In truth, if society continued to hold together, if life and property enjoyed any security, it was because common sense and common humanity restrained men from doing what the Society of Jesus assured them that they might with a safe conscience do.
So strangely were good and evil intermixed in the character of these celebrated brethren; and the intermixture was the secret of their gigantic power.

That power could never have belonged to mere hypocrites.
It could never have belonged to rigid moralists.

It was to be attained only by men sincerely enthusiastic in the pursuit of a great end, and at the same time unscrupulous as to the choice of means.
From the first the Jesuits had been bound by a peculiar allegiance to the Pope.

Their mission had been not less to quell all mutiny within the Church than to repel the hostility of her avowed enemies.

Their doctrine was in the highest degree what has been called on our side of the Alps Ultramontane, and differed almost as much from the doctrine of Bossuet as from that of Luther.