DOCUMENTARY JESUITISM.
By the constitutional documents of Jesuitism, we mean those writings, tracts, digests of laws, or expositions, which the Company has from the first recognised as authentic, and to which it appeals as embodying the mind, the principles, and the practices of the order. These are,—1st, The book alleged and believed to be Loyola's own composition—viz., the Spiritual Exercises; 2d, The letters addressed to the Portuguese Jesuits, On Obedience, and which are also believed to be Loyola's own; 3d, The Constitutions, and the Directorium, which probably were wholly composed, or digested by his immediate coadjutors, Laynez, Faber, Aquaviva, and others. At a later time there was brought to light, unadvisedly as it seems, the Monita Secreta, believed, however, to be a spurious production. A word then for these documents in their order.
The Spiritual Exercises:—This book, when the important place it has held in the Jesuit Institute is remembered, will not be looked into by the modern reader without a mingled feeling of disappointment, amazement, and perhaps contempt. It is not a summary of Christian doctrines; it conveys no particle of instruction; it is not a collection of deep meditations; it is not a diary of those alternations of sorrow and joy, depression and hope, which have filled the religious life of some eminent Christians; it is a manual of (so called) religious manoeuvres, or manipulations, upon and concerning sacred subjects; the tendency and spirit of the whole being in the last degree mechanical. As opposed to what might be intellectual and reflective, it is perfunctory; as opposed to what is imaginative, it is sensuous or beggarly; as opposed to what is spontaneous and nobly free, it is slavish and stupifying. In conjecturing the probable results of a month's drilling—for a month is the time assigned to the entire course—regard must be paid to the moral and intellectual condition of those who submit themselves to such a treatment. A course like this, with its attendant seclusion in a cell, and abstinence from the incitements of pleasure or ambition—a four weeks' discipline carried forward in accordance with these prescriptions, might in a useful manner revive the decayed religious recollections of men of the world, supposing them to retain enough of religious conscience to make them uneasy while pursuing a course of lawless indulgence or ambition. There are also sedate, saturnine, and feeble natures to which this discipline would be well adapted. Men of this order might yield themselves inertly to so mechanical a scheme of life, and go on well in its trammels. As to strong minds, and as to the cultured, the month's task could be nothing but a temporary abnegation of their faculties of reason and feeling; it must induce a state of mind wholly fictitious, and which must come to its end without result or product other than that of leaving
Jesuitism upon the memory a repugnant and humiliating recollection, and upon the manners and style of behaviour a stiffness and conventional hypocrisy. The reader who is already better taught than this strange book can teach him, may glean from it—especially from its latter chapters—some few useful hints applicable to the religious life. On the whole, the Spiritual Exercises is to be regarded as an engine of spiritual despotism,—a tool for crushing the moral and intellectual life, preparatory to the function which the Jesuit will be required to fulfil.
The Letter on Obedience, addressed, as mentioned above, to the refractory Jesuits of Portugal, is, on sufficient grounds, attributed to Loyola himself. It was composed in 1553, three years only before his death, and it may be regarded as embodying, within the compass of a few pages, the very principle, the very distinctive element, of the Jesuit institute; and whoever wishes to understand this profound scheme of polity, and to form his judgment upon it, considered in its relation to the axioms of universal morality, or to Christian precepts, or in its bearing upon the wellbeing of nations, should read, and read again, this remarkable document. It is true that a doctrine nearly approaching that maintained in this Letter, may be gathered from the pages of some monastic writers, and is implied in the rules of some of the religious orders. But the differences are these two,—in the first place, in this Letter the Jesuit rule of obedience, involving, as it does, the stagnation of the intellectual faculties, and a total abrogation of the individual conscience, is expressed in terms far more absolute, reckless, and unexceptional than had hitherto been anywhere heard; and, in the second place, this doctrine had heretofore been addressed to those only, who, having renounced the world, and living or professing to live apart from it, might, with little risk of serious ill consequences, profess any sort, and practise any degree, of submissiveness to the will of their superior. Obedience, within the walls of a monastery, was obedience in the midst of a routine of inaniities. But the Jesuit dogma of obedience was to be carried out and acted upon in the throng of the busy world. The Jesuit, deeply concerning himself, as he did, with the interests of the social system—domestic and municipal—and meddling always, when he could do so, with affairs of state, did this, not as an individual moral agent who is in some degree mindful of the quality of his personal acts, and who judges them to be lawful or criminal; but as a being who has surrendered his responsibility—his conscience, whole and entire, and unconditionally, into the hands of a superior. In the sense of this Letter on Obedience, there is but one sin of which a Jesuit can possibly be guilty—namely, disobedience, or the mere thought which might impel him to call in question the rectitude of the commands of his principal.
The Constitutions of the Society, or that body of rules and methods which are the law of the community, relate to the practices and the routine that attend the selection and admission of members; to the classification of those actually admitted, according to their individual qualities; to the rejection or exclusion of candidates, and to the government of the body by provincials and a General, who was chosen for life, including also a provision made for holding this autocrat in check, or even for removing him from his place in extreme cases. The reader, whom we may suppose already to have acquired, from the perusal of the Spiritual Exercises, and the Letter above mentioned, an idea of the spirit of the Jesuit institute, will find himself perplexed when he looks into these, its forms and its modes of procedure, as set forth in the Constitutions, if he endeavours to divine what may be the real object—the practical purport or end arrived at by so vast and elaborate a scheme of discipline and government. What final purposes are to be the result of a method and of a mechanism so profoundly contrived,
so far-reaching in its means, and so appalling in the conditions which it imposes.
Jesuitism Of this problem the documents in our hands afford no solution. To these reasonable questions no answer is returned by any of those writings to which the Society has been used to make its appeal when challenged to vindicate its doings before the world. If we grant, as we may, that Jesuitism is, to a certain extent, a religious institute, intended, like the more ancient monastic orders, to promote and carry forward the individual piety of its members, or to diffuse religious principles among the people, there yet remains, after these intelligible purposes have been secured, a vast apparatus in excess, which can have no relationship to objects or ends of this sort. What then are the ends which this deep scheme actually has in view? An answer to this question must be sought for in following the Jesuit Society through its history, from its earliest days to recent times. It is this history which expounds the Code and the Constitutions, of which Ignatius Loyola is the reputed author.
The Constitutions, as originally put forth, have become embossed—if so we may speak—with copious expositions, and they are followed by a body of instructions called the Directorium, which adapt the general principles to a vast variety of special cases. From these sources are to be gathered a true notion of the methods—peculiar to itself—of enforcing confession, and of surrounding every Jesuit with a network of delation. These practices which are the special characteristics of Jesuitism, as distinguished from Romanism, and from the pre-existing monastic orders, call for the closest attention, if we would, in a thorough manner, and with philosophic impartiality, come to an understanding of this, the most notable of all the religious schemes which the world has ever seen or tolerated.
If in inquiring concerning the Company of Jesuits, such as it had become at the time of Loyola's death, we were to measure it against the systems, the institutions, and the men of that time, its one prominent characteristic, its main distinction, would appear to be this, that it had at its command, at every moment, the unscrupulous services of a large number of men, fitted by natural talents, and by the most careful training, for functions, offices, and labours of every kind—spiritual, intellectual, political, economical, and even commercial. The selection of its agents from among the number, each well adapted by natural talent for the function assigned to him, is clearly the principal intention of the Constitutions, of the Directory, and of the other documents of the Society. Then, the fit men having been secured, their discipline and training was the second principal care of the Society; and then the distribution of them over the world was the third. In relation to almost every department of human labour, men of this Society were found to be better instructed than any others; they were by natural talent better adapted to their special tasks; they were more diligent, more assiduous, more self-denying and indefatigable; and, in a word, they were more practically efficient, and they were more successful, than their competitors on the same lines of labour. In any circle of affairs, public or private, the Jesuit of that early time was the Joseph in Potiphar's house. It can be no marvel, therefore, if everywhere his valuable services were sought for, and were highly prized. It was especially so in whatever related to the business of education, whether in schools or colleges; and also in the delicate position courted for its members, namely, that of directing the consciences of statesmen and princes.
The duties or offices which the Society professed at the first to undertake, and which have ostensibly filled its hands, and limited its views, were, as we have said, the cure of souls, the conversion of heathen nations, and the education of the young. But the work upon which, in fact—so we must infer from its history—the mind of the leaders of the Jesuit company has been always intensely fixed, but con-
Jesuitism. cerning which it has observed a discreet silence, was the giving the aid of its casuistical direction to men in power, and to women also, upon whose influence the turn of political affairs so often depends. It has been the discharge of this occult function which has given its character to the Society; it has been the immortal refinements which it has been compelled to invent or to adopt in discharging this function which have drawn upon it general reprobation and hatred, and which have made it the object of well-founded jealousy and fear in almost every country, Catholic as well as Protestant.
The Jesuit missions among the heathen have been illustrated by instances of Christian zeal and devotedness, such as have never been surpassed; while at the same time these very missions have exhibited, as in India, and in South America, those characteristics of the Jesuit institute which are the most to be reprobated, namely—its unscrupulous compromises with pagan superstitions and vices, and its pursuit of worldly influence and power, as in Paraguay, apart from any genuine zeal for the spiritual, or even temporal, well-being of the people whom it has assumed to govern.
In like manner the Jesuit scheme of education has displayed the highest merits on the one side, combined always with a vitiating element, which, if it had prevailed without counteraction, must have led the mind of Europe in a backward direction, from the bright course it had entered upon, toward the dim regions of intellectual stagnation. No teachers, no professors, were more assiduous, or more able, than the Jesuits who placed themselves at the head of schools and colleges in the sixteenth century. Seldom could their rivals compete with them. But the education thus conveyed had a uniform characteristic—it was stationary, not germinant; it was dogmatic, not suggestive; it was static, not dynamic. The most ample and exact acquaintance with things as they are was conveyed by the Jesuit teachers; but along with this proficiency there was a prohibition, tacit or explicit, of inquiry or progress. Whereas in the sixteenth century the human mind had received an irresistible impulse, carrying it forward in all directions over the field of action and of speculation, the Jesuit institute, considered as an educational scheme, came forward to stay or to neutralize that impulse by offering so to teach, and so to train the mind of Christendom as should render inquiry needless, and advancement undesirable. To some extent this endeavour to supplant the opening science of the age, and to arrest movement, actually took effect; and it might have done so in a degree that would have been fatal to our modern advancement, if the Jesuit body had not, at an early time, so displayed its vicious tendencies in another sphere as to awaken salutary distrust and alarm throughout Europe.
This reaction against the Jesuit body took its rise within the circle of political movements, where it had already whispered doctrines against which the moral instincts of men prompted them to make an outcry.
SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE ORDER.
In taking a glance at the history of the order of Jesuits, there is little that can command attention beyond the field of its interference with the political interests of the European nations. So far as Jesuitism was an outbreak of religious fervour—and so far, when thus thought of, as it served in a time of laxity to reanimate the Roman Catholic world, and thus to maintain Catholicism against the assailing forces of the Lutheran and Calvinistic reformation—thus far, the Society may be regarded as having been a seasonable and useful conservative energy; for, unless the Church of Rome had at that moment found, and had availed itself of this aid, or of some aid of the same kind, it may well be believed that the Romanized Christianity which
was destined for a lengthened term to hold the nations of Jesuitism. southern Europe in a visibly Christian condition, must have given way to the hostile force, so that the places which knew it once should have known it no more. This was not to be. The reformation was itself far from being such as that the world could take it up as an ultimate type of Christian belief and worship; it was a sudden reaction from the errors and corruptions of many ages; it was moreover a violent reaction; it drew with itself large fragments of ancient errors, and an abundance also of crude novelties, and it was hurried forward by the tempests of the political world, and swayed this way and that by cross undercurrents. The German, the Swiss, the English, and the Scotch reformation—all and severally—were temporary forms of Christianity which could retain their own coherence only so long as they were each of them forcibly compacted by the vigorous circumjacent pressure of the old religion. The vivid zeal and the Protestant feeling of some overweening persons may prompt them to resent an aversion of this sort, which, however, may be assented to without any peril by those who know how to hold fast their Christianity, while they forget their Protestantism. But Jesuitism, so far as it came in to save the Roman Catholicism of southern Europe, had done its destined work at an early time; or we might say, about the time when the Protestant evangelic fervour had subsided throughout the reformed nations. This counteractive energy had well spent itself on both sides toward the close of the seventeenth century. Thus far, therefore, the history of Jesuitism stands on record as a short chapter in the general history of the great religious movement of the sixteenth century. Thought of in this way, it may be granted that Martin Luther found his complement in Ignatius Loyola.
The history of Jesuitism, we have said, must mean its political history, and this is a dark narrative of a guileful interference with the course of national affairs; dark enough even when left to work itself out in its own way, but deriving a deeper colour, a fouler stain, from this source; not so much because crimes more flagitious were committed by the hands, or at the instigation of Jesuit agents, but because the Jesuit—whether suggesting crimes, or employed in smoothing the path of the criminal, or in extracting the sting of remorse—went about his work with refined reasonings, with an apparatus of orderly logic, with a carefully adjusted scheme of spurious ethics, which, as often as it made one man actually a criminal, prepared a hundred for walking in the same path. An aggravated mischief cannot but ensue in the social system when men who have been used to do ill at the blind impulse of sensual passions, cupidity, ambition, learn to do the very same things as recommended and palliated by sophistries. Those astute writers, who, at a very early time after the death of Loyola, and while his immediate successors were still living, gave themselves to the task of moulding an ethical system suited to the varied requirements of Jesuit confessors, may be regarded as compiling in cipher the blackest passages of the history of the courts of southern Europe for 150 years forward. The series of casuistic writers that is immortalized in the Provincial Letters—such as Sanchez, Molina, Bauney, Bobadilla, Escobar—are the expositors of the course of events in all those countries where the "Company of Jesus" had reared its establishments, and had been treated with favour by kings, queens, and statesmen. Peruse these casuists, make yourself master of the doctrine they profess for giving nerve to the arm of the assassin, and you are furnished with a sort of programme of the tragedies of European history, through the course of the following century. Sweeping statements of this sort, condemnatory of communities of men, may be true in substance; but they should never stand alone, as if they might be taken as unexceptionally and universally true. Counter-statements, well
Jesuitism. sustained by evidence, and assented to by eminent writers, not of the Society, have been advanced; and every candid mind will rejoice to find that, in relation even to the Jesuit Society, as to almost every other institute or community, it is true that the better impulses of human nature largely avail to correct and to modify the vicious tendency of systems, and of codes, and of written doctrines.
Within the borders of Protestant countries it was inevitable that the Jesuit should be regarded, and should be dealt with also, not so much as the teacher of a reprobated religion, as a conspirator, as an incendiary, as a convicted enemy of the there established government. In particular instances, unwarrantable severities may have been enacted; but, as a rule, the paramount reasons of self-preservation must be held to bear out every infliction under which the Jesuits of those times suffered. In England, for instance, the proclamation of James I. (1604), and the procedures thence resulting, infringed no rule of a just polity, if it be granted that every government must sustain itself against the machinations of traitors, or of agents of a foreign power, found lurking about palaces, and waylaying princes with daggers under their cloaks. Even in these times, if treason were rife—if disaffection were widely spread—if a pretender to the throne were at hand—any class of men professing the principles, or known to be governed by the principles, that are avowed by Jesuit writers, must be summarily disposed of.
In France the presence of the Jesuits, and their admitted influence at court, under the protection of the Cardinal de Lorraine, and the expulsion of the order at a much later time (1764), all involve facts and reasons of a far more complicated order than those belonging to the same questions as affecting England. Jealousies, alarms, hatreds, the balancing of parties in the Gallican church, and in the universities, the inclinations of the court (that of Francis II. and his successors), and that tendency towards freedom of thought and action which already was at work among the people, all these, and other undefined influences, give complexity to those struggles which ended in the suppression of the order. The first expulsion of the order from France dates 1592. They were recalled in 1603; but finally expelled in 1764, occasioned by the failure of its trading operations. From the first, the Jesuit teachers and professors were able to place themselves in a position of indisputable advantage as men of more energy and assiduity, and of higher accomplishments, than were generally the doctors of the Sorbonne, or the existing professors in colleges and schools. On this ground the competitors were very unequally matched; or it was so in all instances but one; the eminent—the pre-eminent—men of Port-Royal, were well qualified in all branches to dispute the ground with the most noted of the Jesuit teachers. A mortifying consciousness of this unlooked-for and yet indisputable fact—the existence of a body of learned and accomplished men, highly esteemed also for their piety, their orthodoxy, and their personal virtue, worked its way to the heart of the Jesuit Society, and suggested a purpose of vengeance which was at length triumphantly realized in the destruction of their rivals. The damage and the humiliation which had accrued to the Society from the Provincial Letters might now be patiently borne by the “reverend fathers,” for they could take to themselves the comfort of knowing that they had moved the besom of royal violence to sweep over the home of their enemies—Port-Royal was no more.
An antagonism of another sort took place between the Jesuits and the clergy of the Gallican church, on the ground of those principles of national independence which were then in favour. Jesuitism, by its vow and its spirit, was ultramontane in the most extreme sense. Nothing which Hildebrand had affirmed, no enormity which Innocent III. had carried into effect, revolted the Jesuit leaders or writers
of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. The papal authority—regarded as the visible and audible will of Christ—could acknowledge no limit on earth, could yield itself to no gainsaying. But by a large proportion of the clergy of France these notions were repudiated, and an appeal to the judgment of councils through a course of ages, supported a very different belief, which yet was held to consist with a due regard to the chair of St Peter. On this ground, therefore, the Jesuits in France found themselves—among Catholics—the advocates of an anti-national doctrine: they might believe themselves to be firmly established in the closet of the sovereign, but they could never feel themselves to be welcome, or at home, in the church, or in the nation. The Jesuit's church principles were disliked and rejected; his machinations were not unknown; the corrupt morality which he taught at court, and whenever among private persons it might, with advantage, be advanced—these several grounds of exception, of suspicion, of dislike, attached to the members of the order in France, as decisively almost as in England, although under different conditions.
In other Catholic countries—as throughout the domains of Charles V., and in Portugal, whence the Society was expelled in 1759, and in Venice, where at an early date (1606) it gave ground, and in Sicily, in 1767—the Jesuit establishments made themselves obnoxious on somewhat different grounds. These governments found and felt themselves to be enveloped in the meshes of a mute organization, which held on to a distant and foreign authority—an organization which, spreading its fibres in the most intimate way throughout the very substance of the social system, domestic as well as political, acted in both directions—the centrifugal and the centripetal; that is to say, as an omnipresent reporter of all things, and as a universal influence controlling all affairs, under the direction of a power inaccessible and responsible to none—amenable nowhere. Loyola, or whoever it might be that was the contriver of the Jesuit institute, might have foreseen that course of events which ensued in almost every country within which it had at first triumphed—namely, that it must come to be regarded as politically incompatible with the security of civil government, whether autocratic or democratic. This incompatibility would be felt not less vividly in countries that were firmly Catholic, and intolerant of dissent, than in Protestant countries: the consequence was, the expulsion of the order from countries the most orthodox, as well as from the heretical.
Justice to the Jesuit Society demands that general allegations of this sort should be accompanied with modifying statements. In several instances—especially in that of the harsh and cruel measure of the Portuguese government, in concert with that of Spain, in 1750 and 1759—the Jesuit fathers were made the victims of state policy, taking its course in utter contempt of reason, truth, religious feeling, and common humanity. The history of the missions in Paraguay and Brazil, and the narrative of the violences attempted and perpetrated in these countries by the two Catholic governments, are of a kind to engage the sympathies of the reader strongly and entirely on the side of the Society. Little as we may approve of the principles which guided those missions, it is a fact not to be disputed, that, through a long course of time, the Jesuit rule secured to the aboriginal tribes an incalculably larger amount of social and individual well-being than they could have enjoyed in their native condition; or, need it be said, under the ferocious rule of their European conquerors.
But when Jesuitism had become the object of dread, or jealousy, and of dislike to the Papacy—that is to say to the pontiff and his immediate ministers, it was on a different ground. At a very early time the pope had seen that the vow of unconditional obedience to the vicar of Christ had
Jesuitism, absolutely no meaning, whenever occasions arose which made this silent submission, or submission at all, inconvenient. The Jesuit doctrine was, that its vow of obedience included not merely an outward compliance with the command of a superior, but a conformity of soul and judgment also—an inward and absolute approval of such commands, whatever might be the contrary dictate of a man's individual judgment and conscience: he must not only say that white is black, but think it so. Then this outward obedience, and this inward congruity of the will, forbade any attempt, even in the most urgent instances, to persuade the superior, or to bring him over by argument, by expostulation, by entreaty, to another mind. Nothing can be more clear or more imperative than are the several statements of this doctrine wherever it presents itself in the authentic writings of the Society. Yet notwithstanding these professions, and in the face of them, Loyola himself, and the generals who succeeded him, never scrupled to use every sort of disusive importunity, when they thought it desirable to turn aside the sovereign pontiff from some course which they judged to be prejudicial to the interests, or damaging to the influence, of the Society. None could surpass the Jesuit General in silent obsequiousness, when this humble mood suited him; none so daringly contumacious as he, when it did not suit him to submit. If then the popes regarded the Society as a powerful auxiliary, they well understood also that it retained always a will of its own, which they could not control. The Society was at best a "fast and loose" ally.
This significant fact had betrayed itself from the first, and had been signalized several times during the lifetime of Loyola and of Paul IV. Such were those occasions when the general obtained release for his Society from the spiritual care of women, unless indeed, and this was an exception easily allowed, when ladies who sought the aid of a Jesuit confessor, occupied high positions at the court of princes. Such also was that occasion when the rule was to be maintained which forbade a Jesuit to accept a bishopric, or a benefice of any kind. The same practice of obedience, whenever convenient, and of contumacy on special occasions, had been freely resorted to in relation to the missions of the Society. At a time when the compromising behaviour of the Jesuit missionaries in India and China had become known in Europe, and had raised an outcry throughout Christendom, the popes made repeated endeavours to bring these propagandists back to a course of Christian simplicity and purity. These remonstrances, these injunctions, were scarcely heeded; they seemed scarcely to have become audible after they had traversed so many thousand miles. It was manifest that the "Company of Jesus" was governed, not merely from within, but that it had an independent life, and an object of its own, and that it might, as occasion arose, pursue its private ends in spite of injunctions, of decretals, of bulls, of anathemas. Hitherto no religious body had grown up within the pale of the Church which could in any comparable degree alarm the Papacy.
This jealousy and alienation had gone on always increasing, until it came to its natural issue in the decree of Clement XIV. in 1773, suppressing the order. At that time the relative forces of the two powers had become such as to render this act possible on the part of the Church. Besides that the Society, like every human combination springing into life with great energy, had by this time lost very much of its interior vitality; and it had, moreover, concentrated upon itself, from all quarters, an amount of opprobrium quite unexampled in any instance which might be brought into comparison with it. Religious orders had indeed often fallen into contempt from their laxity, and their departure from the spirit and rule of their founders. But the Jesuit institute had become hateful just because it had realized its original principle, and had fully developed,
in act, the incurable viciousness of its constitution, of its Jesuitism, maxims, of its distinctive tendency. Other religious bodies might retrace their downward steps, they might admit reforms, and might regain their position in the world's esteem. But as to the order of Jesuits, the fact had at length become incontestably certain—it was a truth uncontradicted (out of the Society)—that to this body a renovation, and a return to its primitive health, would be nothing less than a universal calamity—would bring every civil polity, every social interest, into peril. The act, therefore, which suppressed this order was borne out, and was assented to by the implicit approval of the European nations, Catholic not less than Protestant. In truth, it was by the urgency of the Catholic governments that Pope Ganganelli had been led, or driven, to take this course, which he did with the show, at least, of extreme reluctance. It was thenceforward in heretical Prussia and schismatic Russia that the Society found an asylum. Yet from Russia they were expelled by Alexander in 1817.
The events of the next following forty years were of that sort which could not but induce a reaction within the pale of the Church, and which would favour and bring on a resuscitation of Jesuitism. Pius VII. yielded to an influence in re-establishing the order, which was almost as distinctly expressed as that which had had its effect with his predecessor in abolishing it. A deluge had swept over Europe in this interval; a tornado had laid waste the Church; heresy and atheism had reared themselves aloft, and had appeared to be in course for utterly obliterating religious belief, or such religious belief as the Roman Catholic Church could recognize, from the minds and consciences of men. The time, therefore, was come for having recourse anew to the most potent restoratives; nor could any means be devised so effective, or so near at hand, with this view, as a revival of the Jesuit order. It was called upon, therefore, at a time of need, to repeat its first services to the Church, and at the same time to redeem for itself the esteem which it had universally lost.
During the period that has elapsed since the re-establishment of the Society—now more than forty years—it has pursued its course, we may suppose, to the satisfaction of its patrons and employers. Undoubtedly, the Jesuit influence has come in to the aid of that reaction which has taken place throughout, and still more beyond, the limits of the Roman Catholic world. Every sort of tendency which there may be to seek for and to accept infallible authority in matters of religion, would meet Romanism under its Jesuit form. It is the Jesuit who must be stationed at the gate of the Church to welcome and encourage returning and repentant heretics. The antique religious orders possess no powers of adaptation fitting them for a work of this sort; in every sense they are superannuated. But the very characteristic of Jesuitism is its pliant or polymorphous quality. It knows perfectly who and what the repentant are. It knows how those feel who stray away from Protestant communions, and what are likely to be their difficulties in seeking to return to the Catholic Church; then it has a perfect command of the pharmacopoeia of Romanism, and more than all, it has always a choice of agents, among whom it may find the very one who can best adapt himself to the humours of the individual patient.
In labours of this sort, the restored Jesuitism of our times has no doubt rendered great service to the Roman Church. It has also made some progress in recovering the position it once occupied as the director of education, popular and professional. Something, also, in recent times, it may have effected in that which we must call its proper work—political intrigue. But beyond these faint revivals of the parts it played throughout the world in the seventeenth century, there is little which is now possible to this once formidable association; and henceforward every new development of the substantial forces of the social system