she
was wrong about the greatest facts of nature and history. Not to speak
of the New World, which she was obliged to admit, after having denied
it, she condemns Galileo, and then she submits to his system, adopts
and teaches it: the penance that she imposed on him for one day has,
since Galileo, been inflicted upon herself for two hundred years.

Here is another fact, still graver in one sense:--

The fundamental right of popes, the title of their power, those famous
Decrees which they quoted and defended, as long as criticism, unaided
by the art of printing, failed to enlighten mankind;--well! the pope is
obliged to confess that these very Decrees are a tissue of lies and
imposture.[1]

What? when popery has disclaimed its own word, and given itself the lie
on the fundamental fact, upon which its own right depends, is it then
that the Jesuits claim for her infallibility in matters of fact?

The Jesuits have been the tempters and corrupters of popes as well as
of kings. They caught kings by their _concupiscence_, and popes by
their _pride_.

It is a laughable, but touching sight to see this poor little Jansenist
party, then so great in genius and heart, resolute in making an appeal
to the justice of Rome, and remaining on their knees before this
mercenary judge!

The Jesuits were not so blind but that they saw that popery, foolishly
propped up by them in theology, was miserably losing ground in the
political world. In the beginning of the 17th century the pope was
still powerful; he whipped Henry IV. in the person of the Cardinal
d'Ossat. But in the middle of that century, after all the great
efforts of the Thirty Years' War, the pope was not even consulted in
the Treaty of Westphalia; and in that of the Pyrenees, between Catholic
Spain and very-Christian France, they forgot that he existed.

The Jesuits had undertaken what was perfectly impossible; and the
principal engine they employed for it--the monopoly of the rising
generation--was not less impossible. Their greatest effort had been
directed to this point; they had succeeded in getting into their hands
the greater part of the children of the nobility and of people of
fortune; they had contrived, by means of education, a machine to narrow
the mind and crush the intellect. But such was the vigour of modern
invention, that in spite of the most ingenious machinery to annihilate
invention, the first generation produced Descartes, the second the
author o