a change in the French dynasty.  They organized the Thirty Years’ War, and they procured the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  If it is not possible to connect them immediately with all and each of the criminal acts laid to their charge, the fact that a Jesuit in every case was lurking in the background, counts by the force of cumulative evidence heavily against them, and explains the universal suspicion with which they came to be regarded as factious intermeddlers in the concerns of nations.  Moreover, their written words accused them; for the tyrannicide of heretics was plainly advocated in their treatises on government.  So profound was the conviction of their guilt, that the death of Sixtus V. in 1590, predicted by Bellarmino, the sudden death of Urban VII. in the same year, and the death of Clement VIII. in 1805, also predicted by Bellarmino—­these three Popes being ill-affected toward the order—­were popularly ascribed to their agency.  But of their practical intervention there is no proof.  Old age and fever must be credited, in these as in other cases, with the decease of Roman Pontiffs supposed to have been poisoned.

[Footnote 175:  See Mariana, De Rege, lib. i. cap. 6.  This book, be it remembered, was written for the instruction of the heir apparent, afterwards Philip III.]

[Footnote 176:  Henri IV. let them return to France, in mere dread of their machinations against him.  See Sully, vol. v. p. 113.]

[Footnote 177:  Sarpi, who was living at the time of Henri’s murder, and who saw his best hopes for Italy and the Church of God extinguished by that crime, at first credited the Jesuits with the deliberate instigation Ravaillac.  He gradually came to the conclusion that, though they were not directly responsible, their doctrine of regicide had inflamed the fanatic’s imagination.  See, in succession, Letters, vol. ii. pp. 78, 79, 81, 83, 86, 91, 105, 121, 170, 181, 192.]

It is not, however, to be wondered that sooner, or later the Jesuits made themselves insupportable by their intrigues in all the countries where they were established.[178] Even to the Papacy itself they proved too irksome to be borne.  The Company showed plainly that what they meant by obedience to Rome was obedience to a Rome controlled and fashioned by themselves.  It was their ambition to stand in the same relation to the Pope as the Shogun to the Mikado of Japan.  Nor does the analysis of their opinions fail to justify the condemnation passed upon them by the Parlement of Paris in 1762.  ’These doctrines tend to destroy the natural law, that rule of manners which God Himself has imprinted on the hearts of men, and in consequence to sever all the bonds of civil society, by the authorization of theft, falsehood, perjury, the most culpable impurity, and in a word each passion and each crime of human weakness; to obliterate all sentiments of humanity by favoring homicide and parricide; and to annihilate the authority of sovereigns in the State.’