advance the cause of the Order, to glorify the Church, they hesitated not to adopt any means, however questionable. Thus, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits, who founded the Madura Mission in India, found that the claims of the Brahmins to superior caste presented an insuperable barrier to their success. They at once claimed to belong to a still higher caste of Brahmins from the West, and a deed was actually forged, purporting to prove that the Brahmins of Rome-the Jesuits-were descended in direct line from Brahma. One falsehood generally leads to another, and so it was then found necessary to imitate the sacred books of the Brahmins, and thus a fifth "Veda" was forged, to match the four preserved by the Brahmins. This act of duplicity may be taken as a fair specimen of the craft they employed everywhere they

went.

But there was something more than craft employed. They admitted persons to baptism on a simple profession of belief without strict examination. This involved important results. The Jesuits by this means acquired control over the rising generation. The parents were professing Christians-they were baptized-leave them to the mercy of God-take care of the young. Thus they acted, and the children were moulded to their purpose, and everywhere as the old generation died out, another arose full of zeal, carefully trained, well disciplined. But here, too, arose a frightful evil. From the engrafting of the gospel on heather systems of error; from the acceptance of ignorant heathens into the privileges of Christians, arose a mongrel creed-a half-caste religion, half Christian, half Pagan, the soul of heathenism inhabiting the body of Christianity; the

skeleton of Paganism tricked out in the trappings of the Gospel!

Just as in the early days of Christianity, the engrafting of the gospel on Heathen Mythology and Oriental Philosophy produced the germs of Roman Catholicism itself, so in the Jesuit Missions the Romanism established was a mixture of truth and falsehood, all the more pernicious because underlying the errors there was a substratum of truth.

Take the Mission in China as an illustration of what is here stated.

When the Jesuits entered China they announced themselves as teachers of mathematics, music, and drawing, from Europe. They were well received, and with patient assiduity they commenced the task of proselytizing the most exclusive and the strangest people in the world. They became great favourites at Court; they introduced useful arts and manufactures; they made watches, organs, and even firearms and gunpowder. They gained the favour of the throne; they proselytized the heir to the crown; they gained over the generals of the army. They converted the Mandarins, and soon churches sprang up everywhere, and Romanism was established in the Celestial Empire. Thus far their conduct was marked by consummate tact. But they went farther than this. The Chinese worshipped "the host of heaven," and the Jesuits actually joined in the worship, on the grounds that they worshipped not the sun, moon, and stars, but God, who made them. The Chinese worshipped their own forefathers; the Jesuits joined the adoration, on the grounds that they did not worship or adore them, but paid them civil veneration. To such an extent was this scandalous profanation of religion carried, that at last the matter became a public scandal,

and was complained of at Rome. The Jesuits were formally censured in the Bulls of the Pope, and their practices forbidden.

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In dealing with converts China, the Jesuits brought into practice their doctrine of mental reservation. They allowed professed converts to worship idols, provided they carried under their clothes the crucifix, and when they bowed down to their idol worshipped the crucifix by mental reservation. When De Tournon, the legate was sent to inquire into these practices, they effectually prevented him from making an unfavourable report. When an attempt which had been made to carry him off by poison failed, he was arrested at Macao, and cast into prison, where he perished miserably.

of the Jesuits in Syria, Malacca, Tartary, and Japan; in Abyssinia, Congo, and Mozambique; in Brazil, Mexico, and Paraguay. In the last-named country they founded a formidable military organization, under Jesuit control, and that, too, with the most profound secrecy.

"The experience of three centuries," says Dr. Dollinger, " shows that the Jesuits have no lucky hand. No blessing ever rests on their undertakings. They build with unwearied assiduity, but a storm comes and shatters the building, or a flood breaks in and washes it away, or the worm-eaten edifice falls to pieces in their hands. The Oriental proverb about the Turks may be applied to them, 'Where the Turk sets his foot, grass never grows.' Their Missions in Paraguay, Japan, and among the wild North American tribes have long since gone to ruin. In Abyssinia they had once (in 1625) almost attained dominion, but soon afterwards (in 1634) the whole concern collapsed, and they never ventured to return there. What is left to-day of their laborious Missions in the Levant, the Greek islands, Persia, the Crimea, and Egypt? Scarcely a reminiscence of their former presence there is to be found on the spot." *

The history of Jesuitism in Europe is a gloomy picture. They devoted all their energies to Spain, the cradle of the Order, and they have made it what it is a ruined and degraded nation. They brought on Germany the horrors of the Thirty Years' War. They almost annihilated the aristocracy of Bohemia, and destroyed its constitution. They exercised for a time in Poland almost absolute power, and Poland is destroyed. Ruin followed in their footsteps every

*

where, and at one time or another they have been expelled from every country in which they were permitted to reside. Yet, despite all opposition, the Order lives on, powerful as of old, vigorous as in the days of its early existence.

In 1773 Clement XIV. suppressed the Order of Jesus by the Bull "Dominus ac Redemptor." He survived the issue of the Bull about a year, and died in great agony-some said of poison, more probably of remorse; for whatever the faults of the Jesuits may have been, none can deny that they were ever the zealous champions of the the Roman Pontiff.

In 1767 Charles III. sent out despatches from Madrid to the governors of Spanish colonies throughout Asia, Africa, and America, to be opened on the evening of April 2nd, and not before, under pain of death. Those sealed despatches contained instructions to the magistrates to enter all the establishments of the Jesuits, and seize their papers, which they were to seal up and retain, and within twenty-four hours transport the Fathers with a purse, a breviary, and apparel to certain appointed places. A few hours after the despatches were opened, six thousand Jesuits were floating away from the coasts of Spain. At the same time they were expelled from France, Naples, and Parma. More than seventy times have the Jesuits been banished from the different states of Europe-Roman Catholic as well as Protestant and always because they conspired against the liberties of the people. A century ago the King of Prussia gave them an asylum in Prussia, when they were suppressed by the Bull of an Infallible Pontiff, and in our days they have been driven from the country which then received them with open arms.

In 1814 Pius VII. restored the Order, and in 1820 the Fathers were expelled from Russia. The dogma of Infallibility is the necessary consequence of the system of Jesuitism. That dogma is the chief corner-stone in the edifice of despotic power, which the Jesuits have spent three centuries in erecting. Always the most deadly enemies that mental and moral liberty have ever known, they have consummated a career of arrogance and duplicity by an open attack on the liberties of mankind.

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Loyola's " elementary idea" was an absolute domination over the spirits of men. tralization of all powers on earth in the bosom of one master of souls;" and his followers have worked out that "idea," until at the present hour it is realized in the Roman Catholic Church.

The Pope is now the puppet of the Order, and Jesuitism seeks to rule the world. In the nineteenth century England has received them to her arms, as Prussia did in days gone by. Let her beware that they do not reward her with a harvest of contention and bloodshed.

Jesuitism is politically incompatible with the security of any civil government, whether autocratic or democratic; from the very first the members of the Society took part in every intrigue and revolution. "They have published such tenets concerning the duty of opposing princes who were enemies of the Catholic Faith, as countenanced the most atrocious crimes and tended to dissolve all the ties which connect subjects with their rulers."*

The same writer accuses them

of propagating "a system of relaxed and pliant morality which accommodates itself to the passions of men, which justifies their vices, which tolerates their imperfections, and authorizes almost every action that the most audacious or crafty politician would wish to perpetrate."+

John Chastel, a pupil of the Order, attempted to assassinate Henry IV. of France; and another member, Father Guiscard, was convicted of writing a book in favour of regicide. The Order was driven out of Portugal in 1759, upon the charge of having instigated the assassination of King Joseph I. They were expelled from England for conspiring to assassinate Elizabeth.

The case of Thomas Heth, a Jesuit, tried in 1568 and pilloried for assuming the disguise of a Protestant preacher, in order the more effectually to sow dissension in England, is noteworthy as illustrating the unscrupulous manner in which the Jesuits employed any means likely to promote the success of the Order.

This subject is all-important for this reason, that Jesuitism never changes. Such as the Society was in the beginning, such it is to-day. The Jesuits are working silently, secretly, unscrupulously at the present day to overthrow Protestantism in great Britain. Other orders are antiquated; the Order of Jesus suits to a nicety the requirements of the age. The vast numbers of Protestants who in recent years have gone over to Rome from the Church of England would alone be sufficient to prove that the Order of Jesus has not lost its vitality.

In Ireland, since the Disestablishment, Jesuits have penetrated in the guise of Protestant Evangelists into remote rural parishes, and have done incalculable mischief by sowing dissension and suspicion between minister and people.

There never was a grosser imposition than the arrogance of the Society which dared to bestow on a confraternity foremost in opposition to the truth and perfectly shameless in the maintenance of corruption, idolatry, ignorance and crime, the name of the pure and holy Jesus of Nazareth.

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Speaking of the working of Jesuitism in England during recent years, the author of "The Modern Avernus" says: "It is not long since a gentleman of fortune established provincial journal for the sole purpose of conserving our national Protestantism. It was subsequently discovered that the man who had had sufficient address to secure the appointment of editor was a Jesuit. Jesuits are on the staff of almost every newspaper in London. They have been found wearing the footman's livery in the mansions of Belgravia. They have been accosted (and recognized) under the garb of the bricklayer's hodman in Oxford Street; they have borrowed the guise of the Protestant Scripture Reader and City Missionary, and engaged in the com

bats of a mock controversy at the corners of the streets in order to secure the confusion of the (supposed) Protestant champion. They have held (and not for nothing) important curacies under rich 'Evangelical' rectors in influential spheres."*

When you consider that the Jesuits are as numerous, as powerful, as unscrupulous as ever; when you take into account their peculiar belief that every crime, however atrocious, may be committed at the command of the Superior, provided the Order gains by its commission; when you review the history of Jesuitism, black with intrigue, treason, perfidy and crime; when you compare the fervour, zeal, and perseverance of the Fathers with the divisions of Protestants and the apathy of Protestant statesmen, then you cannot fail to see that Jesuitism is at the present day an enemy not to be despised-an enemy formidable, relentless, and unscrupulous; an enemy to the civil as well as to the religious liberties of mankind; an enemy which must, by the mere working out of its own fundamental principles, destroy all law and order in the State, or be destroyed itself in the deadly struggle.