecutions, without reckoning the La Barres, of whom from time to time they will make an auto-da-fé’[193] To speak thus was to recognise the true character of the revolution, and the many elements which go to the transformation of an old society. To speak thus, too, was to mark the true character of the sincere lover of human progress, the soul of steadfast patience and strong hope, mingled with many a pang for the far-off and slow-coming good. It was a natural thing to identify the Jesuits with the strongest part of the old society, because their organisation was both the strongest and most striking of its external supports. Their suppression, though not to be dispensed with except on the condition of an ultimate overthrow of morality and an extinction of intellectual light, had one effect which the statesmen of the time could hardly be expected to see, and which has not been enough considered. Just as the papacy by the fourteenth century had become more and more exclusively a temporal power, so the Jesuits by the middle of the eighteenth had become more and more a commercial power. They were a powerful trading corporation, and it was as merchants, rather than as casuists and directors of conscience, that they finally came into collision with secular authority in France, Portugal, and Spain. Now since the revival of the order it has been exclusively engaged in the contest for spiritual supremacy, and for as much of temporal power as has seemed essential to its security. This, however, is only one of the evils which counterbalance the advantages of every progressive measure; for, alas, when the statesman believes most confidently that he has advanced by a league, a very few years show him or others that his league was after all no more than an ell or two.