The effect of the suppression of the order in France was both good and ill.  The event unquestionably led to the propagation of an impious philosophy and all sorts of crude opinions and ill-digested theories, both in government and religion, in the schools, the salons, and the pulpits of France.  The press, relieved of its most watchful and jealous spies, teemed with pamphlets and books of the most licentious character.  The good and evil powers were both unchained and suffered to go free about the land, and to do what work they could.  There are many who feel that this combat is necessary for the full development of human strength and virtue; who maintain that the good is much more powerful than the evil in any age of moral experiences; and who believe that angels of light will, on our mundane arena, prevail over angels of darkness,—­that one truth is stronger than one thousand lies, and that two can put ten thousand to flight.  There are others, again, who think that there is a vitality in error as well as a vitality in truth, as proved seemingly by the prevalence of Pagan falsehoods, Mohammedan empires, and Papal superstitions.  But to whatever party clearness of judgment belongs, one thing is historically certain,—­that never was poor human nature more puzzled by false guides, more tempted by appetites and passions, more enslaved by the lust of the eye and the pride of life, than during the latter years of the reign of Louis XV.  Never was there a period or a country in Christendom more frivolous, pleasure-seeking, sceptical, irreligious, vain, conceited, and superficial than during the reign of Madame de Pompadour.  No; never was there a time of so little moral elevation among the great mass, or when so few great enterprises were projected for the improvement of society.

And it was from society thus disordered, inexperienced, and godless that all restraints were removed from the ancient and venerated guardians of youth, of religion, and of literature.  Judge what must have been the effects; judge between these opposing theories, whether it were better to have the institutions of society guarded by selfish, ambitious, and narrow-minded priests, or to have the flood-gates of vastly preponderating evil influences opened upon society already reeling in the intoxication of the senses, or madly raving from the dethronement of reason, the abnegation of religious duties, and the extinction of the light of faith.  I would not say that either one or the other of these horrible alternatives is necessary or probable in these times, that we are compelled to choose between them, or that we ever shall be compelled; but simply, that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in France,—­that semi-Catholic and semi-infidel nation,—­there existed on the one hand a most execrable spiritual despotism exercised by the Jesuits, and on the other a boundless ferment of destructive and revolutionary principles, operating on a people generally inclined, and in some cases abandoned, to