I allow it, Sir; there formerly existed a body of English Jesuits. It was violently crushed and annihilated more than forty years ago. I look in vain for the yoke, which they imposed upon our fathers: I have read something of the yoke, which they themselves bore. It is described in letters of blood, in the penal statutes of Elizabeth and the first James. During a full century, half the gibbets of England witnessed the unrelenting severity of persecution, which these injured men quietly and meekly endured. They were a body of catholic priests, always esteemed and cherished by English catholics; and, at every period of their existence, they counted in their society many members of the best and most ancient families among the British gentry. They risked their lives by treading on their native soil. They devoted themselves to
administer the comforts of religion in secret to their suffering brethren; and they then slunk back to their hiding holes in the hollows of walls and roofs of houses. They never possessed a single house, school, or chapel, in which they could recommend themselves to their countrymen, by the peaceable functions of their profession: they were never otherwise known to the British public than when, surprised by priest-catchers, they were dragged to jail, and from jail to the gallows. Thus lived the Jesuits, in this their free country, from the twenty-second year of Elizabeth to the thirtieth of Charles II. This is all the progress that they made, in a full century, towards their own aggrandizement, which, says Laicus, "is the main object of all their labours[[119]]."
When the scene of blood was finally closed, in 1680, by the execution of eight innocent Jesuits in one year, not to mention a dozen
others, who died in jail, many of them under sentence of death, the Jesuits still remained an inoffensive body of catholic missionary priests. Their object was to assist their catholic brethren; and, having obtained some foundations from the liberality of foreign potentates, they applied themselves to give to the expatriated youth of their own country the education, which the partiality of the laws denied them at home. In these pacific occupations they persevered, without experiencing any jealousy on the part of government, even during the two rebellions of 1715 and 1745; because, since the accession of the House of Brunswick, it has been a principle with our monarchs never to persecute any man for conscience, never to harass inoffensive subjects.
At the present day, that royal principle, with all its consequences, and they extend far, is widely diffused throughout the empire. Every man in it acknowledges the impossibility of converting the millions of his majesty's catholic subjects to any other assignable mode of faith;
and every thinking man must feel the importance and, at the present day, the necessity, of attaching these millions to the common cause of the empire, and to the cordial support of one common government. Sound policy will always forbear to sour and to fret subjects, by jealous suspicions and invidious distinctions. It will always incline wise rulers of states to provide, for their subjects, ministers of religion, who are firmly attached to their government, and who may feel that they have nothing to fear from it, while they do not provoke its sword. Such was the conduct of continental governments in past times; and they everywhere judged it prudent to intrust, in a great measure, the national education of their youth to the active order of Jesuits, who, at the same time, were preachers, and catechists, and confessors, and visitors of hospitals and prisons; and who always had in reserve a surplus of apostles, armed with a cross and a breviary, ready to fly to every point of the heavens, to the extremities of the globe, to create in the wilds of America and Asia new
empires for the God of the Gospel, new nations of subjects for France, Portugal, and Spain. The political services rendered by Jesuits to those crowns have often been acknowledged; yet, alas! how have they been requited? When the venerable missioners of the society of Jesuits were dragooned out of Portuguese and Spanish America, the loss of millions of Indians, whom they had civilized, nay, the loss of the territorial possession was loudly predicted to those misguided courts. The first part of the prediction has long since been fulfilled. All the power of France, Spain, and Portugal, could not replace the old tried missioners of Canada, California, Cinaloa, Mexico, Maragnon, Peru, Chili, and Paraguay. The Jesuits were destroyed; the civilized natives, deprived of their protectors, disbanded, and relapsed into barbarism.
Equally impotent and unavailing was all the mighty power of France, Spain, Portugal, and Austria to fill the void, left by the discarded Jesuits, in the quiet ministry of schools at home.
Cast a retrospect on the former state of Europe. There were, in all considerable towns, colleges of Jesuits, now, alas! struck to ruins, in which gratuitous education was given. They were temples, in which the language of religion hallowed the language of the Muses. They were seminaries where future senators, magistrates and officers, prelates, priests, and cenobites, &c., received their first, that is, the most important part of education. Not even an attempt was made to supply the room of the ejected instructors, excepting, perhaps, for form sake, in a few great cities; and here what a woful substitution! The Jesuits of Clermont college, in Paris, had, for two hundred years, quietly instructed and trained the flower of the French nobility, to religion, patriotism, and letters. Within a few years after the expulsion of the old masters, Clermont college vomited forth, from its precincts into France, Robespierre, and Camille des Moulins, and Tallien, and Noel, and Freron, and Chenier des Bois, and Porion, and De Pin, and other
sanguinary demagogues of that execrable period; names of monsters, now consigned to everlasting infamy. The game was, indeed, by this time, carried rather farther than the Pombals, the Choiseuls, the Arandas, and others, who had planned the ruin of the Jesuits, had either designed or foreseen; but the mound was thrown down, and how could the torrent be withstood?