there can be no doubt that Loyola stamped in an eminent degree the impress of his own subtle and profound genius on the order which he founded, still it was not by him, but by Laynez and Aquaviva-men of still greater ability and wisdom -that the crafty and far-reaching policy of the Society was elaborated.

In 1541 Loyola became the first general of the order. The number of members was at first confined to sixty; but this limitation was soon withdrawn. When Loyola died, in 1556, the Society had colleges in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, the Low Countries; and the missions of the Jesuits spread rapidly from Europe through China, India, Japan, and South America.

With such care were the members chosen, that some were rejected whose only fault was a hasty temper. To go anywhere, to do all things, to endure sickness, suffering, danger, imprisonment, exile, persecution, torture, death, at the command of a superior, and for the benefit of the Church: such was the rule of the Jesuit. Unquestioning obedience was the law of the Order, and the Jesuit obeyed, when obedience meant death.

The life of the sovereign; the liberties of the people; man's honour; woman's chastity; the dearest private interest; the closest domestic tie; personal feeling and personal ambition; the welfare of hearth, and home, and country; the laws of man and the law of Godall these were as nothing in the eyes of the Jesuit, compared with the advancement of his Order.

Such was the Society founded by Ignatius Loyola, by whose influence the great Catholic reaction began, and whose labours stemmed the tide of the Protestant Reformation.

The disciples of Loyola at once

possessed themselves of all the strongholds which influence the public mind. Three establishments were formed, at Vienna, Cologne, and Ingoldstadt, and soon the new teachers were to be found everywhere. Everywhere, too, they acted with consummate prudence, untiring zeal, and profound craft. They embodied the peculiar intellect of their founder; they united self-abnegation with the

most

anxious zeal for the promotion of each other; they combined enthusiasm and worldly wisdom; they were visionary, and at the same time practical; they were eloquent, learned, and accomplished; they were agreeable, well-bred, and witty; they possessed in an eminent degree the secret of becoming "all things to all men." They were zealous supporters of monarchy in one country; in another they were furious republicans. The Jesuit preacher commanded overflowing audiences; the Jesuit confessor was admitted into the private chambers of princes. The Jesuit teacher conveyed knowledge as no other teacher did. The same man passed from the chamber of the sovereign to the hut of the peasant. When Laynez and Salmeron were sent to the Council of Trent, they lived in the hospital, swept the rooms, tended the sick, and asked alms for a living.

The labours of the Society were carried on secretly, silently, unobtrusively, but rapidly. In one district of Germany fourteen cities and market-towns, upwards of two hundred villages, containing 60,000 souls, were in one year (1586) brought back to the Church of Rome. They added fraud to craft; they gained a footing in Bohemia, by giving out that they were come to teach science gratis. gratis. In the reign of John, King of Sweden, two Jesuits from Louvain gave themselves out as Evangelical

preachers. They disputed before the clergy and people, quoting the Reformers as their own, and the adversary of the Pope was always (and sometimes ignominiously) worsted. As early as 1568 they began to infest the Church of England in the guise of Puritanical preachers, their object being to divide and weaken.

They spread over Europe, from Sweden to Italy, from Vienna to Connaught. "They were to be found in the depths of the Peruvian mines, at the marts of the African slave-caravans, on the shores of the Spice Islands, in the observatories of China. They made converts in regions which neither avarice nor curiosity had tempted any of their countrymen to enter; and preached and disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West understood a word."

They joined the Babington plot, which had for its object the assassination of Elizabeth, and were concerned in the still more nefarious conspiracy known as the Gunpowder Plot. They were accomplices in the guilt, if not indeed sole promoters of the design, when more than one crowned head among the sovereigns of Europe fell by the dagger of the assassin.

The Jesuit view of the Church is, that it is "a great, all-embracing empire an absolute monarchy, ruled with irresponsible and plenary power by one man-the Pope. To him all alike, layman and cleric, king and beggar, are equally and absolutely subject. No one has any rights before him, and all authority in the Church is an emanation from his-a mere deputed power, that may at any moment be recalled."*

There cannot be a doubt that much of the success which attended the Jesuits may be traced to the strictness of their system.

• Dollinger.

"The law makers of the Society have framed a set of ordinances and of privileges with skill that is perfectly marvellous. On the one hand they supply every conceivable guarantee for crushing out any germ of independent impulse that could by possibility allow momentary play in an individual member to some movement of dissent, however suppressed and strictly mental, from any order emanating from his superior. On the other hand, they are studiously adapted to instil into those entrusted with the supreme direction of the Society a sense of discretion so vast, so ample, and so completely freed from all ordinary limitations, that they may become absolutely imbued with the consciousness of duty being wholly centred in the keen observance of whatever at any particular moment might recommend itself as specially expedient for making particular minds acquiesce more readily in their ascendancy."†

Faculties of the very widest range are lodged with the General, making him almost independent of the Pope himself. Yet there are also provisions for securing the faithfulness of the General, should he at any time betray an intention of failing in his duty.

No one can become a Novice under fourteen years of age; and, as a Probationer, he has to pass through years of training and discipline before he is admitted to the second rank-the Fathers who have taken three vows. No one can enter the third class-the Fathers who have taken four vows -before he is forty-five years of age, and few attain the rank.

Before entering on the religious life, there is for those who enter the Order of Jesus a noviciate of two years. During this noviciate, the candidate is not allowed to study. Meditation, self-denial, mortification, deliberation, severe and frequent trials, fill up the time. The noviciate is the forge in which the iron is softened, in order to fit it for a new and strange purpose. At the end of two years, the hour for study comes. Then two years are given to rhetoric and literature; three years to philosophy and the physical and mathematical sciences, sometimes even more. Then comes

what is called the Regence, or the teaching of the classes in a college. Five or six years are passed in the Regence; while the young Professor goes up step by step.

At the age of twenty-eight or thirty the candidate is sent to theology. This study, with history, languages, and Canon law occupies four, often six, years. Then the candidate enters the Priesthood, rarely before the age of thirty-two or thirty-three. At the end of each year of this long course there is a severe examination. At the close of the period there is general examination, and the candidate must gain three favourable votes out of four at this final examination, or after all he cannot be admitted to the profession. What wonder such a system produced men like Suarez and Vasquez, Bellarmin and De Lugo, Bourdaloue, Sirmond, and Grimaldi.

a

But the course is not even yet finished: two years' noviciate, nine years of study, five or six years of teaching; these are followed now by one year's probation, devoted to meditation. Then one is admitted to pronounce the vows of "Spiritual Coadjutor," or "Professed." Such is the training for the Order of Jesus.

This Society is governed by a General appointed for life. All other Superiors are appointed but for three years.

Obedience, perinde ac cadaver is the rule of the Jesuit.

It cannot be wondered that such men were zealous. There never has been, since Apostolic days, such success as that which attended the Order of Jesus. But if they were zealous, they were also unscrupulous. "The end justifies the means, was their maxim, and if they lengthened the creed, they shortened the decalogue. They were tempted too often to serve God with the help of the Devil. They introduced casuistry and mental reservation.

The celebrated Cajetan, among the cases where he admits mental reservation to be allowable, lays down the following: "It is quite allowable for a man to swear that he had no accomplices in committing a crime, although in point of fact he had, provided that at the time of swearing he means that he had none in other crimes. Or that a man committed for murder may swear that he did not commit the murder, provided he means while he was in prison."

According to this theory, everything was lawful which served the Church, advanced the Order, or even concealed scandal. A man could only sin in so far as he had the deliberate intention of sinning.

"I think it probable," says a casuist, "that the cloak I wear is mine; it is more probable it is yours. I am not bound to balance the probabilities, and may keep the cloak."

An amusing story is told of the craft and wisdom of the Jesuits: "A Spanish king was about to wage war against the King of France, and sent for contributions to all the religious orders. The Jesuits at once declared that they would give as much as all the other religious houses together. A great spirit of emulation was thus excited, and a very large sum of money was contributed. When, however, the collectors came to the Jesuits, they pleaded poverty, and the Superior offered to the King three advices, by which he would be certain to gain twelve millions sterling. Olivarez, you may be sure, was all attention.

"1 'You are paying,' said the artful Jesuit, 'eight millions for educational purposes in the kingdom. Now, if you give us all the chairs of your universities, we will teach for nothing, and you save eight millions sterling.

"2'Let the king publish a short form of the Breviary-say onethird its present size. This will sell for ten ducats, and every priest in the kingdom will buy one out of gratitude to the king for shortening his daily offices.

"3'An immense sum is acquired by other religious communities for saying masses, while the Jesuits can take none. Let the king seize all the money gained by religious orders in this way, and we will say all the masses for nothing."

We need hardly say that the Jesuits did not escape without mulcture. Paschal says, " I shall not only prove that your writings are full of scandal, but I shall go farther. It is possible to say a thing that is false, believing it to be true; but the real liar is he that lies with an intention to lie. Now I shall make it appear that you, Fathers, lie with that intention, and that you load your enemies, knowingly and designedly, with crimes of which you positively know that they are innocent."

He further charges them with maintaining, both in their writings and disputations, that "It is but a venial sin to ruin the credit of a false accuser by charging him with false crimes."

After such testimony from a Romanist, we need say nothing about the SECRETA MONITA.*

Lessius holds that " if one may kill for fear of losing his money, he may, also, for fear of taking an affront."

Another casuist teaches that a monk may lawfully kill a woman who has it in her power to defame him or his order.

This, however, is the Society which has modestly arrogated to itself the name of "THE ORDER OF JESUS."

There is no crime, however atrocious, which, according to the peculiar doctrines of Jesuitism, may not be justified by Probabilism, or Mental Reservation, or Justification of Means by Ends. To advance the "glory of God," a man may murder, steal, commit perjury, or lie. Thus it is laid down by one casuist that an oath is not binding when taken with the intention, indeed, of swearing, but where there is not an intention of binding or being bound. In such a case " perjury is defined as being merely "the telling a lie, and taking God's name in vain."

"

What wonder that when Riembauer, a Bavarian parish priest, in 1808 murdered his mistress with barbarous cruelty, lest his connection with her should cause scandal, he justified his conduct on the grounds of the teaching he received at his seminary. Thus, too, a man might fight a duel, if he did so not to inflict punishment on his enemy, or for revenge, which would be sinful; but to defend his own honour, which would be laudable. A man might pray for his father's death, provided he bore no ill-will to his parent, but wished to enjoy his goods.

The vulgar notion that Jesuitism owed its success to this laxity of

principle on the part of some of its members is unfounded. Such a course could only tend in the long run to injure the Society, and as a matter of fact, the Order of Jesus never fully recovered the exposure by Paschal in his "Provincial Letters" of this system of casuistry and deception.

The Society owed its success in the first instance to the zeal and fanaticism and ability of such men as Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier. It owed its success to the care with which its members were chosen, to the strict discipline to which they were subjected, to the long and severe course of training through which they were compelled to pass, to the self-forgetfulness, heroism, and devotion of the members of the institution.

The Church of Rome lost millions in Europe by the Reformation. The Jesuits went forth, and gained for her millions upon millions in other quarters of the globe. "They entered Canada, and preached along the waters of the great St. Lawrence, planting their churches as they proceeded among the Indian tribes. They passed down the valley of that great father of rivers, the Mississippi, and there too they preached their doctrines and gathered their proselytes, and thence spread themselves over the wide savannahs

of Louisiana; there, again, teaching and preaching, and settling their churches among the simple and wandering Indians, and there these churches even yet remain. They entered Central America, and there they preached to the teeming populations of that land, proselytizing them by thousands and hundreds of thousands, and establishing amidst the rich and luxuriant valleys of Mexico the foundations of that church which

still to this day remains the richest in the world. They passed through the heart of South America, and there they collected Indian tribes and Indian nations; there they modified their civil institutions, and there they preached their doctrines with such marvellous success that they regained to Rome more proselytes in that populous and mighty Continent than all she had lost by the Reformation in Europe. They passed on to the East, and there, as well as in the West, they raised the banner of the Cross, and their conversions in India are narrated as so numerous as almost to exceed belief. The churches they then founded are still in existence

"They visited Japan, and in that strange and singular island they preached to its immense population with such zeal and success, that from the monarch upon his throne to the Indian in his hut, they had all well-nigh embraced the profession of Christianity, when a storm of persecution dashed, as in a moment, all their cherished hopes to the dust. They entered China, and in that empire, deemed inaccessible to all others, they proselytized with such a strange success, both in the court and in the camp, both in the royal palace and in the peasant's cottage, that they counted their proselytes by hundreds of thousands, and collected their congregations, and erected their churches without number."*

Never since Apostolic times did missionaries succeed like the Jesuits. Surely there was some cause for this. They were, it is true, learned, clever, crafty, devoted, courageous, but there was something more than this-they were utterly unscrupulous. The end sanctified the To gain proselytes, to

means.