d praiseworthy; lays down rules by which the deed
should be executed, under certain and determinate circumstances; and even
goes the length of excusing the use of poison, if other means fail, to
get rid of a tyrant! The book was prohibited by all the governments of
Europe, and burnt publicly in Paris by the hands of the common hangman.

That culpable and highly dangerous doctrine was not the only one of the
same character with which the Jesuits poisoned the public morals in
Europe. The system of ethics which they taught in their classes, and
propounded from the pulpit and confessional, had for its basis the famous
doctrine of probablism, by means of which all crimes found a powerful
subterfuge through which their perpetrators were enabled to avert
responsibility and punishment. For all kinds of excess, that doctrine
afforded excuses; and hence falsehood, perjury, robbery, and even murder
and adultery, might be converted by it into innocent actions, by means of
the sophisms and frauds with which that absurd theory was interwoven. To
this was united, in order to exasperate opinion against such men, the
irresistible influence which these Jesuits exercised in all the courts.
Meanwhile the immense wealth which they were accumulating, by means of
commerce with the West Indies and in South America, betrayed, in the
so-called Company of Jesus, a mundane and ambitious spirit totally
incompatible with that which ought to prevail in every religious and
cloistral establishment. About the middle of the eighteenth century, all
the enlightened men of Europe exclaimed against that company, and
ardently desired its extermination; and, although many works were
published against it, and the voices of many religious orders were raised
in denouncing it to the pontifical throne and to the public, such was the
power and dexterity with which it neutralised these hostile dispositions,
that nobody dared to attack its front, until a king of Spain, the
illustrious Charles III., undertook that great work, and carried it on to
its consummation with as much resolution as ability.

We have already described the characters of those good and able ministers
who surrounded that monarch, and we have alluded to their Jansenistic
doctrines, which were diametrically opposed to those professed by the
Jesuits. But neither the upright principles nor enlarged ideas of the
monarch, nor yet the influence exercised by Aranda, Campomanes,
Floridablanca, and Rod