Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/678

648 JESUITS a class perfectly feasible if thought expedient. One is the power given to the general to receive candidates secretly, and to conceal their admission, for which there is a remark able precedent in the case of Francis Borgia, duke of Gandia, afterwards himself general of the society; the other is an even more singular clause, providing for the admission of candidates to the company by persons who are not themselves members of it. The known facts on either side are insufficient for a decisive verdict, and " Not proven" is the only impartial judgment possible. The general, who should by the statutes of the society reside permanently at Rome, holds in his hands the right of appointment, not only to the office of provincial over each of the great districts into which the houses are mapped, but to the offices of each house in particular, no shadow of electoral right or even suggestion being recognized. The superiors and rectors of all houses and colleges in Europe must report weekly to their provincial on all matters concerning the members of the society and all outsiders with whom they may have had dealings of any sort. Those employed in district missions report at such longer intervals as the provincial may fix. The provincial, for his part, must report monthly to the general, giv ing him a summary of all details which have reached himself. But, as a check on him, all superiors of houses in his province are to make separate reports directly to the general once in three months, and further to com municate with him without delay every time any matter of importance occurs, irrespective of any information which the provincial may have forwarded. Nor is this all ; an elaborate system of espionage and delation forms part of the recognized order of every house, arid, in direct contrast to the ancient indictment and confession of faults in open conventual chapter, every inmate of a house is liable to secret accusation to its superior, while the superior himself may be similarly delated to the provincial or the general. Nor is the general himself exempt from control on the part of the society, lest by any possibility he might prove, from disaffection or error, unfaithful to its interests. A consultative council is imposed on him by the general con gregation, consisting of six persons, whom he may neither select nor remove, namely, four assistants, each represent ing a nation, an admonisher or adviser (resembling the adlatus of a military commander) to warn him of any faults or mistakes, and his confessor. One of these must be in constant attendance on him ; and, while he is not at liberty to abdicate his office, nor to accept any dignity or office outside it without the assent of the society, ho may yet be suspended or deposed by its authority. No such instance, however, has yet occurred in Jesuit history, although steps in this direction were once taken in the case of a general who had set himself against the current feeling of the society. With so widely ramifying and complex a system in full working order, controlled by the hand of one man, the Company of Jesus has been aptly defined as " a naked sword, whose hilt is at Rome, and whose point is every where." There would seem at first to be an effectual external check provided, however, in the fact that, while all the officers of ths society, except the council aforesaid, hold of the general, he in turn holds of the pope, and is his liegeman directly, as well as in virtue of the fourth vow, which he has taken in common with the other professed. But such is the extraordinary skill with which the relations of the society to the papacy were originally drafted by Loyola, and subsequently worked by his successors, that it has always remained organically independent, and might very conceivably break with Rome without imperilling its own existence. The general has usually stood towards the pope much as a powerful grand feudatory of the Middle Ages did towards a weak titular lord paramount, or perhaps as the captain of a splendid host of " Free Companions " did towards a potentate with whom he chose to take temporary and precarious service ; and the shrewd Roman populace have long shown their recognition of this fact by styling these two great personages severally the "White Pope " and the "Black Pope." In truth, the society has never, from the very first, obeyed the pope, whenever its will and his happened to run counter to each other. Even in the very infancy of the company, Loyola himself used supplications and arguments to the pope to dissuade him from enforcing injunctions likely to prove incompatible with the original plan, and on each occasion succeeded in carrying his point ; while his immediate successors more openly resisted Paul IV. when attempting to enforce the daily recitation of the breviary on the clerks of the society, and to limit the tenure of the generalship to three years, and Pius V. when follow ing his predecessor s example in the former respect. Sixtus V. having undertaken with a high hand the wholesale reform of the company, including the change of its name from " Society of Jesus " to " Society of Ignatius," met with strenuous opposition, and the fulfilment of Bellarmine s prophecy that he would not survive the year 1590 was looked on less as the accomplishment of a prediction than of a threat, an impression deepened by the sudden death of his successor. Urban VII., eleven days after his election, who, as Cardinal Castagna, had been actively co-operating with Sixtus in his plans. The accuracy of a similar fore cast made by Bellarmine as to Clement VIII., who was also at feud with the society, and who died before he could carry out his intended measures, confirmed popular suspicion. Urban VIII., Innocent XL, Alexander VIII., and Clement XII. vainly contended against the doctrines taught in Jesuit books and colleges, and could effect no change. Nine popes fruitlessly condemned the " Chinese rites," whereby the Jesuit missionaries had virtually assimi lated Christianity to heathenism, and the practical reply of the latter was to obtain in 1700 an edict from the emperor of China, in opposition to the papal decree, declaring that there was nothing idolatrous or superstitious in the incul pated usages, while in 1710 they flung Cardinal Tournon, legate of Clement XL, into the prison of the Inquisition at Macao, where he perished ; and finally, they disobeyed the brief of suppression issued by Clement XIV. in 1773, which enjoined them to disperse at once, to send back all novices to their houses, and to receive no more members. It is thus clear that the society has always regarded itself as an independent power, ready indeed to co-operate with the papacy so long as their roads and interests are the same, and to avail itself to the uttermost of the many pontifical decrees in its own favour, but drawing the line far short of practical submission when their interests diverge. So constituted, with a skilful combination of strictness and laxity, of complex organization with the minimum of friction in working, the society was admirably devised for its purpose of introducing a new power into the church and the world, and for carrying out effectively every part of its vast programme. Thus equipped, its services to Roman Catholicism have been incalculable. The Jesuits alone rolled back the tide of Protestant advance when that half of Europe which had not already shaken off its allegiance to the papacy was threatening to do so, and the whole honours of the counter-Reformation are theirs singly. They had the sagacity to see, and to admit in their corre spondence with their superiors, that the Reformation, as a popular movement, was fully justified by the gross ignorance, negligence, and open vice of the Catholic clergy, whether secular or monastic ; and they were shrewd enough to discern the only possible remedies, At a time when primary and even secondary education had in most places