imited monarchy is best
calculated to insure the happiness of subjects. Besides this general
advantage, many other features of the Jesuits' institute strongly conspired
to produce union of minds and hearts among the members. One main cause of
it, however, was accidental, and extrinsic to their government and
statutes. This was the unceasing pressure of unmerited outward hostility,
which, of course, closed them into a more compact phalanx. In the last
persecution, a thousand stratagems were devised to create disunion among
them, and to engage them to solicit their own dissolution. Their enemies
were everywhere disappointed and enraged. They were reduced to assassinate
the body, which they could not decompose. In every country, they employed
merciless soldiers, and still more unfeeling lawyers, to tear off the
Jesuits' cassocks; and everywhere they found the country watered with the
Jesuits' tears. Jesuits were everywhere fond of their profession. Can this
be a crime?

[98] After some search I have discovered, that Jerom Zarowicz, or Zarowich,
was the name of the discharged Polish Jesuit, who forged and published the
_Monita Secreta_ in 1616. Subsequent editions, as might be expected, were
swelled with fresh matter. Henry a Sancto Ignatio, a Flemish Carmelite
friar, and an avowed partisan of the Jansenists Arnaud and Quesnel,
trumpeted forth the _Monita_ in his _Tuba Magna_, a violent invective
against the Jesuits, which he printed at Strasburg in 1713, and again in
1717, just at the period when Quesnel was condemned by the famous bull
_Unigenitus_.

While the minister Pombal was persecuting the Jesuits in Portugal, Almada,
his agent at Rome, filled that capital and all Italy with outrageous libels
against the suffering victims, composed and distributed chiefly by a knot
of friars of different orders, who were in his pay, and printed at the
press of Nicolas Pagliarini. Some of the former were banished, and the
latter was condemned to the galleys. His punishment was remitted by the
meek pontiff Clement XIII, and the culprit escaped to Lisbon, where he was
employed, honoured, and rewarded by Pombal. I have before me two of these
libels, printed in 1760, of which, one is an Italian translation of the
_Monita Secreta_, preceded by a preface of 137 pages, and followed by a
long appendix. The performance, like that of Laicus, is a wild, incoherent
assemblage of impostures and insults, all written, as the author
acknowledges, _