and the solid sums paid by booksellers to the authors of our own day.
But these brilliant passages hardly go lower than the surface of the
great change. Its significance lay quite apart from the prices paid for
books. The all-important fact about the men of letters in France was
that they constituted a new order, that their rise signified the
transfer of the spiritual power from ecclesiastical hands, and that,
while they were the organs of a new function, they associated it with a
new substitute for doctrine. These men were not only the pupils of the
Jesuits; they were also their immediate successors as the teachers, the
guides, and the directors of society. For two hundred years the
followers of Ignatius had taken the intellectual and moral control of
Catholic communities out of the failing hands of the Popes and the
secular clergy. Their own hour had now struck. The rationalistic
historian has seldom done justice to the services which this great
Order rendered to European civilisation. The immorality of many of their
maxims, their too frequent connivance at political wrong for the sake of
power, their inflexible malice against opponents, and the cupidity and
obstructiveness of the years of their decrepitude, have blinded us to
the many meritorious pages of the Jesuit chronicle. Even men like
Diderot and Voltaire, whose lives were for years made bitter by Jesuit
machinations, gave many signs that they recognised the aid which had
been rendered by their old masters to the cultivation and enlightenment
of Europe. It was from the Jesuit fathers that the men of letters whom
they trained, acquired that practical and social habit of mind which
made the world and its daily interests so real to them. It was perhaps
also his Jesuit preceptors whom the man of letters had to blame for a
certain want of rigour and exactitude on the side of morality.

What was this new order which thus struggled into existence, which so
speedily made itself felt, and at length so completely succeeded in