ABSTRACT
The Jesuits are the radical cure against Straussism. Early in 1839, the government of Zurich had offered a professorship at its university to a controversial German theologian, David Friedrich Strauss. For in stripping away myth from fact in his critical look at the gospels, Strauss, as Schweitzer also put it, "made an end of miracle". If David Friedrich Strauss had symbolized all that was objectionable about the Liberal position to Conservatives, then the Jesuits served the same function for their opponents. Faced by that resolute and popular opposition, Zurich's Liberal government resigned and ordered new elections. In fact, the Jesuits were hated with a passion that only a relatively few among the hymn-singing farm folk marching on Zurich could muster for the biographer of the historical Jesus. The large crowd assembled had been pleased by the speech making, in which denunciations of Lucerne's government alternated with demands for the organization of a militant anti-Jesuit league.
