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Rh any conduct but what was exemplary." Neither could J. J. Rousseau be induced to lend his pen to decry the Society, although he confessed that he did not like the Jesuits.

Pope Clement XIV. at last yielded to the threats of the ministers of the Bourbon kings, and in 1773, by a Brief he suppressed the Society, "in order to preserve peace." "This letter", says a Protestant historian, "condemns neither the doctrine, nor the morals, of the Jesuits. The complaints of the courts against the Order are the only motives alleged for its suppression." When recently Sir Henry Howorth represented this Brief as an infallible ex-cathedra pronouncement of the Pope, he thereby showed that he has not even the most elementary notion of what is meant by Papal infallibility. Succeeding events proved that – to use the words of one of the enemies of the Jesuits – a peace treaty was struck between the wolves and the shepherd, and that the latter had sacrificed the best watch-dogs of the flock. The dreadful French Revolution opened the eyes of many to the real purport of the persecutions of the Jesuits. True, the Church is not built on the Society, but on the rock of Peter. Still the Church suffered immensely by this sacrifice of its most zealous defenders, and well might Pope Pius VII., in the Bull of the Restoration of the Society in 1814, speak of the "dispersion of the very stones of the sanctuary," which had followed the destruction of the Society and the consequent calamities.