an Pontiffs
supposed to have been poisoned.

[Footnote 175: See Mariana, _De Rege_, lib. i. cap. 6. This book, be it
remembered, was written for the instruction of the heir apparent,
afterwards Philip III.]

[Footnote 176: Henri IV. let them return to France, in mere dread of
their machinations against him. See Sully, vol. v. p. 113.]

[Footnote 177: Sarpi, who was living at the time of Henri's murder, and
who saw his best hopes for Italy and the Church of God extinguished by
that crime, at first credited the Jesuits with the deliberate
instigation Ravaillac. He gradually came to the conclusion that, though
they were not directly responsible, their doctrine of regicide had
inflamed the fanatic's imagination. See, in succession, _Letters_, vol.
ii. pp. 78, 79, 81, 83, 86, 91, 105, 121, 170, 181, 192.]

It is not, however, to be wondered that sooner, or later the Jesuits
made themselves insupportable by their intrigues in all the countries
where they were established.[178] Even to the Papacy itself they proved
too irksome to be borne. The Company showed plainly that what they meant
by obedience to Rome was obedience to a Rome controlled and fashioned by
themselves. It was their ambition to stand in the same relation to the
Pope as the Shogun to the Mikado of Japan. Nor does the analysis of
their opinions fail to justify the condemnation passed upon them by the
Parlement of Paris in 1762. 'These doctrines tend to destroy the natural
law, that rule of manners which God Himself has imprinted on the hearts
of men, and in consequence to sever all the bonds of civil society, by
the authorization of theft, falsehood, perjury, the most culpable
impurity, and in a word each passion and each crime of human weakness;
to obliterate all sentiments of humanity by favoring homicide and
parricide; and to annihilate the authority of sovereigns in the State.'

[Footnote 178: Expelled from Venice in 1606, from Bohemia in 1618, from
Naples and the Netherlands in 1622, from Russia in 1676, from Portugal
in 1759, from Spain in 1767, from France in 1764. Suppressed by the Bull
of Clement XIV. in 1773. Restored in 1814, as an instrument against the
Revolution.]

Great psychological and pathological interest, attaches to the study of
the Jesuit order. To withhold our admiration from the zeal, energy,
self-devotion and constructive ability of its founders, would be
impossible. Equally futile would it be to affect indifference before the
sin