[Gutenberg 59729] • An Account of the Destruction of the Jesuits in France

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1766 edition. Excerpt: ... for them, sensible progresses. The Jesuits, intolerant by system and situation, were become by it only the more odious: they were considered, if I may so say, as the giants of fanaticism; as the most dangerous enemies of reason, and as those whom it imported most to get rid of. The parliaments, when they began to attack the society, found this disposition in all minds. It was properly philosophy, which by the mouth of the magistrates, issued the decree against the Jesuits: Jansenism was only the sollicitor in it. The nation, and the philosophers at its head, wished the annihilation of these fathers, because they are intolerant, persecutors, turbulent, and formidable: the Jansenists desired it, because the Jesuits maintain ver satile grace, and themselves ejjkacivui grace. But for this ridiculous scholastick dispute, and the fatal bull . which was the fruit of it, the society would perhaps still exist, after having so often merited destruction, for * causes somewhat more real and more weighty. But at last it is destroyed, and reason is avenged. Qu'importe de quel bras Dieu daigne se scrvir t To these reflexions we may join another no less important, and formed to serve as a lesson to all religious orders, which may be tempted to imitate the Jesuits. If those fathers had been prudent enough to confine the credit of the society to what it might draw from the sciences and letters, that credit would have been more solid, less envied, arid more more durable. It was the spirit of intrigue and ambition which they displayed, the oppressions which they exercised; in one word, their enormous power (or what was thought such) and, above all, the insolence which they joined to it, that ruined them. There is no believing to what a height they had...