Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/679

JESUITS 049 become a mere effete and pedantic adherence to obsolete methods, they were bold enough to innovate, less in system than in materials, and, putting fresh spirit and devotion into the work, not merely taught and catechized in a new, fresh, and attractive manner, besides establishing free schools of good quality, but provided new manuals and schoolbooks for their pupils, which were an enormous advance on those they found in use, so that for nearly three centuries the Jesuits were accounted the best schoolmasters in Europe, as they were, till their forcible suppression the other day, confessedly the best in France, besides having always conciliated the good will of their pupils by mingled firmness and gentleness as teachers. And, although their own methods have in time given way to further improve ments, yet they revolutionized instruction as completely as Frederick the Great did modern warfare, and have thus acted, whether they meant it or not, as pioneers of human progress. Again, when the regular clergy had sunk into the moral and intellectual slough which is pictured for us in the writings of Erasmus and in the powerful satire JEpistolx Obscurorum Virorum, while there was little of a better kind visible in the lives of the parochial priesthood, the Jesuits won back respect for the clerical calling by their personal culture and the unimpeachable purity of their lives. These are qualities which they have all along carefully maintained, and probably no body of men in the world has been so free from the reproach of discreditable members, or has kept up an equally high average level of intelligence and conduct. As preachers, too, they delivered the pulpit from the bondage of an effete scholasticism, and reached at once a clearness and simplicity of treatment such as the English pulpit scarcely begins to exhibit till after the days of Tillotson ; while in literature and theology they count a far larger number of respectable writers than any other religious society can boast. It is in the mission-field, however, that their achievements have been most remarkable, which might fully justify their taking as their motto " Qiue regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ? " Whether toiling amongst the teeming millions of Hindustan and China, labouring amongst the Hurons and Iroquois of North America, governing and civilizing the natives of Brazil and Paraguay, in the missions and " reductions," or ministering, at the hourly risk of his life, to his coreligionists in England under Elizabeth and James I., the Jesuit appears alike devoted, indefatigable, cheerful, and worthy of hearty admiration and respect. Nevertheless, two most startling and indisputable facts meet the student who pursues the history of this unique society. The first is the universal suspicion and hostility it has incurred, not, as might reasonably be expected, merely from those Protestants whose avowed and most successful foe it has been, nor yet from the enemies of all clericalism and religious dogma, to whom it is naturally the embodiment of all they most detest, but from every Roman Catholic state and nation in the world, with perhaps the insignificant exception of Belgium. Next is the brand of ultimate failure which has invariably been stamped on all its most promising schemes and efforts. It controlled the policy of Spain, when Spain was aiming, with good reason to hope for success, at the hegemony of Europe, and Spain came out of the struggle well-nigh the last amongst the nations. It secured the monopoly of religious teaching and influence in France under Louis XIV. and XY. only to see an atheistic revolution break out under Louis XVI. and sweep over the nation after a century of such training. It guided the action of James II., lost the crown of England for the house of Stuart, and brought about the limitation of the throne to the Protestant succession. Its Japanese and Red Indian missions have vanished without leaving a trace behind ; its labours in Hindustan did but prepare the way for the English empire there ; it was swept out of its Paraguayan domains without power of defence ; and, having in our own day concentrated its efforts on the maintenance of the temporal power of the popes, and raised it almost to the rank of a dogma of the Catholic faith, it has seen Rome proclaimed as the capital of united Italy, and a Piedmontese sovereign enthroned in the Quirinal. These two phenomena demand some inquiry and analysis. As regards the former of them, the hostility the Jesuits have encountered has been twofold, political and moral or religious. There has been, from a very early date in their annals, a strong conviction prevalent that the famous motto of the society, "A.M.D.G." {Ad majorem Dei gloriam), did not adequately represent its policy and motives, that its first and last aim was its own aggrandize ment in power and wealth (for Julius II. had dis pensed the general from the vow of poverty, and the colleges also were allowed to hold property), and that it spared no efforts to compass this end, even to the extent of embroil ing cabinets, concocting conspiracies, kindling wars, and procuring assassinations. In several of these cases, notably as regards the charges which led to their first expulsion from France and Portugal, inclusive in the latter instance of their exile from Paraguay, the Jesuits are able to make one very telling reply, pleading that motives of statecraft alone, of an unworthy kind, and the evidence of untrust worthy and disreputable agents of their enemies, were suffered to decide the matter. In other cases, as for example the assassination of Henry IV. by Ravaillac, they deny all complicity, and no sufficient proof has ever been adduced against them. But, when full allowance has been made for such rejoinders, there remain several counts of the indictment which are but too clearly made out : as, for instance, their large share, as preachers, in fanning the flames of polemical hatred against the Huguenots under the last two Valois kings, their complicity in the plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth which followed on her excommunication by Pius V. ; their responsibility for kindling the Thirty Years War; the part they took in prompting and directing the cruelties which marked the overthrow of Protestantism in Bohemia ; their decisive influence in causing the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the expulsion of the Huguenots from the French dominions ; and their accountability for precipitating the Franco-German war of 1870. And in regard to a large number of other cases where the evidence against them is defective, it is at least an unfortunate coincidence that there is always direct proof of some Jesuit having been in communication with the actual agents engaged. So it was with the massacre of St Bartholomew, almost immediately preceded by a visit of the Jesuit general, Francis Borgia, to the French court, though there is no further evidence to connect him therewith ; so with Chatcl and Ravaillac, the unsuccessful and successful assassins of Henry IV.; so with Jaureguay and Balthasar Gerard, who held the like relation to William the Silent, prince of Orange ; so (as is more familiarly known) with the accomplices in the Gunpowder Plot. In all these and several other instances, the pre cautions which would naturally, and even inevitably, be taken by skilled and wary diplomatists for their own pro tection are sufficient to account for the lack of direct proof against them, but it is not easy to explain the invariable presence of a Jesuit in the background, on any hypothesis- winch will secure the complete acquittal of the society from charges of the sort. It is sufficient to say here in illustration that the English Roman Catholics under Elizabeth, addressing the pope, with regard to the severe penal laws which oppressed them, laid the whole blame of the Government s action on the Jesuits, as having provoked XIII. 82