t with that very large part of mankind who have
religion enough to make them uneasy when they do wrong, and not religion
enough to keep them from doing wrong, he followed a very different
system. Since he could not reclaim them from guilt, it was his business
to save them from remorse. He had at his command an immense dispensary
of anodynes for wounded consciences. In the books of casuistry which had
been written by his brethren, and printed with the approbation of his
superiors, were to be found doctrines consolatory to transgressors of
every class. There the bankrupt was taught how he might, without sin,
secrete his goods from his creditors. The servant was taught how he
might, without sin, run off with his master's plate. The pandar was
assured that a Christian man might innocently earn his living by
carrying letters and messages between married women and their gallants.
The high spirited and punctilious gentlemen of France were gratified by
a decision in favour of duelling. The Italians, accustomed to darker and
baser modes of vengeance, were glad to learn that they might, without
any crime, shoot at their enemies from behind hedges. To deceit was
given a license sufficient to destroy the whole value of human contracts
and of human testimony. In truth, if society continued to hold together,
if life and property enjoyed any security, it was because common sense
and common humanity restrained men from doing what the Society of Jesus
assured them that they might with a safe conscience do.

So strangely were good and evil intermixed in the character of these
celebrated brethren; and the intermixture was the secret of their
gigantic power. That power could never have belonged to mere hypocrites.
It could never have belonged to rigid moralists. It was to be attained
only by men sincerely enthusiastic in the pursuit of a great end, and at
the same time unscrupulous as to the choice of means.

From the first the Jesuits had been bound by a peculiar allegiance to
the Pope. Their mission had been not less to quell all mutiny within the
Church than to repel the hostility of her avowed enemies. Their doctrine
was in the highest degree what has been called on our side of the Alps
Ultramontane, and differed almost as much from the doctrine of Bossuet
as from that of Luther. They condemned the Gallican liberties, the
claim of oecumenical councils to control the Holy See, and the claim of
Bishops to an independent commission from h