t to curtail the
spiritual authority of the church, and to abridge the power of the reigning
monarch, in order to advance their own. Such are the men, such the
passions, which invented accusations of regicide against the Jesuits in
France during the horrid confusion of the Hugonotic wars. At the return of
public tranquillity, they all sunk into oblivion during the period of one
hundred and fifty years, until Jansenism and Deism renewed them, in 1760,
and the ensuing years, as a powerful engine to accomplish the utter
destruction of their known and common enemies. It is needless to disprove
each imputed fact: I will only, for a sample, refute the first, which
stands in Laicus's foul calendar. It is the assertion, that the Jesuit
Varade was implicated in the guilt of the assassins of Henry IV, Barriere
and Chatel. Now Varade was defended and cleared by an advocate, to whom no
reply could be made: this was Henry IV himself, who, in his famous answer
to the parliamentary president {307} Harlay, vindicated the honour and the
innocence of that Jesuit and of all his associates, in a strain of
eloquence, which Harlay and his coadjutors felt to be irresistible. The
royal orator concluded his victorious defence of his friends, by advising
all his hearers to forget the past excesses of civil discord, and not to
exasperate smothered passions, by mutual reproaches, into new crimes. The
employers of Laicus would do well to follow this advice.

Though Henry IV was not the model of a perfect king, I have always thought
his conduct towards the Jesuits a strong proof, that his return to the
religion of his forefathers was sincere. The parliament, which had opposed
him, while he headed the Hugonot party, opposed him now from the motives
above alleged, and determined to deprive him of the services of the
Jesuits, on whom they knew that he greatly depended, for the
re-establishment of the catholic religion. They drove the Jesuits from
France with every mark of ignominy, before Henry was strong enough to
support them. When {308} his power was consolidated, he restored them to
their country, and he chose one of them for his preacher, confessor, and
bosom friend. This was the celebrated father Cotton, whom Laicus impudently
names in his list of Jesuit regicides. In such rage of faction, it is no
wonder that the parliament erected a pillar to the infamy of the persecuted
Jesuits. It was not quite so tall as the British monument, which still
atte