mults, to inflame
civil wars, to arm the hand of the assassin. Inflexible in nothing but
in their fidelity to the Church, they were equally ready to appeal in
her cause to the spirit of loyalty and to the spirit of freedom. Extreme
doctrines of obedience and extreme doctrines of liberty, the right of
rulers to misgovern the people, the right of every one of the people to
plunge his knife in the heart of a bad ruler, were inculcated by the
same man, according as he addressed himself to the subject of Philip or
to the subject of Elizabeth. Some described these divines as the most
rigid, others as the most indulgent of spiritual directors; and both
descriptions were correct. The truly devout listened with awe to the
high and saintly morality of the Jesuit. The gay cavalier who had run
his rival through the body, the frail beauty who had forgotten her
marriage-vow, found in the Jesuit an easy, well-bred man of the world,
who knew how to make allowance for the little irregularities of people
of fashion. The confessor was strict or lax, according to the temper of
the penitent. The first object was to drive no person out of the pale of
the Church. Since there were bad people, it was better that they should
be bad Catholics than bad Protestants. If a person was so unfortunate as
to be a bravo, a libertine, or a gambler, that was no reason for making
him a heretic too.

The Old World was not wide enough for this strange activity. The Jesuits
invaded all the countries which the great maritime discoveries of the
preceding age had laid open to European enterprise. They were to be
found in the depths of the Peruvian mines, at the marts of the African
slave-caravans, on the shores of the Spice Islands, in the observatories
of China. They made converts in regions which neither avarice nor
curiosity had tempted any of their countrymen to enter; and preached and
disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West understood a
word.

The spirit which appeared so eminently in this order animated the whole
Catholic world. The Court of Rome itself was purified. During the
generation which preceded the Reformation, that court had been a scandal
to the Christian name. Its annals are black with treason, murder, and
incest. Even its more respectable members were utterly unfit to be
ministers of religion. They were men like Leo the Tenth; men who, with
the Latinity of the Augustan age, had acquired its atheistical and
scoffing spirit. The