magistrates, everywhere protected and employed them. Bishops and
their clergy everywhere regarded them as their most useful auxiliaries in
the sacred ministry, because they professedly exercised every duty of it,
except that of _governing_ the church; {178} and this they renounced by
vow. The people, in all towns, even in villages, felt their gratuitous
services. A hundred years ago, if the public voice had been individually
collected in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Poland,
undoubtedly, they would rather have parted with any other, perhaps with
most other religious bodies, than with the society of Jesuits alone. A
hundred years ago, all the continental sovereigns in Europe would have
concurred in the same sentiment. With them they advised in all concerns of
religion; to them they listened as preachers; to them they intrusted the
instruction of their children, their own consciences, their souls. In those
days, not only kings, but ministers of kings, and the great bulk of their
nobles and people, believed in religion. They were sons of men, who had
fought hard battles in France and Germany, in defence of catholic unity,
against confederate sects, who had conspired to overturn it. Voltaire had
not yet appeared among them. Religion was not yet presented to them as an
object of ridicule. They {179} deemed of religion with reverence and awe,
and they believed it to be the firmest support of the state and of the
throne. They venerated its ministers, and among them the Jesuits, because
they knew, that their institute was well calculated to form its followers
to the active service of the altars, which they respected.

An idea of the institute of the Jesuits cannot be formed without consulting
the original code; and the first inspection of it shows the author to have
been a man of profound thinking, and eminently animated with the spirit of
religious zeal. _Ad majorem Dei gloriam_ was the motto of Ignatius of
Loyola, the main principle of all his conduct. He conceived, that a body of
men, associated to promote God's greater glory, must profess to imitate,
not one or two, but, universally, all the astonishing virtues of the
Redeemer; and, in planning his institute, he compressed them all into one
ruling motion of _zeal_, which, in his ideas, was the purest emanation of
charity, the summit of {180} Christian perfection. He everywhere employs
his first principle, as the universal bond, or link, that must unite his
soc