ere they had
settlements; in their schools and seminaries, in pulpits and confessionals,
in hospitals and workhouses, in the cultivation of sciences, in national
and foreign missions; all this professional business afforded them a large
field for exertion, and enabled them to recommend themselves to kings,
prelates, and magistrates, by signal services to the public, and thus to
blunt the stings of envy and the shafts of malice. The small number, which
frequented England for nearly two hundred years, in the face of the penal
laws, had no such field of action. They were confined to administer the
rites of religion to their brethren {176} in private houses; they were
necessitated to live separate; they were forced to disguise their
profession and character, and frequently their very names; they lived under
the laws, and they were not protected by the laws; they knew, that the
distorted character, drawn of them by their foreign enemies, obtained ready
credit in this country, without inquiry or examination; and, as they could
neither act nor speak in their own defence, it has happened, that the
notion of a Jesuit is to this day _vulgarly_ (I take the word in its full
meaning) associated with the idea of every crime.

In foreign countries, the Jesuits formed a conspicuous body, to which no
man was wholly indifferent. They could not be viewed with the eye of
contempt. They were highly esteemed, and they were bitterly hated. In all
catholic countries, the esteem and respect, which they enjoyed, were fully
established. They were every where considered as pure and holy in their
morals and conduct, eminently zealous for {177} religion, and highly
serviceable to the public. Their enemies, at all times, were either open
separatists from the catholic church, or secret enemies of it, who formed
parties for its destruction; or they were rivals, who vied with them in
some branches of the public administration of religion. From these sources
proceeded, at different times, that undigested mass of criminations,
unsubstantiated by proof, which are so inconsistently collected in the new
conspiracy against the Jesuits. It is evidently folly to imagine, that a
large body of men, connected with the public by a thousand links,
surrounded by jealous enemies, could possibly be a band of unprincipled
knaves, impostors, and miscreants. The universal favour of the bulk of so
many polished nations forbids, at once, such an idea. Popes, kings,
prelates,