served, that the daughters of Israel assemble every year to lament the daughter of Jephtha for four days." You will just have the goodness, Mr. Anti-philosopher, to tell us, whether four days of lamentation every year have ever been devoted to weeping the fate of a young woman because she was consecrated?

Whether any nuns (religieuses) were ever solemnly appointed among a people who considered virginity an opprobrium?

And also, what is the natural meaning of the phrase, he did to her as he had vowed-"Fecit ei sicut voverat?" What had Jephtha vowed? What had he promised by an oath to perform ?-To kill his daughter; to offer her up as a burnt offering:—and he did kill her.

Read Calmet's dissertation on the rashness of Jephtha's vow and its fulfilment; read the law which he cites, that terrible law of Leviticus, in the twentyseventh chapter, which commands that all which shall be devoted to the Lord shall not be ransomed, but shall die the death: "Non redimetur, sed morte morietur."

Observe the multitude of examples by which this most astonishing truth is attested. Look at the Amalekites and Canaanites; look at the king of Arad and all his family subjected to the law of devotion; look at the priest Samuel slaying king Agag with his own hands, and cutting him into pieces as a butcher cuts up an ox in his slaughter-house. After considering all this, go and corrupt, falsify, or deny holy scripture, in order to maintain your paradox; and insult those who revere the scripture, however astonishing and confounding they may find it. Give the lie direct to the historian Josephus, who transcribes the narrative in question, and possitively asserts that Jephtha immolated his daughter. Pile revilings upon falsehoods, and calumny upon ignorance; sages will smile at your impotence;

and weak.

sages,

thank God, are at present neither few nor Oh! that you could but see the sovereign contempt with which they look down upon the Rouths, when they corrupt the holy scripture, and when they boast of having disputed with the president Montes

quieu in his last hour, and convinced him that he ought to think exactly like the jesuits!

JESUITS; OR PRIDE.

THE jesuits have been so much a subject of discourse and discussion, that after having engaged the attention of Europe for a period of two hundred years, they at last begin to weary and disgust it, whether they write themselves, or whether any one else writes for or against that singular society; in which it must be confessed there have been found, and are to be found still, individuals of very extraordinary merit.

They have been reproached, in the six thousand volumes that have been written against them, with their lax morality, which has not however been more lax than that of the capuchins; and with their doctrine relating to the safety of the person of kings; a doctrine which after all is not to be compared with the hornhandled knife of James Clement; nor with the prepared host, the sprinkled wafer, which so well answered the purpose of Ange de Montepulciano, another jacobin, and which poisoned the emperor Henry VII.

It is not versatile grace which has been their ruin, nor the fraudulent bankruptcy of the reverend father La Valette, prefect of the apostolic missions. A whole order has not been expelled from France and Spain and the two Sicilies, because that order contained a single bankrupt. Nor was it effected by the odious deviations of the jesuit Guyot-Desfontaines, or the jesuit Freron, or the reverend father Marsy, so injurious, in the latter instance, to the youthful and high-born victim. The public refused to attend these Greek and Latin imitations of Anacreon and Horace.

What is it then that was their ruin?-Pride. What! it may be asked by some-were the jesuits prouder than other monks? Yes; and so much so, that they procured a lettre-de-cachet against an ecclesiastic for calling them monks. One member of the society, called Croust, more brutal than the rest, a brother of the confessor of the second dauphiness, was absolutely, in my

presence, going to beat the son of M. de Guyot, afterwards king's advocate (prêteur-royal) at Strasburg, merely for saying he would go to see him in his

convent.

It is perfectly incredible with what contempt they considered every university where they had not been educated, every book which they had not written, every ecclesiastic who was not a man of quality.' Of this I have myself, times without number, been a witness. They express themselves in the following language, in their libel intitled "It is time to speak out :""Should we condescend even to speak to a magistrate who says the jesuits are proud and ought to be humbled?" They were so proud that they would not suffer any one to blame their pride.

*

Whence did this hateful pride originate? From father. Guignard's having been hanged? which is literally true.

It must be remarked, that after the execution of that jesuit under Henry IV., and after the banishment of the society from the kingdom, they were recalled only on the indispensable condition that one jesuit should always reside at court, who should be responsible for all the rest. Coton was the person who thus became a hostage at the court of Henry IV.; and that excellent monarch, who was not without his little stratagems of policy, thought to conciliate the pope by making a hostage of his confessor.

From that moment every brother of the order seemed to feel as if he had been raised to be king's confessor. This place of first spiritual physician became a department of the administration under Louis XIII., and more so still under Louis XIV. The brother Vadblé, valet-de-chambre of father La Chaise, granted his protection to the bishops of France; and father Le Tellier ruled with a sceptre of iron those who were very well disposed to be so ruled. It was impossible that the greater part of the jesuits should not be puffed up by the consequence and power to which these two members of their society had been raised, and that they

* Page 341.

should not become as insolent as the lacqueys of M. Louvois. There have been among them, certainly, men of knowledge, eloquence, and genius; these possessedsome modesty, but those who had only mediocrity of talent or acquirement, were tainted with that pride which generally attaches to mediocrity and to the pedantry of a college.

From the time of father Garasse almost all their polemical works have been pervaded with an indecent and scornful arrogance which has roused the indignation of all Europe. This arrogance frequently sunk into the most pitiful meanness; so that they discovered the extraordinary secret of being at once objects of envy and contempt. Observe, for example, how they expressed themselves of the celebrated Pasquier, advocate-general of the Chamber of Accounts:

66

Pasquier is a mere porter, a Parisian varlet, a second-rate showman and jester, a journeyman retailer of ballads and old stories, a contemptible hireling, only fit to be a lacquey's valet, a scrub, a disgusting ragamuffin, strongly suspected of heresy, and either heretical or much worse, a libidinous and filthy satyr, a master-fool by nature, in sharp, in flat, and throughout the whole gamut, a three-shod fool, a fool double-dyed, a fool in grain, a fool in every sort of folly."

They afterwards polished their style; but pride, by becoming less gross, only became the more revolting.

Everything is pardoned except pride; and this accounts for the fact, that all the parliaments in the kingdom, the members of which had the greater part of them been disciples of the jesuits, seized the first opportunity of effecting their annihilation; and the whole land rejoiced in their downfall.

So deeply was the spirit of pride rooted in them, that it manifested itself with the most indecent rage, even while they were held down to the earth by the hand of justice, and their final sentence yet remained to be pronounced. We need only read the celebrated memorial already mentioned, intitled "It is Time to speak Out," printed at Avignon in 1763, under the assumed name of Anvers. It begins with an ironical

petition to the persons holding the court of parliament. It addresses them with as much superiority and contempt as could be shown in reprimanding a proctor's clerks. The illustrious M. de Montclar, procureurgénéral, the oracle of the parliament of Provençe, is continually treated as 'M. Ripert,' and rebuked with as much consequence and authority as a mutinous and ignorant scholar by a professor in his chair. They pushed their audacity so far as to say,* that M. de Montclar' blasphemed'in giving an account of the institution of the jesuits.

In their memorial, intitled "All shall be Told," they insult still more daringly the parliament of Metz, and always in the style of arrogance and dictation derived from the schools.

They have retained this pride, even in the very ashes to which France and Spain have now reduced them.t From the bottom of those ashes the serpent, scorched as it has been, has again raised its hostile head. We have seen a contemptible creature, of the name of Nonotte, set himself up for a critic on his masters; and although possessing merely talent enough for preaching to a mob in a church-yard, discoursing with all the ease of impudence about things of which he has not the slightest notion. Another insolent member of the society, called Patouillet, dared, in the bishop's mandates, to insult respectable citizens and officers of the king's household, whose very lacqueys would not have permitted him to speak to them.

One of the things on which they most prided themselves, was introducing themselves into the houses of the great in their last illness, as ambassadors of God, to open to them the gates of heaven, without their previously passing through purgatory. Louis XIV. it was considered as having a bad aspect, it was unfashionable and discreditable, to die without having passed through the hands of a jesuit; and the

Vol. ii. 399.

Under

And it is yet to be seen whether they will not regain a share of influence by a return through the portal of humility. Happily, their past history alarms even Despotism itself.-T.