ment, frugality, and the renunciation of pleasure, constituted in that Society the most harmonious concord of science and virtue. I had personal knowledge of them: they were an assemblage of heroes for religion and humanity."[1]
We close this chapter with the following sympathetic lines of a recent writer: "The rise of the Jesuits had been astonishing. Their fall was august. Annihilation could not shake their constancy. No tempests of misfortune could attaint their magnificent obedience. Defamation, incarceration, banishment, starvation, death, unthankfulness, fell upon them, and could not alter, and could not dismay. To the cabals of courtiers and the frenzy of kings, to the laugh of triumphing harlots, and the rebuke of solemn hypocrites, to the loud-voiced joy of the heretic and the unbeliever, to the poisonous sneer of banded sectaries, exulting in their secret confederation, to the gibes of traitors, to the burning sympathies of unpurchased and unpurchasable multitudes, the only response of the Jesuits was superb and indomitable duty. Girt round by cruelty and frivolity, more cruel still; as in the centre of a vast amphitheatre of the antique which they had taught so well, they remained as high resolved, as unflinching as Sebastian before the archers of the Palatine, or the virgin Blandina amid the beasts at Lyons. It was hardly a marvel that the victorious monarch of Prussia, outside the Church though he was, but accustomed to see men die at the call of honor and discipline, half owned a thrill of warrior emotion, and paid a captain's
- ↑ Quoted in the Annales Philosophiques, Morales, et Littéraires, by M. de Boulogne, vol. I, p. 221.
