they had
gained. From being the most popular of all the adherents of the papal
power, and of the ideas of the Dark Ages, they became the most
unpopular; they became so odious that the Pope was obliged, by the
pressure of public opinion and of the Bourbon courts of Europe, to
suppress their Order. The fall of the Jesuits was as significant as
their rise. I need not dwell on that fall, which is one of the best
known facts of history.

Why did the Jesuits become unpopular and lose their influence?

They gained the confidence of Catholic countries because they deserved
it, and they lost that confidence because they deserved to lose it,--in
other words, because they became corrupt; and this seems to be the
history of all institutions. It is strange, it is passing strange, that
human societies and governments and institutions should degenerate as
soon as they become rich and powerful; but such is the fact,--a sad
commentary on the doctrine of a necessary progress of the race, or the
natural tendency to good, which so many cherish, but than which nothing
can be more false, as proved by experience and the Scriptures. Why were
the antediluvians swept away? Why could not those races retain their
primitive revelation? Why did the descendants of Noah become almost
idolaters before he was dead? Why did the great Persian Empire become as
effeminate as the empires it had supplanted? Why did the Jewish nation
steadily retrograde after David? Why did not civilization and
Christianity save the Roman world? Why did Christianity itself become
corrupted in four centuries? Why did not the Middle Ages preserve the
evangelical doctrines of Augustine and Jerome and Chrysostom and
Ambrose? Why did the light of the glorious Reformation of Luther nearly
go out in the German cities and universities? Why did the fervor of the
Puritans burn out in England in one hundred years? Why have the
doctrines of the Pilgrim Fathers become unfashionable in those parts of
New England where they seemed to have taken the deepest root? Why have
so many of the descendants of the disciples of George Fox become so
liberal and advanced as to be enamoured of silk dresses and laces and
diamonds and the ritualism of Episcopal churches? Is it an improvement
to give up a simple life and lofty religious enthusiasm for
materialistic enjoyments and epicurean display? Is there a true advance
in a university, when it exchanges its theological teachings and its
preparation of p