unhesitating obedience, and the systematic activity of their order.
All the Jesuits existing acknowledged one head, the general of their
order, whose constant residence was at Rome. But their influence,
powerful as it was by their open operation on society, derived
perhaps a superior power from its secret exertions. Its name was
legion--its numbers amounted to thousands--it took every shape of
society, from the highest to the lowest. It was the noble and the
peasant--the man of learning and the man of trade--the lawyer and the
monk--the soldier and the sailor--nay, it was said, that such was the
extraordinary pliancy of its principle of disguise, the Jesuit was
suffered to assume the tenets of Protestantism, and even to act as a
Protestant pastor, for the purpose of more complete deception. The
good of the church was the plea which purified all imposture; the
power of Rome was the principle on which this tremendous system of
artifice was constructed; and the reduction of all modes of human
opinion to the one sullen superstition of the Vatican, was the
triumph for which those armies of subtle enthusiasm and fraudulent
sanctity were prepared to live and die.

The first act of Pombal was to remove the king's confessor, the
Jesuit Moreira. The education of the younger branches of the royal
family was in the hands of Jesuits. Pombal procured a royal order
that no Jesuit should approach the court, without obtaining the
express permission of the king. He lost no time in repeating the
assault. Within a month, on the 8th of October 1767, he sent
instructions to the Portuguese ambassador at Rome, to demand a
private audience, and lay before the pope the misdemeanours of the
order.

Those instructions charged the Jesuits with the most atrocious
personal profligacy, with a design to master all public power, to
gather opulence dangerous to the state, and actually to plot against
the authority of the crowns of Europe. He announced, that the king of
Portugal had commanded all the Jesuit confessors of the prince and
princesses to withdraw to their own convents; and this important
manifesto closed by soliciting the interposition of the papal see to
prevent the ruin, by purifying an order which had given scandal to
Christianity, by offences against the public and private peace of
society, equally unexampled, habitual, and abominable. In 1758, the
representation to the pope was renewed, with additional proofs that
the order had deter