iversal change in public
opinion respecting them? The charges against them, to which I have
alluded, must have had foundation. They did not become idle, gluttonous,
ignorant, and sensual like the old monks: they became greedy of power;
and in order to retain it resorted to intrigues, conspiracies, and
persecutions. They corrupted philosophy and morality, abused the
confessional privilege, adopted _Success_ as their watchword, without
regard to the means; they are charged with becoming worldly, ambitious,
mercenary, unscrupulous, cruel; above all, they sought to bind the minds
of men with a despotic yoke, and waged war against all liberalizing
influences. They always were, from first to last, narrow, pedantic,
one-sided, legal, technical, pharisaical. The best thing about them, in
the days of their declining power, was that they always opposed infidel
sentiments. They hated Voltaire and Rousseau and the Encyclopedists as
much as they did Luther and Calvin. They detested the principles of the
French Revolution, partly because those principles were godless, partly
because they were emancipating.

Of course, in such an infidel and revolutionary age as that of Louis XV,
when Voltaire was the oracle of Europe,--when from his chateau near
Geneva he controlled the mind of Europe, as Calvin did two centuries
earlier,--enemies would rise up, on all sides, against the Jesuits.
Their most powerful and bitter foe was a woman,--the mistress of Louis
XV., the infamous Madame de Pompadour. She hated the Jesuits as
Catharine de Medici hated the Calvinists in the time of Charles
IX.,--not because they were friends of absolutism, not because they
wrote casuistic books, not because they opposed liberal principles, not
because they were spies and agents of Rome, not because they perverted
education, not because they were boastful and mercenary missionaries or
cunning intriguers in the courts of princes, not because they had marked
their course through Europe in a trail of blood, but because they were
hostile to her ascendency,--a woman who exercised about the same
influence in France as Jezebel did at the court of Ahab. I respect the
Jesuits for the stand they took against this woman: it is the best thing
in their history. But here they did not show their usual worldly wisdom,
and they failed. They were judicially blinded. The instrument of their
humiliation was a wicked woman. So strange are the ways of Providence!
He chose Esther to save