, and the very same
day she perceived in the ardent heart of Jesus her own heart united to
the Jesuit's.

La Colombiere, being of a mild and feeble nature, was hurried away
unresistingly into this ardent vortex of passion and fanaticism. He
was kept for a year and a half in this spiritual furnace; he was then
snatched away from Paray, and hurled red-hot into England. They were,
however, still mistrustful of him, fearing he might cool, and sent him,
from time to time, a few ardent and inspired lines: Marie Alacoque
dictated, and the superior was her amanuensis.

He remained thus two years with the Duchess of York in London, so well
concealed and shut up, that he did not even see the town. They brought
to him, mysteriously, a few lords, who thought it advantageous to be
converted to the religion of the heir presumptive. England having at
last discovered the Papal conspiracy, La Colombiere was accused,
brought before Parliament, and embarked for France, where he arrived
ill; and though his superior sent him to Paray to see whether the nun
could revive him, he died there of a fever.

However little inclined people may be to believe that great results are
brought about by trifling causes, they are obliged, however, to confess
that this miserable intrigue had an incalculable effect upon France and
the world. They wanted to gain England, and they presented themselves
to her, not in the persons of the Gallicans, whom she respected, but in
those of the Jesuits, whom she had always abhorred. At the very moment
when Catholicism ought, in prudence at least, to have discarded the
idolatries with which the Protestants reproached it, they published a
new one, and the most offensive of all, the carnal and sensual devotion
of the Sacred Heart. To mingle horror with ridicule, it was in 1685,
the sad and lamentable year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
that Marie Alacoque raised the first of those altars which overspread
the whole of France. We know how England, confirmed in her
Protestantism and horror of Rome by the Jesuits, took to herself a
Dutch king, carried away Holland in her movement, and by this
conjunction of the two maritime powers obtained the dominion of the
seas.

The Jesuits may boast that they have been the means of setting
Protestantism in England upon a very solid foundation. All the Father
Mathews in the world will never be able to remove it.

Their political work, as we have seen, is important: