Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/684

654 JESUITS once in 1581, and again in 1601, as conspirators against the life of Queen Elizabeth, and later again for their share in. the Gunpowder Plot ; from France as accomplices in the attempt of Chatel to assas sinate Henry IV. ; and from Antwerp as having resisted the pacifi cation of Ghent. It is true that the edict of the parliament of Paris in 1594, which banished them from France, was revoked in 1603, by desire of Henry IV., who permitted them to return under con ditions ; and this fact has been much relied on by Jesuit writers in proof of their innocence of all complicity in Chatel s plot. But as Sully has recorded for us that Henry declared his only motive to be the expediency of not driving them into a corner, and so inducing them to murder him through despair or revenge, and that his only hope of tranquillity lay in appeasing them, his conduct dees not tell much in their favour. It was also during Acquaviva s generalship that Philip II. of Spain complained bitterly of the company to Pope Sixtus V., and encouraged him in those plans of reform which were cut short by his death in 1590, and also that the long-protracted discussions on grace, wherein the Dominicans contended against the Jesuits, were carried on at Rome, with little practical result, by the Con gregation DC Auxiliis, which began to sit in 1598, and continued till 1607. He saw too the expulsion of the Jesuits from Venice in 1606 for siding with Paul V. when he placed the republic under an interdict, but did not live to see their recall, which took place at the intercession of Louis XIV. in 1657. But the concessions made to the company by Gregory XIV., successor of Sixtus V., during his short reign of twelve months, almost seemed to compensate for all these troubles ; for he not only confirmed all existing privileges, but conferred also that of being able to expel members of the society without any form of trial, or even documentary procedure, besides denouncing excommunication against every one save the pope or his legates who directly or indirectly infringed the constitutions of the society, or attempted to bring about any change therein. Under Vitelleschi, Acquaviva s successor, the first centenary of the society was held on September 25, 1639, the hundredth anniversary of the verbal approbation given to the draft constitutions by Paul III., and there were then thirty-six provinces, with eight hundred houses, containing fifteen thousand Jesuits. It was in the following year that the great controversy which raged for a century in the Latin Church broke out by the posthumous publication of the Auynstinus of Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres, in which the Jesuits took the leading part, and finally secured the victory for their teaching throughout the Roman obedience. It was in this same year 1640 that, considering themselves ill-used by the count- duke Olivarez, prime minister of Philip IV. of Spain, they power fully aided the revolution which placed the duke of Braganza on the throne of Portugal, and their services were rewarded with a practical control of ecclesiastical and almost of civil affairs in that kingdom, which lasted for more than a hundred years. The society also gained ground steadily in France, for, though held in check during Richelieu s life, and little more favoured by Mazarin, yet from the moment Louis XIV. assumed the reins of government, their star was in the ascendant, and Jesuit confessors, the most celebrated of whom were La Chaise and Letellier, guided the policy of the king, not hesitating to take his side in his quarrel with the Holy See, which nearly resulted in a schism, nor to sign the Galilean articles. How their hostility to the Huguenots forced on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and their war against Jansenism did not cease till the very walls of Port Royal were demolished in 1710, even to the abbey church itself, and the bodies of the holy dead taken with every mark of insult from their graves, and literally flung to the dogs to devour, is well known. But, while thus gaining power in one direction, the company was losing it in others. The Japanese mission had vanished in blood by 1651, and, though many Jesuit fathers and their converts died bravely as martyrs for the faith, yet it is impossible to acquit them of a large share in the causes of that overthrow. And it was about this same period that the grave scandal of the Chinese and Malabar rites, already referred to, began to attract attention in Europe, and to make thinking men ask seriously whether the Jesuit missionaries taught anything which could be fairly called Christianity at all. When it is remembered, too, that they decided in a council at Lima that it was inexpedient to impose any act of Christian devotion except baptism on their South American converts, without the greatest precautions, on the ground of intellectual difficulties, it is not wonderful that this doubt was not satisfactorily cleared up, notably in face of the charges brought against the society by Berii- ardin do Cardonas, bishop of Paraguay, and the saintly Palafox, bishop of Angelopolis in Mexico, whom they persecuted till he had to fly for his life, and could be protected by the pope himself only by his translation to a European see. As regards their North American work, the Abbe Badiche, continuator of Helyot, pays the Jesuits the doubtful compliment of saying that the Red Indian tribes which accepted the gospel with joy, " learned to mingle Jesus Christ and France together in their affection." The seeds of decay were already germinating within the company itself. A succession of devout but incapable generals after the death of Acquaviva saw the gradual secularization of tone by the flocking in of recruits of rank and wealth, desirous to share in the glories and influence of the company, but not well adapted to increase them, and too readily admitted on merely temporal grounds ; while the old strict discipline was relaxed, as the professed fathers gradually encroached on the general s authority, till they went the length, in 1661, of appointing a vicar-general with powers which practically superseded those of the general, Goswin Nickel, whom they did not think it expedient to depose formally. And, though the political weight of the company continued to increase in the cabinets of Europe, yet it was being 1 steadily weakened internally. They abandoned, too, the system of free education, which had won them so much influence and honour ; by attaching themselves exclusively to the interests of courts, they lost favour with the middle and lower classes ; and, above all, their monopoly of power and patronage in France, with the fatal use they had made of it, drew down the bitterest hostility upon them. It was indeed to their credit that the Encyclopedists attacked them as the foremost representatives of Christianity, but they are accountable in no small degree for the unfavourable opinion of the nature and merits of Christianity itself which their opponents entertained. But that part of the policy of the company which proved most fatal to it, and served as the pre text of the attacks before which it fell, was its activity, wealth, and importance as a great trading firm, with branch houses scattered over the richest producing countries in the world. Its founder, with a wise instinct, had forbidden the accumulation of wealth ; its own constitutions, as revised in the eighty-fourth decree of the sixth general congregation, had forbidden all pursuits of a commer cial nature, as also had various popes, rescinding the decree of Gregory XIII. ; but nevertheless, the trade went on unceasingly. The first mutterings of the storm which was soon to break were heard in a severe brief issued in 1741 by Benedict XIV., the most learned and able of the later popes, wherein he denounced the Jesuits as "disobedient, contumacious, captious, and reprobate persons," and enacted many stringent regulations for their better government ; and this was followed up by two bulls, Ex quo sinyulari in 1742, and Omnium sollidtudinum in 1744, striking at their continued insubordination in the matter of the Chinese rites, which, however, did not save them from an edict of banishment from China itself in 1753, and the last of them disappeared thence in 1774. The first serious attack came from a country where they had been long dominant. In 1753 Spain and Portugal exchanged certain American provinces with each other, which involved a transfer of sovereign rights over Paraguay, but it was provided that the popula tions should severally migrate also, that the subjects of each crown might remain the same as before. The inhabitants of the reduc tions," whom the Jesuits had trained in the use of European arms and discipline, rose in revolt, and attacked the troops and authorities. Their previous docility, and their entire submission to the Jesuit missionaries, left no doubt possible as to the source of their rebellion, though direct proof was, as usual, lacking ; and the matter was not soon forgotten. In 1757 Carvalho, marquis of Pombal, prime minister of Joseph I. of Portugal, dismissed the three Jesuit chap lains of the king, and named three secular priests in their stead. He next complained to Benedict XIV. that the trading operations of the society hampered the commercial prosperity of the nation, and asked for remedial measures. The pope granted a visitation of the society, and committed it to Cardinal Saldanha, a close inti mate of Pombal s. He issued a severe decree against the Jesuits, and ordered the confiscation of all their merchandise. But at this juncture Benedict XIV. died, and was succeeded, much as had happened on several previous occasions, by a pope strongly in favour of the Jesuits, Cardinal Rezzonico, who took the title of Clement XIII. Pombal, finding that no help was to be expected from this quarter, adopted other means. The king was fired at and wounded on returning from an assignation with his mistress, the marchioness of Tavora, September 3, 1758. The duke of Aveiro, the marquis of Tavora, and other persons of high rank were tried and executed for conspiracy, while some of the Jesuits, who had undoubtedly been in communication with them, were charged, on evidence whose value there are no certain means of testing, but which seems very doubtful, with complicity in the attempted assassination. Pombal charged the whole society with its guilt, and, unwilling to await the dubious issue of an application he had made to the pope for licence to try them in the civil courts, whence they were exempt, issued a decree on September 1, 1759, ordering their immediate deportation from Portugal and all its dependencies, and their supersession by the bishops in the schools and universities. Those in Portugal were at once shipped to Italy, and such as were in the colonies expelled speedily after. In France, Madame de Pompadour was their enemy, it is said, because they endea voured to make her break off her connexion with Louis XV. , and refused her absolution on any other terms ; but the immediate cause of their ruin Avas the bankruptcy of F. Lavalette, the Jesuit administrator of Martinique, a daring speculator, Avho failed for 2,400,000 francs, and ruined some French commercial houses of note. Ricci, then general of the Jesuits, repudiated the debt,