le past, that they might be lenient judges.
Nevertheless, the opposition was never silenced, and one general of
the order wrote against its most conspicuous and characteristic
doctrine.

The order was, from the first, ultramontane, in the old meaning of the
term. But its members in France consented to sign their names to
Gallican propositions as the custom of the country, not as truth.
They were ultramontanes in the other sense of the word, as
conservatives, advocates of authority and submission, opponents of
insubordination and resistance. Accordingly, they became the habitual
confessors of absolute monarchs, in Austria, and in France under the
Bourbons, and were intimately associated with great conservative
forces of society. At the same time they were required to be
disciples of St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Thomas had a very large
element of political liberalism. He believed in the Higher Law, in
conditional allegiance, in the illegitimacy of all governments that do
not act in the interest of the commonwealth. This was convenient
doctrine in the endeavour to repress the forces of Protestantism, and
for a time the Jesuits were revolutionists. The ideas of 1688, of
1776, of 1789 prevail among them from the wars of religion to about
1620. In some of the medieval writers revolution included
tyrannicide. It began to be taught in the twelfth century, and became
popular in the sixteenth. The Jesuits adopted the doctrine at one
time, and in such numbers that one of them, Keller, in 1611, says he
knows hardly three who were opposed to it. A hundred years later this
was deplored as a melancholy deviation by D'Avrigny and other fathers
of the Society.

The Society of Jesus is the second in the enumeration of the forces
that produced and directed the great historic movement that we call
the Counter-Reformation. The third is the Council of Trent. The idea
arose very early that the only way to find a remedy for those things
of which Protestants complained was to hold a general Council, and it
was very earnestly desired by the Emperor. Fifteenth-century divines
believed that all things would go well if Councils were constantly
held. But the Popes were against it from the first, and at the last
the Protestants also. It was to be an assembly from which they were
excluded, and their interests were to be debated and decided by men
whose function it now avowedly was to take their lives. The Duke of
Wurtemberg marvelled