"Sam": or The history of mystery./ By C. W. Webber.

526 ",SAM: " OR, THE HIISTORY OF MYSTERY.
influence over the whole world. Their repeated expulsions
from Roman Catholic governments, and their suppression by
the Pope, afford sufficient evidence of their dangerous character. But let us look at a few unexceptional testimonies
concerning the moral principles of the order.
In 1642, an assembly of Romish clergy at Nantes
denounced a work by the Jesuit Bauni, "as calculated to
encourage licentiousness and the corruption of manners; as
violating natural equity, and the rights of man, and tolerating blasphemy, usury, simony, and many other enormous
crimes, as offenses of no magnitude." In 1643, the Romish
university of Paris declared themselves ready to prove that
there is no article inll religion which the Jesuits have not corrupted, and do not daily corrupt, by erroneous novelties; that
the scholastic theology has been depraved by the dangerous
opinions of their writers, who have had the approbation, or
at least the connivance of the whole society; that Christian
morality had become a body of problematical opinions, since
their society had undertaken, by a general understanding, to
accommodate it to the luxury of the age; that the laws of
God had been sophisticated by their unheard of subtleties;
that there was no longer any difference between vice and
virtue; that by a base indulgence, they promised impunity
to the most flagrant crime; that there was no conscience,
however erroneous, which might not obtain peace, if it would
confide in them; and that, in short, their doctrines, inimical
to all order, had equally resisted the power of kings and the
authority of the hierarchy; that if the light which God had
placed in all reasonable minds, in order to show the distinction between purity and equity, were so far extinguished
that such a pernicious theology could be universally receivedin that case deserts and forests would be preferable to cities;
and society with wild beasts, who have only their natural
arms, would be better than with men who, in addition to the
violence of their passions, would be instructed by this doctrine of devils to dissimulate and feign, and to counterfeit the
characters of intimate friends, in order to destroy others with
the greater impunity." In 1762, the Parliament of Popish
France gave the following decision: " The court has ordained
that the passages extracted from the books of one hundred
and forty-seven Jesuit authors having been verified, a