What is more singular still, is, that an undertaking, which would have been thought very difficult, and even impossible at the beginning of 1761, should have been accomplished in less than two years, without noise, without resistance, and with as little trouble as they would have had in destroying the Capuchins and the Pickpusses. We cannot say of the Jesuits that their death has been as brilliant as their life. Nay, if any thing ought to humble them, it is that they have perished so pitifully, so obscurely, without lustre and without glory. Nothing better discovers a real weakness, which had only the appearance of strength. The Jesuits will say, without doubt, that they have only executed, and wanted only to execute, literally the precept of the gospel; “When they persecute you in one city, fly into another.” But why, after having forgot this precept for two hundred years, have they remembered it so late?
Lastly, what will complete our astonishment is, that two or three men only, who would not have thought themselves destined to effect such a revolution, should have conceived and accomplished this great project: the general impulse given to the whole body of the magistracy was their work, and the fruit of their impetuous activity. Mankind indeed are seldom led by cold and calm spirits. Tranquill reason has not, of herself alone, the warmth so necessary to enforce her opinions, and make us enter into her views: she is content with instructing her age silently, and without bustle, and to become afterwards a mere spectatress of the effect, whether good or bad, which her lessons shall have produced. She resembles, if we may use the comparison, the “old man of the mountain,” at whose voice the young people, his disciples, ran to throw themselves over precipices, but who took care not to throw himself over.
It is true, that this small number of men, who set all the tribunals of the kingdom in motion against the Jesuits, found the nation favourably disposed for that fermentation, and eager to support it by its discourses. We say by its discourses; for in France all that the nation can do, is to speak, right or wrong, for or against, those who govern: but it must be confessed also, that the publick cry is there held in some account. Philosophy, against which the Jansenists had declared war almost as hot as against the company of Jesus, had made, in spite of them, and happily 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 versatile grace, and themselves efficacious 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 servir?
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, and 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 carried their audaciousness lately: the following is a pretty recent stroke, which will make them thoroughly known.
Benedict XIV. at the beginning of his pontificate, accepted the dedication of a work, which father Norbert the Capuchin had composed against the Jesuits; for they were come to that pass, as to arm even the Capuchins against them: Tu quoque Brute[18]! cried a famous satyrist on this occasion. The pope thought he might permit Norbert to remain at Rome under his protection. He had not the power to do it: the Jesuits took their measures so well, that in the end they drove the Capuchin not only out of the pope’s territories, but even out of all the Catholick states: he was obliged to fly to London, and found not till 1759 an asylum in Portugal, when the society were driven from thence: he had the satisfaction, as he tells us himself, to assist at the execution of Malagrida, and to say mass for the repose of his soul, while they finished burning his body.
The persecution, so rancorously carried on by the Jesuits against this monk, who was protected by Benedict XIV. had greatly irritated that pope against them; he omitted no opportunity of giving them, on all occasions, disgust, whenever it was in his power. The Jansenists even doubt not but, if he had lived, he would have availed himself of the circumstance of their destruction in Portugal and France, to annihilate the society: but whatever they may say, it is not probable that a pope, be he what he will, should ever forget so far his own true interests. The Jesuits are the sovereign Pontif’s Janissaries, formidable sometimes to their master, like those of the Ottoman Porte, but necessary like them to the support of the empire. It is the interest of the court of Rome to curb and to preserve them: Benedict XIV. had too much sense not to think so. The Czar Peter, it is true, broke at one time 40,000 Strelitzes, who had revolted, though they were his best soldiers: but the Czar had twenty millions of subjects, and could recruit them with other Strelitzes; whereas the Pope, whose whole power is supported only by the spiritual army under his command, would not be able easily to recruit it with such soldiers as the Jesuits, so well disciplined, so devoted to the church of Rome, and so formidable to the enemies of the sovereign Pontif.
It may be asserted with truth, that Pope Benedict XIV. would have acted better on such an occasion than his successor Clement XIII. He would not, like the latter, have written to a king, who did him the honour of consulting him, “that the Jesuits must remain as they were:” he would have returned an equivocal answer, as he did on occasion of the refusal of the sacraments to the Jansenists; he would have gained time; he would have granted the parliaments some modifications in regard to the institution (at least with respect to the French Jesuits); he would have flattered and engaged the Jansenists, by some bull, in favour of efficacious grace: in short, he would have deadened or weakened the blows that were aimed at his regiment of guards. But it looks as if, in this affair, the Jesuits and their friends had been seized with a fit of giddiness, and that they did themselves all that was necessary to accelerate their ruin: they shewed themselves, for the first time, inflexible in a matter, where it was of the highest importance to them not to be so: they caballed in secret, and talked openly at court against their enemies: they cried out, that religion was undone, if we parted with them; that we drove them away only to establish in France incredulity and heresy: and by these means they cast oil on the fire, instead of extinguishing it. It looks as if the Jansenists had put up to God, for the destruction of the society, the following prayer of Joad in Athalia.
Daigne, daigne, grand Dieu, sur son chef & sur elle