Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Jesuits

JESUITS. The &ldquo;Company of Jesus,&rdquo; in its original conception, and in its avowed or ostensible objects, does not at the first glance appear as more than one of many similar communities which have grown up in the bosom of Latin Christianity. Like several of them, it is a congregation of ecclesiastics living in accordance with a definite rule, whence technically called &ldquo;Clerks Regular&rdquo;; like the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights, military ideas have entered largely into its plans; like Benedictines, Dominicans, and Franciscans, its spiritual labours have been those of teaching the young by schools and catechizings, conducting home missions by such agencies as sermons, retreats, and the like, combating heresy with the pulpit and the pen, and converting the heathen. In each and all of these peculiarities and occupations it comes late into a field where its precursors had been busy for centuries, and it might seem to differ from them merely by a more careful selection of instruments, a more skilful organization, and a more perfect discipline.

But such a view is entirely misleading. On closer

examination the Jesuit body proves to resemble those other religious societies only in external and separable accidents, differing from them and from all others in its essential character, &mdash; and that not in degree merely, but in kind also, so as to be an institution absolutely unique in history.

In the first place, all the earlier associations of the kind, even the military orders themselves, have their origin in a desire to withdraw so far as possible from contact with the world and its concerns, to seek spiritual perfection in a retired life of contemplation and prayer, to concentrate efforts for this end chiefly within the cloister where each such group is collected, and to act only indirectly, and as it were with the mere surplus overflow of religious energy, on their more immediate neighbours around, and even then chiefly with the idea of persuading all the most devout and fervent amongst them to forsake the world in a similar fashion. Contrariwise, the Jesuit system is to withdraw religious men from precisely this sort of retirement, except as a mere temporary preparation for later activity, and to make habitual intercourse with society a prime duty, rigidly suppressing all such external regulations of dress, rule, and austerities as tend to put obstacles in the way, so leaving the members of the &ldquo;Company&rdquo; free to act as emissaries, agents, or missionaries in the most various places and circumstances. Next, the constitution of the elder societies was for the most part democratic. Allowing for special exceptions, the normal scheme of government was this. Each house of an order had a separate life and partial independence of its own. It elected its own superior and officers, usually by ballot, for a short term of years, it discussed its business, and its members confessed their faults, in open chapter. Each group of houses elected a provincial; the provincials, or delegates from among them, elected the general, whose authority was strictly constitutional, and limited as definitely by the rule and statutes as the rights of the youngest novice. Further, admission was seldom difficult; the noviciate rarely exceeded two years, and the novice, professed at the close of that probation, at once entered on a share in the government of the society, and became eligible for its highest offices. Unlike this method in every respect, the Jesuit polity is almost a pure despotism, guarded, no doubt, with certain checks, but even those of an oligarchical kind. The general is indeed elected by the congregation of the society; but, once appointed, it is for life, and with powers lodged in his hands, partly due to the original constitutions, and partly to special faculties and privileges conferred by various popes, which enormously exceed, as regards enactment and repeal of laws, as to restraint and dispensation, and both in kind and degree, those wielded by the heads of any other communities. He alone nominates to every office in the society (with certain significant exceptions to be named presently) and appoints the superiors of all the houses and colleges. The vow of obedience is taken directly to him, and not, as in the older orders, to the rule, as distinguished from the mere chief of the executive. The admission or dismissal of every member depends on his absolute fiat; and, by a simple provision for reports to him, he holds in his hands the threads of the entire business of the society in its most minute and distant ramifications.

Once more, the distinguishing peculiarity of the earlier communities, dating from the origin of the Benedictine rule, is their hostility to local change. The vow of stability, soon added to the three customary pledges of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was designed to impede, not merely itinerancy without settled abode, such as had brought discredit on those ancient monks who were styled circumcellions, nor even easy transition from one religious community to another, unless in search of greater austerity,

but even facility of transfer from one house to another of the very same order. Where the profession was made, there, in the absence of exceptional reasons, the life should be spent; and this rule of course tended to nationalism in the monasteries of every country, even in the great military orders, which, though accepting recruits from all quarters, yet grouped them into tongues. But mobility and cosmopolitanism are of the very essence of the Jesuit programme. The founder of the society has excluded the possibility of doubt on this subject, for having chosen the military term &ldquo;Company,&rdquo; rather than &ldquo;Order&rdquo; or &ldquo;Congregation&rdquo; to describe his new institute, he explained its meaning to Paul III. as being that, whereas the ancient monastic communities were, so to speak, the infantry of the church, whose duty was to stand firmly in one place on the battlefield, the Jesuits, contrariwise, were to be the &ldquo;light horse,&rdquo; capable of going anywhere at a moment's notice, but especially apt and designed for scouting or skirmishing. And, to carry out this view, it was one of his plans to send foreigners as superiors or officers to the Jesuit houses of each country, requiring of these envoys, however, to use invariably the language of their new place of residence, and to study it both in speaking and writing till entire mastery of it had been acquired, &mdash; thus by degrees making all the parts of his vast system mutually interchangeable, and so largely increasing the number of persons eligible to fill any given post, without reference to locality.

Further, the object of the older monastic societies was the sanctification of their individual members. In truth, community life was only a later development of the original system, as exhibited in the Thebaid, in accordance with which solitary hermits began to draw near to each other, until the collection of separate huts gradually assumed the form of a laura or hamlet of cells, grouped under an abbot, and with a common place of worship &mdash; a model still surviving in the Camaldolese order. Their obedience to a superior, and the observance of some kind of fixed rule, had no further intention than the improvement of the spiritual character of each person who entered such a community; and, with certain qualifications, this has continued the ideal of the older orders, &mdash; modified chiefly by the natural desire of each such body to gain influence and credit from the personal character of all its members and the efficiency of its active operations. But the founder of Jesuitism started at once with a totally different purpose. To him, from the first, the society was everything, and the individual nothing, except so far as he might prove a useful instrument for carrying out the society's objects. In a MS. collection of sayings by Loyola, whose genuineness is accepted by the Bollandists, themselves Jesuits, and by his biographer F. Genelli, he is stated to have said to his secretary, Polanco, that &ldquo;in those who offered themselves he looked less to purely natural goodness than to firmness of character and ability for business, for he was of opinion that those who were not fit for public business were not adapted for filling offices in the society.&rdquo; He went even further than this, and laid down that even exceptional qualities and endowments in a candidate were valuable in his eyes only on the condition of their being brought into play or held in abeyance strictly at the command of a superior. On this principle, he raised obedience to a position it had never held before, even amongst monastic virtues. His letter on this subject, addressed to the Jesuits of Coimbra in 1553, is still one of the standard formularies of the society, ranking with those two other products of his pen, the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions; and it is evident that his views differ very seriously from the older theories on the subject, as formulated in other rules. In them the superior is head of a local family, endued with paternal authority, no doubt as

understood by the old civil code of the Roman empire, centuries after the very memory of freedom had been lost, yet having fixed limits, alike traditional and prescribed, besides being exercised only within a limited area and for certain specified purposes. Loyola, true to his military training and instincts, clothes the general with the powers of a commander-in-chief of an army in time of war, giving him the absolute disposal of all members of the society in every place and for every purpose. Not only so, but he pushes the claim much further, requiring, besides entire outward submission to command, also the complete identification of the inferior's will with that of the superior. He lays down that this superior is to be obeyed simply as such, and as standing in the place of God, without reference to his personal wisdom, piety, or discretion; that any obedience which falls short of making the superior's will one's own in inward affection as well as in palpable effect, is lax and imperfect; that going beyond the letter of command, even in things abstractly good and praiseworthy, is disobedience; and that the &ldquo;sacrifice of the intellect&rdquo; &mdash; a familiar Jesuit watchword &mdash; is the third and highest grade of obedience, well-pleasing to God, when the inferior not only wills what the superior wills, but thinks what he thinks, submitting his judgment so far as it is possible for the will to influence and lead the judgment. So far-reaching and dangerous are these maxims that the Letter on Obedience was formally condemned, not long after Loyola's death, by the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, and it tasked all the skill and learning of Bellarmine as its apologist, together with the whole influence of the company, to avert the ratification of the sentence at Rome.

It has, however, been alleged in defence that this very strong language must be glossed and limited by two other maxims penned by Loyola: (1) &ldquo;Preserve your freedom of mind, and do not relinquish it by the authority of any person, or in any circumstances whatever&rdquo;; and (2) &ldquo;In all things except sin I ought to do the will of my superior, and not my own.&rdquo; But the value of these checks is seriously diminished when it is added that the former of them occurs in the introductory part of the Spiritual Exercises, a manual expressly designed and used for the purpose of breaking down the will of those who pass through its appointed ordeal under a director; while the latter is qualified in its turn, not only by the whole principle of probabilism, the special doctrine of the society, which can attenuate and even defend any kind of sin, but by the four following maxims, in close juxtaposition to itself in the very same document: &ldquo;I ought to desire to be ruled by a superior who endeavours to subjugate my judgment or subdue my understanding&rdquo;; &ldquo;When it seems to me that I am commanded by my superior to do a thing against which my conscience revolts as sinful, and my superior judges otherwise, it is my duty to yield my doubts to him, unless I am otherwise constrained by evident reasons&rdquo;; &ldquo;If submission do not appease my conscience, I must impart my doubts to two or three persons of discretion, and abide by their decision&rdquo;; &ldquo;I ought not to be my own, but His who created me, and his too by whose means God governs me, yielding myself to be moulded in his hands like so much wax. . . . . I ought to be like a corpse, which has neither will nor understanding, or like a small crucifix, which is turned about at the will of him that holds it, or like a staff in the hands of an old man, who uses it as may best assist or please him.&rdquo; And one master-stroke of Loyola's policy was to insure the permanence of this submission by barring access to all independent positions on the part of members of the society, through means of a special constitution that no Jesuit can accept a cardinal's hat, a bishopric other than missionary, an abbacy, or any similar dignity, save with permission of the general, not to

be accorded unless and until the pope has commanded its acceptance under pain of sin.

The next matter for consideration is the machinery by which the society is constituted and governed, so as to enable this principle to become a living energy, and not a mere abstract theory. The society, then, is distributed into six grades: &mdash; novices, scholastics, temporal coadjutors, spiritual coadjutors, professed of the three vows, and professed of the four vows. The novice cannot become a postulant for admission to the society till fourteen years old, unless by special dispensation, and is at once classified according as his destination is the priesthood or lay brotherhood, while a third class of &ldquo;indifferents&rdquo; receives such as are reserved for further inquiry before a decision of this kind is made. They first undergo a strict retreat of a month in what is practically solitary confinement, during which they go through the Spiritual Exercises, and make a general confession of their whole previous life; after which the first noviciate, of two years duration, begins. This is spent partly in daily study, partly in hospital work, and partly in teaching the rudiments of religious doctrine to children and the poor. They may leave or be dismissed at any time during this noviciate, but if approved are advanced into the grade of scholastics, corresponding in some degree to that of undergraduates at a university. The ordinary course for these is five years in arts, when, without discontinuing their own studies, they must pass five or six years more in teaching junior classes, not reaching the study of theology till the age of twenty-eight or thirty, when, after another year of noviciate, a further course of from four to six years is imposed, and not till this has been completed can the scholastic be ordained as a priest of the society, and enter on the grade of spiritual coadjutor, assuming that he is not confined to that of temporal coadjutor, who discharges only such functions as are open to lay-brothers, and who must be ten years in the society before being admitted to the vows. The time can be shortened at the general's pleasure, but such is the normal arrangement. Even this rank confers no share in the government, nor eligibility for the offices of the society. That is reserved for the professed, themselves subdivided into those of the three vows and of the four vows. It is these last alone, forming only a small percentage of the entire body, who constitute the real core of the society, whence its officers are all taken, and their fourth vow is one of special allegiance to the pope, promising to go in obedience to him for missionary purposes whensoever and whithersoever he may order, &mdash; a pledge seriously qualified in practice, however, by the power given to the general of alone sending out or recalling any missionary. The constitutions enjoin, by a rule seldom dispensed with, that this final grade cannot be attained till the candidate has reached his forty-fifth year, which involves a probation of no fewer than thirty-one years for even such as have entered on the noviciate at the earliest legal age. These various members of the society are distributed in its noviciate houses, its colleges, its professed houses, and its mission residences. The question has long been hotly debated whether, in addition to these six avowed grades, there be not a seventh, answering in some degree to the Tertiaries of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, secretly affiliated to the society, and acting as its unsuspected emissaries in various lay positions. This class is styled in France &ldquo;Jesuits of the short robe,&rdquo; and some evidence in support of its actual existence was alleged during the lawsuits against the company under Louis XV. The Jesuits themselves deny the existence of any such body, and are able to adduce the negative disproof that no provision for it is to be found in their constitutions. On the other hand, there are clauses therein which make the creation of such

a class perfectly feasible if thought expedient. One is the power given to the general to receive candidates secretly, and to conceal their admission, for which there is a remarkable precedent in the case of Francis Borgia, duke of Gandia, afterwards himself general of the society; the other is an even more singular clause, providing for the admission of candidates to the company by persons who are not themselves members of it. The known facts on either side are insufficient for a decisive verdict, and &ldquo;Not proven&rdquo; is the only impartial judgment possible. The general, who should by the statutes of the society reside permanently at Rome, holds in his hands the right of appointment, not only to the office of provincial over each of the great districts into which the houses are mapped, but to the offices of each house in particular, no shadow of electoral right or even suggestion being recognized.

The superiors and rectors of all houses and colleges in Europe must report weekly to their provincial on all matters concerning the members of the society and all outsiders with whom they may have had dealings of any sort. Those employed in district missions report at such longer intervals as the provincial may fix. The provincial, for his part, must report monthly to the general, giving him a summary of all details which have reached himself. But, as a check on him, all superiors of houses in his province are to make separate reports directly to the general once in three months, and further to communicate with him without delay every time any matter of importance occurs, irrespective of any information which the provincial may have forwarded. Nor is this all; an elaborate system of espionage and delation forms part of the recognized order of every house, and, in direct contrast to the ancient indictment and confession of faults in open conventual chapter, every inmate of a house is liable to secret accusation to its superior, while the superior himself may be similarly delated to the provincial or the general.

Nor is the general himself exempt from control on the part of the society, lest by any possibility he might prove, from disaffection or error, unfaithful to its interests. A consultative council is imposed on him by the general congregation, consisting of six persons, whom he may neither select nor remove, &mdash; namely, four assistants, each representing a nation, an admonisher or adviser (resembling the adlatus of a military commander) to warn him of any faults or mistakes, and his confessor. One of these must be in constant attendance on him; and, while he is not at liberty to abdicate his office, nor to accept any dignity or office outside it without the assent of the society, he may yet be suspended or deposed by its authority. No such instance, however, has yet occurred in Jesuit history, although steps in this direction were once taken in the case of a general who had set himself against the current feeling of the society. With so widely ramifying and complex a system in full working order, controlled by the hand of one man, the Company of Jesus has been aptly defined as &ldquo;a naked sword, whose hilt is at Rome, and whose point is every where.&rdquo;

There would seem at first to be an effectual external check provided, however, in the fact that, while all the officers of the society, except the council aforesaid, hold of the general, he in turn holds of the pope, and is his liegeman directly, as well as in virtue of the fourth vow, which he has taken in common with the other professed. But such is the extraordinary skill with which the relations of the society to the papacy were originally drafted by Loyola, and subsequently worked by his successors, that it has always remained organically independent, and might very conceivably break with Rome without imperilling its own existence. The general has usually stood towards the pope much as a powerful grand feudatory of the Middle Ages

did towards a weak titular lord paramount, or perhaps as the captain of a splendid host of &ldquo;Free Companions&rdquo; did towards a potentate with whom he chose to take temporary and precarious service; and the shrewd Roman populace have long shown their recognition of this fact by styling these two great personages severally the &ldquo;White Pope&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Black Pope.&rdquo; In truth, the society has never, from the very first, obeyed the pope, whenever its will and his happened to run counter to each other. Even in the very infancy of the company, Loyola himself used supplications and arguments to the pope to dissuade him from enforcing injunctions likely to prove incompatible with the original plan, and on each occasion succeeded in carrying his point; while his immediate successors more openly resisted Paul IV. when attempting to enforce the daily recitation of the breviary on the clerks of the society, and to limit the tenure of the generalship to three years, and Pius V. when following his predecessor's example in the former respect. Sixtus V. having undertaken with a high hand the wholesale reform of the company, including the change of its name from &ldquo;Society of Jesus&rdquo; to &ldquo;Society of Ignatius,&rdquo; met with strenuous opposition, and the fulfilment of Bellarmine's prophecy that he would not survive the year 1590 was looked on less as the accomplishment of a prediction than of a threat, &mdash; an impression deepened by the sudden death of his successor, Urban VII., eleven days after his election, who, as Cardinal Castagna, had been actively co-operating with Sixtus in his plans. The accuracy of a similar forecast made by Bellarmine as to Clement VIII., who was also at feud with the society, and who died before he could carry out his intended measures, confirmed popular suspicion. Urban VIII., Innocent XI., Alexander VIII., and Clement XII. vainly contended against the doctrines taught in Jesuit books and colleges, and could effect no change. Nine popes fruitlessly condemned the &ldquo;Chinese rites,&rdquo; whereby the Jesuit missionaries had virtually assimilated Christianity to heathenism, and the practical reply of the latter was to obtain in 1700 an edict from the emperor of China, in opposition to the papal decree, declaring that there was nothing idolatrous or superstitious in the inculpated usages, while in 1710 they flung Cardinal Tournon, legate of Clement XI., into the prison of the Inquisition at Macao, where he perished; and finally, they disobeyed the brief of suppression issued by Clement XIV. in 1773, which enjoined them to disperse at once, to send back all novices to their houses, and to receive no more members. It is thus clear that the society has always regarded itself as an independent power, ready indeed to co-operate with the papacy so long as their roads and interests are the same, and to avail itself to the uttermost of the many pontifical decrees in its own favour, but drawing the line far short of practical submission when their interests diverge.

So constituted, with a skilful combination of strictness and laxity, of complex organization with the minimum of friction in working, the society was admirably devised for its purpose of introducing a new power into the church and the world, and for carrying out effectively every part of its vast programme. Thus equipped, its services to Roman Catholicism have been incalculable. The Jesuits alone rolled back the tide of Protestant advance when that half of Europe which had not already shaken off its allegiance to the papacy was threatening to do so, and the whole honours of the counter-Reformation are theirs singly. They had the sagacity to see, and to admit in their correspondence with their superiors, that the Reformation, as a popular movement, was fully justified by the gross ignorance, negligence, and open vice of the Catholic clergy, whether secular or monastic; and they were shrewd enough to discern the only possible remedies. At a time when primary and even secondary education had in most places

become a mere effete and pedantic adherence to obsolete methods, they were bold enough to innovate, less in system than in materials, and, putting fresh spirit and devotion into the work, not merely taught and catechized in a new, fresh, and attractive manner, besides establishing free schools of good quality, but provided new manuals and schoolbooks for their pupils, which were an enormous advance on those they found in use, so that for nearly three centuries the Jesuits were accounted the best schoolmasters in Europe, as they were, till their forcible suppression the other day, confessedly the best in France, &mdash; besides having always conciliated the good will of their pupils by mingled firmness and gentleness as teachers. And, although their own methods have in time given way to further improvements, yet they revolutionized instruction as completely as Frederick the Great did modern warfare, and have thus acted, whether they meant it or not, as pioneers of human progress. Again, when the regular clergy had sunk into the moral and intellectual slough which is pictured for us in the writings of Erasmus and in the powerful satire Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, while there was little of a better kind visible in the lives of the parochial priesthood, the Jesuits won back respect for the clerical calling by their personal culture and the unimpeachable purity of their lives. These are qualities which they have all along carefully maintained, and probably no body of men in the world has been so free from the reproach of discreditable members, or has kept up an equally high average level of intelligence and conduct. As preachers, too, they delivered the pulpit from the bondage of an effete scholasticism, and reached at once a clearness and simplicity of treatment such as the English pulpit scarcely begins to exhibit till after the days of Tillotson; while in literature and theology they count a far larger number of respectable writers than any other religious society can boast. It is in the mission-field, however, that their achievements have been most remarkable, which might fully justify their taking as their motto &mdash;

Whether toiling amongst the teeming millions of Hindustan and China, labouring amongst the Hurons and Iroquois of North America, governing and civilizing the natives of Brazil and Paraguay, in the missions and &ldquo;reductions,&rdquo; or ministering, at the hourly risk of his life, to his coreligionists in England under Elizabeth and James I., the Jesuit appears alike devoted, indefatigable, cheerful, and worthy of hearty admiration and respect.

Nevertheless, two most startling and indisputable facts meet the student who pursues the history of this unique society. The first is the universal suspicion and hostility it has incurred, &mdash; not, as might reasonably be expected, merely from those Protestants whose avowed and most successful foe it has been, nor yet from the enemies of all clericalism and religious dogma, to whom it is naturally the embodiment of all they most detest, but from every Roman Catholic state and nation in the world, with perhaps the insignificant exception of Belgium. Next is the brand of ultimate failure which has invariably been stamped on all its most promising schemes and efforts. It controlled the policy of Spain, when Spain was aiming, with good reason to hope for success, at the hegemony of Europe, and Spain came out of the struggle well-nigh the last amongst the nations. It secured the monopoly of religious teaching and influence in France under Louis XIV. and XV. only to see an atheistic revolution break out under Louis XVI. and sweep over the nation after a century of such training. It guided the action of James II., lost the crown of England for the house of Stuart, and brought about the limitation of the throne to the Protestant succession. Its Japanese and Red Indian missions have vanished without

leaving a trace behind; its labours in Hindustan did but prepare the way for the English empire there; it was swept out of its Paraguayan domains without power of defence; and, having in our own day concentrated its efforts on the maintenance of the temporal power of the popes, and raised it almost to the rank of a dogma of the Catholic faith, it has seen Rome proclaimed as the capital of united Italy, and a Piedmontese sovereign enthroned in the Quirinal. These two phenomena demand some inquiry and analysis. As regards the former of them, the hostility the Jesuits have encountered has been twofold, political and moral or religious. There has been, from a very early date in their annals, a strong conviction prevalent that the famous motto of the society, &ldquo;A.M.D.G.&rdquo; {Ad majorem Dei gloriam), did not adequately represent its policy and motives, that its first and last aim was its own aggrandizement in power and wealth (for Julius II. had dispensed the general from the vow of poverty, and the colleges also were allowed to hold property), and that it spared no efforts to compass this end, even to the extent of embroiling cabinets, concocting conspiracies, kindling wars, and procuring assassinations. In several of these cases, notably as regards the charges which led to their first expulsion from France and Portugal, inclusive in the latter instance of their exile from Paraguay, the Jesuits are able to make one very telling reply, pleading that motives of statecraft alone, of an unworthy kind, and the evidence of untrustworthy and disreputable agents of their enemies, were suffered to decide the matter. In other cases, as for example the assassination of Henry IV. by Ravaillac, they deny all complicity, and no sufficient proof has ever been adduced against them. But, when full allowance has been made for such rejoinders, there remain several counts of the indictment which are but too clearly made out: as, for instance, their large share, as preachers, in fanning the flames of polemical hatred against the Huguenots under the last two Valois kings, their complicity in the plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth which followed on her excommunication by Pius V.; their responsibility for kindling the Thirty Years War; the part they took in prompting and directing the cruelties which marked the overthrow of Protestantism in Bohemia; their decisive influence in causing the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the expulsion of the Huguenots from the French dominions; and their accountability for precipitating the Franco-German war of 1870. And in regard to a large number of other cases where the evidence against them is defective, it is at least an unfortunate coincidence that there is always direct proof of some Jesuit having been in communication with the actual agents engaged. So it was with the massacre of St Bartholomew, almost immediately preceded by a visit of the Jesuit general, Francis Borgia, to the French court, though there is no further evidence to connect him therewith; so with Châtel and Ravaillac, the unsuccessful and successful assassins of Henry IV.; so with Jaureguay and Balthasar Gerard, who held the like relation to William the Silent, prince of Orange; so (as is more familiarly known) with the accomplices in the Gunpowder Plot. In all these and several other instances, the precautions which would naturally, and even inevitably, be taken by skilled and wary diplomatists for their own protection are sufficient to account for the lack of direct proof against them, but it is not easy to explain the invariable presence of a Jesuit in the background, on any hypothesis which will secure the complete acquittal of the society from charges of the sort. It is sufficient to say here in illustration that the English Roman Catholics under Elizabeth, addressing the pope with regard to the severe penal laws which oppressed them, laid the whole blame of the Government's action on the Jesuits, as having provoked

it by their conspiracies; while the secular priests in England issued in 1601 by the pen of one of their number, William Watson (afterwards executed in 1603), a pamphlet known as Important Considerations, to the same effect.

The merited odium which has overtaken the Inquisition, usually officered by Dominicans, has induced the Jesuits, whose own controversial method has for the most part been different, to disclaim all connexion with that tribunal, and to represent their society as free from complicity in its acts. But, in truth, it was Ignatius Loyola himself who procured its erection in Portugal in 1545-6, and F. Nithard, one of the very few cardinals of the society, was inquisitor-general of that kingdom in 1655.

The charges against the Jesuits on moral and doctrinal grounds are not less precise, early, numerous, and weighty. Their founder himself was arrested more than once by the Inquisition, and required to give account of his belief and conduct. But Loyola, with all his powerful gifts of intellect, was entirely practical and ethical in his range, and had no turn whatever for speculation, nor desire to reason on, much less question, any of the received dogmas of his church. He was therefore acquitted on every occasion, and sagaciously applied for and obtained each time a formally attested certificate of his orthodoxy, knowing well that, in default of such documents, the fact of his arrest as a suspected heretic would be more distinctly recollected by opponents than that of his honourable dismissal from custody. His successors, however, have not been so fortunate. On doctrinal questions indeed, though their teaching on grace, especially in the form given it by Molina, one of their number, was directly Pelagian (the result of reaction from Luther's teaching, which they had combated in Germany), and condemned by several popes, yet their pertinacity in the long run carried the day, and gained a footing for their opinions which was denied to the opposite tenets of the Jansenists. But the accusations against their moral theology and their action as guides of conduct, nay, as themselves involved in many doubtful transactions, have not been so appeased. They were censured by the Sorbonne as early as 1554, chiefly at the instance of Eustache de Bellay, bishop of Paris, on grounds of which some were quite true, though others appear to have been at least exaggerations; but they can plead that no other theological faculty of the time joined in the condemnation. Melchior Cano, one of the ablest divines of the 16th century, never ceased to lift up his testimony against them, from their first beginnings till his own death in 1560, and, unmollified by the bribe of the bishopric of the Canaries, which their interest procured for him, succeeded in banishing them from the university of Salamanca. St Charles Borromeo, to whose original advocacy they owed much, and especially the exception made in their favour by the council of Trent (Sess. XXV., xvi.) from the restrictions it laid on other communities, retracted his protection, and expelled them from the colleges and churches which they occupied in his diocese and province of Milan, &mdash; a policy wherein he was followed in 1604 by his cousin and successor, the equally saintly Cardinal Frederick Borromeo. The credit of the society was, however, far more seriously damaged by the publication at Cracow in 1612 of an ingenious forgery (whose authorship has been variously ascribed to John Zaorowsky or to Cambilone and Schloss, all ex-Jesuits) entitled Monita Secreta, professing to be the authoritative secret instructions drawn up by the general Acquaviva and given by the superiors of the company to its various officers and members, and to have been discovered in MS. by Christian of Brunswick in the Jesuit college at Prague. It is full of suggestions for extending the influence of the Jesuits in various ways, for securing a footing in fresh places, for acquiring wealth, and so forth, all marked with

ambition, craft, and unscrupulousness. It had a wide success and popularity, passing through several editions, and, though declared a forgery by a congregation of cardinals specially appointed to examine into it, has not ceased to be reprinted and credited down to the present day. The truth seems to be that, although both caricature and libel, it was drafted by a shrewd and keen observer, who, seeing what the fathers actually did, travelled analytically backwards to find how they did it, and on what methodical system, conjecturally reconstructing the process, and probably coming very near the mark in not a few details. Later on, a formidable assault was made on their moral theology in the famous Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal, eighteen in number, issued under the pen-name of Louis de Montalte, from January 1656 to March 1657. Their wit, irony, eloquence, and finished style have kept them alive as one of the great French classics, a destiny more fortunate than that of two kindred works by Antoine Arnauld, his collaborator in the Provincial Letters, namely, Théologie Morale des Jesuites, consisting of extracts from writings of members of the society, and Morale Pratique des Jesuites, made up of narratives exhibiting the manner in which they carried out their own maxims in their personal action. The reply on behalf of the society to Pascal's charges of lax morality, apart from mere general denials (such as that embodied in F. Ravignan's name for the Provinciales, &ldquo;Le Dictionnaire de la Calomnie&rdquo;), is broadly as follows. (1) Ignatius Loyola himself, the founder of the society, had a special aversion from untruthfulness in all its forms, from quibbling, equivocation, or even studied obscurity of language, and it would be contrary to the spirit of conformity with his example and institutions for his followers to think and act otherwise. (2) Several of the cases cited by Pascal are mere abstract hypotheses, many of them now obsolete, argued on simply as matter of intellectual exercise, but having no practical bearing whatever. (3) Even such as do belong to the sphere of actual life are of the nature of counsel to spiritual physicians, how to deal with exceptional maladies, and were never intended to fix the standard of moral obligation for the general public. (4) The theory that they were intended for this latter purpose, and do represent the normal teaching of the Jesuit body, becomes more untenable in exact proportion as this immorality is insisted on, because it is matter of notoriety that the Jesuits themselves have been singularly free from personal, as distinguished from corporate, evil repute, and no one pretends that the large numbers of lay-folk whom they have educated or influenced exhibit any great moral inferiority to their neighbours. The third of these replies is the most cogent as regards Pascal, but the real weakness of his attack lies in that nervous dread of appeal to first principles and their logical results which has been the besetting snare of Gallicanism. Afraid to deal with the fact that the society was on the whole what its founder meant it to be, and was merely carrying out his programme, because that admission would have involved challenging Loyola's position as a canonized saint, and the action of the Holy See in approving his institute, Pascal was obliged to go on the historically untenable ground that the Jesuits of his day had degenerated from their original standard; and thus he was not at liberty to go down to that principle which underlies the whole theory of probabilism, namely, the substitution of external authority for the voice of conscience. Hence the ultimate failure of his brilliant attack. The same error of complaining against integral parts of the original system as though they were departures from its spirit marks the treatise of the Jesuit Mariana on certain faults in the government of the society, which was published at Bordeaux soon after his death, in Spanish, French, Latin,

and Italian, from a MS. taken from him when he was in prison. The evils he specifies are the spy system (which he declares to be carried so far that, if the general's archives at Rome should be searched, not one Jesuit's character would be found to escape), the monopoly of the higher offices in the hands of a small clique, the narrow range of study, and the absence of encouragement and recompense for the best men of the society. But any fair examination of the constitutions will show that all these belong to the original scheme of government, and should have been challenged on that ground, if at all. Yet, on the broad issue, Pascal's censures have in the main been justified by the subsequent teaching of the society, for the lax casuistry which he held up to ridicule has been formally reproduced in the most modern and popular Jesuit text book on the subject, that of F. Gary, while the works of Liguori and Scavini, though not of direct Jesuit origin, are yet interpenetrated with the same opinions. And the result of dispassionate examination of these and kindred works &mdash; always bearing in mind that no Jesuit writings can be published without special licence from the general, after careful scrutiny and review &mdash; is that the three principles of probabilism, of mental reservation, and of justification of means by ends, which collectively make up what educated men intend by the term &ldquo;Jesuitry,&rdquo; are recognized maxims of the society. As the last of these three is at once the most odious in itself and the charge which is most anxiously repelled, it is well to cite three leading Jesuit theologians in proof. Busembaum, whose Medulla Theologiæ has been more than fifty times printed, and lately by the Propaganda itself, lays down the maxim in the following terms: &ldquo;Cum finis est licitus, etiam media sunt licita,&rdquo; and, &ldquo;Cui licitus est finis, etiam licent media.&rdquo; Layman, similarly, in his Theologia Moralis, &ldquo;Cui concessus est finis, concessa etiam sunt media ad finem ordinata;&rdquo; and Wagemann, in his Synopsis Theologiæ Moralis, yet more tersely, &ldquo;Finis determinat probitatem actus.&rdquo; In point of fact, many rules of conduct based on these three principles have gradually percolated, as might have been expected, into popular catechisms, and so have weakened the plea that we are dealing only with technical manuals for a professional class; while the plausible defence from the fair average honesty and morality of the lay-folk taught by a clergy which uses these manuals, amounts simply to a confession that the ordinary secular conscience is a safer guide in morals than a Jesuit casuist, since the more nearly the code deducible from his text-books is conformed to the more widely must the pupil diverge from all accredited ethics.

Two causes have been at work to produce the universal failure of the great company in all its plans and efforts. And first stands its lack of powerful intellects. Nothing can be wider from the truth than the popular conception of the ordinary Jesuit as a being of almost superhuman abilities and universal knowledge. The company is without doubt a corps d'élite, and an average member of it is of choicer quality than the average member of any equally large body, besides being disciplined by a far more perfect drill. But it takes great men to carry out great plans, and of great men the company has been markedly barren from almost the first. Apart from its mighty founder, and his early colleague Francis Xavier, there are absolutely none who stand in the very first rank. They have had, no doubt, able administrators, like Acquaviva; methodical and lucid compilers, like the Bollandists and Cornelius a Lapide; learned and plausible controversialists, like Bellarmine; elegant preachers, as Bourdaloue, Segneri, and Vicyra; distinguished mathematicians, like Le Seur, Jacquier, and more lately Secehi; but even their one boldest and most original thinker, Denis Petau, has produced no permanent influence

over the current of human thought. They have had no Aquinas, no Anselm, no Bacon, no Richelieu. Men whom they trained and who broke loose from their teaching, Pascal, Descartes, Voltaire, have powerfully affected the philosophical and religious beliefs of great masses of mankind, but respectable mediocrity is the brand on the long list of Jesuit names in the catalogues of Alegambe and De Backer. This result is due chiefly to the destructive process of scooping out the will of the Jesuit novice, to replace it with that of his superior (as a watchmaker might fit a new movement into a case), and thereby annihilating in all instances those subtle qualities of individuality and originality which are essential to genius. Men of the highest stamp will either refuse to submit to the process, or will come forth from the mill with their finest qualities pulverized and useless. Nor is this all. The Ratio Studiorum, as devised by Acquaviva, and still followed in the colleges of the society, lays down rules which are incompatible with all breadth and progress in the higher forms of education. True to the anti-speculative and traditional side of Loyola's mind, it prescribes that even where religious topics are not in question, the teacher is not to permit any novel opinions or discussions to be mooted; nor to cite himself, or allow others to cite, the opinion of an author not of known repute; nor to teach or suffer to be taught anything contrary to the prevalent opinions of acknowledged doctors current in the schools. Obsolete and false opinions are not to be mentioned at all, even for refutation, nor are objections to received teaching to be dwelt on at any length. The professor of Biblical literature is always to support and defend the Vulgate reading, and to cite the Hebrew and Greek only when they can at least be reconciled therewith; while all versions except the LXX. (which is to be spoken of respectfully) are to be passed over entirely, save when they help to confirm the Vulgate text. In philosophy, Aristotle is to be always followed, and Aquinas generally, care being taken to speak respectfully of him even when abandoning his opinion. It is not wonderful that, under such a method of training, highly cultivated commonplace should be the inevitable average result, and that in proportion as Jesuit power has become dominant in Latin Christendom, the same doom of intellectual sterility, and consequent loss of influence with the higher and thoughtful classes, has spread from the part to the whole. The second cause which has blighted the efforts of the company is the lesson, too faithfully learnt and practised, of making its corporate interests the first object at all times and in all places. The most brilliant exception to this rule is found in some of the foreign missions of the society, and notably in that of St Francis Xavier. But Xavier quitted Europe in 1541, before the new society had hardened into its final mould, and never returned. His work, so far as we can gather from contemporary accounts, was not done on the true Jesuit lines, though the company has reaped all its credit; and it is even possible that had he succeeded Loyola as general of the Jesuits the institute might have been seriously and healthfully modified. It would almost seem that careful selection was made of the men of greatest piety and enthusiasm, such as Anchieta, Baraza, and Brebeuf, whose unworldliness made them less apt for the diplomatic intrigues of the society in Europe, to break new ground in the various foreign missions, where their successes would throw lustre on the society, and their scruples need never come into play. But such men are rare, and as they died off, their places had to be filled with more sophisticated and ordinary characters, whose one aim was to increase the power and resources of the society. Hence the condescension to heathen rites in Hindustan and China. The first successes of the Indian mission were entirely amongst the lowest class; but when Robert de Nobili, to win the

Brahmans, adopted their insignia and mode of life in 1605 &mdash; a step sanctioned by Gregory XV. in 1623 &mdash; the fathers who followed his example pushed the new caste-feeling so far as absolutely to refuse the ministrations and sacraments of religion to the pariahs, lest the Brahman converts should take offence, &mdash; an attempt which was reported to Rome by Norbert, a Capuchin, and by the bishop of Rosalia, and was vainly censured in the pontifical briefs of Innocent X. in 1645, Clement IX. in 1669, Clement XII. in 1734 and 1739, and Benedict XIV. in 1745. The Chinese rites, assailed with equal unsuccess by one pope after another, were not finally put down until 1744, by a bull of Benedict XIV. For Japan, where their side of the story is that best known, we have a remarkable letter, printed by Wadding, addressed to Paul V. by Soleto, a Franciscan missionary, who was martyred in 1624, in which he complains to the pope that the Jesuits had systematically postponed the spiritual welfare of the native Christians to their own convenience and advantage, while, as regards the test of martyrdom, no such result had followed on their teaching, but only on that of the other orders who had undertaken missionary work in Japan. Again, even in Paraguay, the most promising of all Jesuit undertakings, the evidence shows that the fathers, though civilizing the Guarani population just sufficiently to make them useful and docile servants, happier, no doubt, than they were before or after, stopped short there, and employed them simply in raising produce to be traded with for the interests of the society, in accordance with a privilege conferred on them by Gregory XIII., licensing them to engage in commerce.

These examples are sufficient to explain the final collapse of so many promising efforts. The individual Jesuit might be, and often was, a hero, saint, and martyr, but the system of which he was a part, and which he was obliged to administer, is fundamentally unsound, and in contravention of inevitable laws of nature, so that his noblest toils were foredoomed to failure, save in so far as they tended to ennoble and perfect himself, and offered a model for others to imitate.

The influence of the society since its revival in Latin Christendom has not been beneficial. It presents the seeming paradox of the strictest and most irreproachable body amongst the Roman clergy doing nothing to raise the general standard of clerical morals; of that which is collectively the best educated order setting itself to popularize merely emotional and material cults, to the practical neglect and disparagement of more spiritual agencies; of the most intellectual religious teachers deliberately eviscerating the understanding, and endeavouring to substitute mechanical submission to a word of command for intelligent and spontaneous assent to reasonable argument. And yet in all this they are but carrying out the fatal principles of the original institute. True to the teaching of that remarkable panegyric on the society, the Imago Primi Sæculi Societatis Jesu (probably written by John Tollenarius in 1640), they have identified the church with their own society, and have considered only what mode of action would make it more easily governed in the same spirit. It is thus for the advantage of such a scheme that laymen should reason as little as possible on questions of theology, that the fathers of the company should hold an acknowledged position of moral and intellectual superiority to the ordinary secular clergy, that all the threads of ecclesiastical authority should be gathered up into one hand, and that one hand in the stronger grasp of the society &mdash; a policy modelled exactly on the lines of the concordat of Napoleon I. with Pius VII. Hence the long preparation and elaborate intrigues which issued in the Vatican decrees of papal infallibility and immediate jurisdiction in all dioceses, the ultimate issues of which are still hidden in futurity.