RICHELIEU.
When the four ministers of Charenton presented very heavy accusations against the Jesuits to Louis XIII, cardinal Richelieu answered them all: for the sake of brevity, I shall extract only his reply on the charge of regicide. "As to what you say of their doctrine, with respect to the power they attribute to the pope over kings, you would have spoken very differently of it, if, instead of learning it from the private writings of a few particulars, you had collected it from the mouth of their general, who, in the year 1610, made a public and solemn declaration, by which he not only disapproves, but forbids all those of his order, under very severe penalties, to teach or maintain it lawful, under what pretext of tyranny soever, to attempt upon the persons of kings and princes."
ABBE RAYNAL.
To the foregoing testimonies, let us add that of one of the bitterest enemies of Christianity. "The magnificence of the ceremonies," says Raynal, "attracts the Indians to the churches, where they find pleasure and piety united. There it is that religion is amiable, and it is at first in her ministers that she there gains love. Nothing equals the purity of the morals, the mild and tender zeal, the paternal solicitude, of the Jesuits of Paraguay. Every pastor is truly the father, as well as the director of his parishioners. There his authority is not felt, for he orders, prohibits, and punishes, only what is punished, prohibited, and ordered by the religion, which all of them, as well as he, worship and cherish."—"A government in which nobody is idle, nobody works to excess; in which food is wholesome, plentiful, and impartially partaken by all the citizens, who are conveniently lodged, conveniently clothed; in
which old persons, widows, orphans, and the sick, find a succour unknown in any other part of the globe; in which every one marries according to inclination, and without interest; and where large families are a comfort, without a possibility of becoming a burthen; in which the debauchery inseparable from idleness, that equally corrupts opulence and poverty, never accelerates the degradation, or rather the decline of human life; in which factitious passions are never excited, and well-regulated desires never thwarted; in which the advantages of commerce are enjoyed; without danger of contagion from the vices attendant on luxury; in which well-stored magazines, and mutual gratuitous succours among nations, rendered brothers by the same religion, afford a secure resource against the want that the uncertainty or inclemency of the seasons may produce; in which criminal justice has never been under the melancholy necessity of condemning a single criminal to death, to ignominy, or to punishment of any duration; and in which the very name of a tax or of a lawsuit is
unknown." Listen, I pray, to this account, from a quarter so unsuspected, of "the slavery in which the Jesuits held the Indians of Paraguay, and the atrocities which they exercised there;" for such is the language of their assailant, whom one must be surprised to find unacquainted with the writings of such an author as Raynal.
THE BISHOPS OF FRANCE.
There are forty-five names of bishops subscribed to a reply made by them to certain articles proposed for their examination by Louis XV. Their judgment is given at considerable length, and the testimony of it is too valuable to be abridged. I have already referred the reader to the document, printed at length, in the Appendix, at the end of this volume; to enable him, however, to judge here of the importance of it, I will insert the articles in this place.