Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/680

 650 JESUITS 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 1 655. 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 intel lect, was entirely practical and ethical in his range, and had no turn whatever for speculation, nor desiro to reason on, much less question, any of the received dogmas of his church. He was therefore acquitted on every occasion, 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 exaggera tions ; 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, 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 authorita tive 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 analy tically 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, Theologie MoraledesJcsuitcs, consisting of extracts from writings of members of the society, and Morale Pratique des Jf-suites, 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. Eavignan s name for the Provinciates, &quot;Le Dictionnaire de la Calomnie&quot;), is broadly as follows. (1) Ignatius Loyola himself, the founder of the society, had a special aversion from untruth- fulness in all its forms, from quibbling, equivocation, or even studied obscurity of language, and it would be con trary 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 unten able 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 Galli- canism. 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 approv ing his institute, Pascal was obliged to go on the histori cally 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,
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