JESSORE, a district of the province of Bengal, to the N.E. of Calcutta, bounded on the N. by the district of Pubna, and on the E. by Dacca, Jelalpoor, and Buckergunge; on the S. by the Sunderbunds, and on the W. by Barset and Nuddea. It is 105 miles in length from S.E. to N.W., and 48 in breadth. The area, according to official statement, is 3512 square miles. The northern part of this district is very fertile; but the southern division is in the Sunderbunds, and composed of salt marshy islands covered with trees. Some parts lie so low that embankments are found
necessary to protect them against inundation. The land is fertile, and produces rice, indigo, sugar, and tobacco in large quantities. The population, according to official statement, is 381,744. According to recent authority, the Brahmins form one-half of the population, the Mussulmans the other; but this unusually large proportion of Mussulmans appears remarkable in a tract so remote from the seat of their former empire in India. Jessore, the chief town, is situate 77 miles N.E. of Calcutta, in Lat. 23. 10, Long. 89. 10.
JESUITISM.—If a very few exceptive instances are allowed for, it holds good as a rule, that canonization shuts the door against authentic history. The instance now before us has no claim to be regarded as one of those rare exceptions. The existing memoirs whence we derive our knowledge of the personal history of the founder of the order of Jesuits, are probably genuine, and, in the main they may be authentic; but it is impossible that we, at this time, should know them to be so. They contain indeed little that should be regarded as improbable, and very little that is absolutely incredible; and even this little is of a kind which the practised reader of the literature of the Calendar will find it easy to detach from the places where it occurs without a disintegration of the mass.
But then, in accepting these now extant materials, we do so in simple faith; for scanty means, if any, are within our reach by aid of which we might assure ourselves of the truth of what we admit to be true, or might effect an excision of the spurious parts. The life of "St Ignatius," just such as we find it in the documents which the Church of Rome and the Society itself recognise as authentic, is of a kind which would attract no special notice. It would take its place among instances without number of similar conversions, and of equal intensities of feeling, and of extravagancies of behaviour not less absurd. The only kind of surprise for which there can be ground in perusing the biographies of Ignatius Loyola, is this—that a narrative exhibiting so little which is indicative of extraordinary intelligence, or of any rare qualities of the moral nature, should be found standing at the head of a course of events which has no parallel in the history of the human family. The reader is impelled to exclaim, and to ask—"Is this the man from whose brain can have sprung the Jesuit institute and its polity?" An answer in the affirmative can scarcely be accepted apart from the supposition that the Jesuitism, of which Loyola himself may be regarded as the author, was little more than a germ-idea, caught at, cherished, evolved, by minds of far greater compass than his own.
Be this as it may, no proper account of Jesuitism can be presented without a preliminary, though it be a much condensed, biography of the man who has been signalized as its founder, and who undoubtedly bore sway as its chief, through the period of its infancy and of its rapid growth.
The sources whence the customary notices of the life of Loyola have been drawn are, chiefly, those compilations which the Society itself has put forth, or which it sanctioned after the time when any independent testimony might have been collected and appealed to.
The Bollandists, in their vast collection, the Acta Sanctorum, have, in their usual elaborate manner, collected those materials of Jesuit history which came to their hand. These materials were digested and amplified by Orlandinus; and his voluminous memoir of the founder is the one to which the Society has attached its sanction. The Jesuit, John Peter Maffei, an agreeable writer, and author of a History of the Indies, and a Life of the heroic St Francis Xavier, has brought the narrative within moderate compass, and given it a form acceptable to general readers. He appears to have availed himself of the notes of a contemporary, Polancus, who had lived on terms of intimacy with Loyola. Maffei's book first appeared in 1585. Ludovico
Jesuitism. Gonsalvo, a Spaniard, and one who also had been Loyola's companion, left memoirs relating to his master's earlier years, and these notes carry an air of truthfulness and simplicity.
At a later time, the Jesuit Pietro Ribadeneira, taking Gonsalvo's Memoirs as his text, with which he combined whatever had been done by his predecessors, compiled a formal and very copious history of the founder of the order. This writer differs in various instances from Maffei, and generally he does so when narratives involving the supernatural are to be disposed of; in these cases he trenches as little as possible upon the marvellous, and hastens forward to set his foot on firmer ground. It is from the writers above named that we are to learn all that can now be known of the personal history of the founder.