Michelet has described their method in a brilliant and exact metaphor, as the attempt to counteract the poison of free thought and stimulative studies by means of vaccination.

They taught the classics in expurgated editions, history in drugged epitomes, science in popular lectures.

Instead of banning what M.Renan is wont to style _etudes fortes_, they undertook to emasculate these and render them innocuous.
While Bruno was burned by the Inquisition for proclaiming what the Copernican discovery involved for faith and metaphysics, Father Koster at Cologne vulgarized it into something pretty and agreeable.

While Scaliger and Casaubon used the humanities as a propaedeutic of the virile reason, the Jesuits contrived to sterilize and mechanize their influences by insipid rhetoric.

Everywhere through Europe, by the side of stalwart thinkers, crept plausible Jesuit professors, following the light of learning like its shadow, mimicking the accent of the gods like parrots, and mocking their gestures like apes.