toiled the tactics of the Jesuits, and swept suddenly away the intrigues and labours of long years. "Whether the Tudors or Stuarts were in power, Whether the Rose was a white or a red, DR. MARTIN F. TUPPER. Wisdom the Romanists have never possessed; their cunning would seem now to have departed from them. They looked at the surface of society. In especial, they fixed their eyes on the throne. They marked not the earthquake that was mustering below their feet. Suddenly its mighty throes shook England, and when they lifted up their eyes after the first moments of surprise, the Stuart had disappeared, and with him had passed the hopes they had entertained of carrying over the nation to Popery; and on the throne from which revolution had precipitated James II. sat William of Orange, the representative of Protestantism. There is another well-marked but unpleasant peculiarity of the Jesuits which we must not pass unnoticed. When they have some special villainy in hand, then it is that they make the loudest professions of amity and goodwill. The welkin at these seasons rings with their songs in praise of peace. The blow is generally the first intimation their victim receives that he has been singled out for destruction. History abounds with examples in point. The annals of France are full of such, and not less the records of England. Oaths and treaties, friendships and festivities, formed the lure which drew the victims of the St. Bartholomew to the fatal spot where the hideous butchery was to be enacted. When the Babington conspiracy was hatching for the murder of Elizabeth and the setting up of a Popish sovereign, the party who had it in hand published a book which overflowed with sweet and charitable counsels, "that good Catholics were to employ no other arms against their prince but the arms of the primitive Christians, tears and daily prayers." They first attempted to prevent James I. ascending the throne of England, and when they found they could not effect their end, they fawned most hypocritically upon him, styling him, "Most Puissant Prince and Orient Monarch." They continued to sing this syren song till the King and nation were all but drawn into the abyss of destruction. The deeper their plunges into treason, the louder their professions of loyalty. It was while they were devising the Gunpowder Plot that they published the "Lay Catholic's Petition," wherein they protested their fidelity and unfeigned love to His Majesty, offering to be bound life for life, with good sureties for their behaviour. These faithful and loving subjects were all the while storing barrels of gunpowder by the dozen in the cellar of the Parliament House, and fearful lest their good deeds and loving intents should come too soon to be known, they covered them up with billets and faggots. When all was ready to blow King and Parliament into the air, Father Garnet was pleased to talk much of bulls and mandates from his Holiness to charge all the priests and their Catholic flocks in England to carry themselves with profound peace and quiet; and to maintain the deception, he sent a messenger to Rome with a letter, supplicating that commandment might go forth staying all commotions of Catholics in England. In a subsequent reign, when they had a prince of their own (James II.) upon the throne, with what vehemence did the Papists declaim against persecution, and what an outcry did they raise for a universal toleration and regard for tender consciences, while all they wished for was toleration only for so long a time as should enable them to set up their own religion, and this done, drive conscience and toleration out of the kingdom, as men do wild beasts when they have subdued a savage country. The memory of every reader will enable him to recall in recent history, similar examples of adroitness in the black art of deception, and of ostentatious professions of charity, and peaceableness, and attention to religious duties, just before some outbreak of lawlessness, violence, and treason. Let the reader look at the following picture : Saint Simon, describing in his "Memoirs" an interview with Père Tellier, the confessor of Louis XIV., writes :-"I saw him face to face between two candles, there being only the breadth of the table between us (I have elsewhere described his horrible countenance), and all at once, stupefied both in sight and hearing, I comprehended, while he was speaking, all that was implied in a Jesuit a man who, by his personal annihilation, and bound by the vows of his order, could hope for nothing for his family or for himself. . . . And yet with deliberate purpose, and with studied artifice, was about to throw State and Church into the most terrific conflagration, and begin the most frightful persecution for questions that mattered not a jot to him.” CHAPTER XV. Expulsions and Suppression of the Jesuits. So long as the Jesuits struck at Protestantism only, the Governments of Europe cared but little for the matter. But when it came to pass that in three-fourths of the countries of Christendom there were no more Protestants to slay, and the Jesuits began to aim their blows at all authority which stood betwixt them and their final goal, which was the assumption into their own hands of the government of the world, the indifference of Governments gave place to alarm. When, after drowning the half of Europe in Lutheran and Huguenot blood, kings saw this "black terror" drawing near themselves, and unsheathing its sword above their heads, they discovered to their dismay that an "Order" had suddenly risen up in Christendom whose principles were villainous beyond all Pagan precedents, and who, animated by a ferocity, and armed with powers of destruction surpassing the rage of all former desolators of the earth, would inflict deeper and more irreparable havoc upon human society than any which Huns, Vandals, and Turks had ever wrought. When it was seen that these new spoilers would leave neither law nor throne standing in the earth, then there came to be an unanimous consent of the peoples and Governments of Europe against the Jesuits. Nation after nation rose up and chased them beyond their borders-drove them out with execrations. We speak not now of Protestant but Popish Governments. It is not in the power of the Jesuits to affirm that this universal abhorrence of which they now became the objects was the expression of Protestant dislike or retaliation. If pity was shown them in the day of their calamity, it was by Protestants, whose fathers' blood they had shed. And if they received a welcome when no other land in Europe would give them a home, it was from a Protestant kingdom. It is from their co-religionists that this emphatic condemnation of their practices and principles has come. There is not a Popish kingdom in all Europe that has not at one time or other driven them out, and these expulsions now number over fifty. Let us specify a few of the more notable of them, with the reasons assigned for the banishment of their order. A decree of banishment passed against them in France, 20th December, 1594. The edict declared them to be " corruptors of youth, disturbers of the public repose, and enemies of the King and State." The Parliament of Paris on a monument erected to commemorate one of their many plots to assassinate Henry IV., inscribed this public accusation, "This plot sprang from the Jesuits, who, concealing the most abominable crimes under the guise of piety, had publicly taught the assassination of kings." Henry III. and Henry IV., as is well known, fell by their dagger. Their banishment from England in 1602 was on the express ground that "the Jesuits were the advisers of the new conspiracies against the Queen" (Elizabeth). The latter half of that sovereign's life they made bitter to her, and, moreover, kept the nation in a state of continual uneasiness and alarm. The Senate of Venice recorded sentence of banishment against them in 1616, assigning as the reason for driving them out of the republic that the "Jesuits used the confessional to discover the affairs of families, and the resources and secrets of States, and that every six months the information thus obtained was laid before their general." The Jesuits have always made large use of the confessional. It offers rare facilities for discovering the riches of families, for hatching plots, and for governing states. Like another Eolus, the confessor can send forth from his cave the tempests of social and political revolution. They have aspired especially to be the confessors of kings and statesmen, and to the pressure which they have put upon the consciences of rulers, history owes some of the cruelest edicts that darken its pages, and Europe some of the most terrible tragedies which have reddened its soil. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes-an act the folly of which was as gigantic as its wickedness, and which drew after it a vengeance not less gigantic, seeing it opened to France the floodgates of untold humiliations, sufferings, crimes, and revolutions-the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, we say, was wrung from Louis XIV. by his Jesuit confessor. The blood of his Protestant subjects was the price which was exacted of the monarch for the pardon of his adulteries. The first of the European countries to admit the Jesuits, after their first institution, was Portugal. Even Portugal had to |