ns, to the
extremities of the globe, to create in the wilds of America and Asia new
{325} empires for the God of the Gospel, new nations of subjects for
France, Portugal, and Spain. The political services rendered by Jesuits to
those crowns have often been acknowledged; yet, alas! how have they been
requited? When the venerable missioners of the society of Jesuits were
dragooned out of Portuguese and Spanish America, the loss of millions of
Indians, whom they had civilized, nay, the loss of the territorial
possession was loudly predicted to those misguided courts. The first part
of the prediction has long since been fulfilled. All the power of France,
Spain, and Portugal, could not replace the old tried missioners of Canada,
California, Cinaloa, Mexico, Maragnon, Peru, Chili, and Paraguay. The
Jesuits were destroyed; the civilized natives, deprived of their
protectors, disbanded, and relapsed into barbarism.
Equally impotent and unavailing was all the mighty power of France, Spain,
Portugal, and Austria to fill the void, left by the discarded Jesuits, in
the quiet ministry of schools at home. {326} Cast a retrospect on the
former state of Europe. There were, in all considerable towns, colleges of
Jesuits, now, alas! struck to ruins, in which gratuitous education was
given. They were temples, in which the language of religion hallowed the
language of the Muses. They were seminaries where future senators,
magistrates and officers, prelates, priests, and cenobites, &c., received
their first, that is, the most important part of education. Not even an
attempt was made to supply the room of the ejected instructors, excepting,
perhaps, for form sake, in a few great cities; and here what a woful
substitution! The Jesuits of Clermont college, in Paris, had, for two
hundred years, quietly instructed and trained the flower of the French
nobility, to religion, patriotism, and letters. Within a few years after
the expulsion of the old masters, Clermont college vomited forth, from its
precincts into France, Robespierre, and Camille des Moulins, and Tallien,
and Noel, and Freron, and Chenier des Bois, and Porion, and De Pin, and
other {327} sanguinary demagogues of that execrable period; names of
monsters, now consigned to everlasting infamy. The game was, indeed, by
this time, carried rather farther than the Pombals, the Choiseuls, the
Arandas, and others, who had planned the ruin of the Jesuits, had either
designed or foreseen; but
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