our age, would then have resembled the church of the United States, whose foundation and renown are owing chiefly to the labors of enlightened Sulpicians and Jesuits, as well as to the exclusion of monks and of all the orders that dwell in the idle seclusion of cloisters instead of passing useful lives amid secular occupations and temporal interests. If the act of Henry VIII. in England was unjust and cruel, it was matched both in boldness and wickedness by the despotic decree of the unrelenting Charles of Spain. Nor can the latter sovereign claim the merit of having substituted virtue for vice as the British king pretended he had done in the suppression of the monasteries. Henry swept priest and friar from his kingdom with the same blow; but the trimming Charles banished the intellectual Jesuit whilst he saved and screened the lazy monk.
The pretext of Charles III. for his outrageous conduct was found in an insurrection which occurred on the evening of Palm Sunday, 1766, and gave up the capital of Spain, for forty-eight hours, to a lawless mob. It was doubtless the result of a preconcerted plan to get rid of an obnoxious minister; and, as soon as it was known that this personage had been exiled, the rioters instantly surrendered their arms, made friends with the soldiers, and departed to their homes. In fact, it was a political intrigue, which the king and his minister charged on some of the Spanish grandees and on the Jesuits. But as the former were too powerful to be assailed by the king, his wrath was vented on the Fathers of the Order of Jesus, whose lives, at this time, were not only innocent but meritorious.
"Some years preceding, on a charge as destitute of foundation, they had been expelled from Portugal. In 1764, their inveterate foe, the Duke de Choiseul, minister of Louis XV., had driven them from France; and, in Spain, their possessions were regarded with an avaricious eye by some of the needy courtiers. To effect their downfall, the French minister eagerly joined with the advocates of plunder; and intrigues were adopted which