obedience to the central authority—the general for the time being; utter unscrupulousness as to means; and the supremacy which knowledge always confers. Far from occupying themselves, like the Protestant clergy, exclusively with theology, there was no branch of knowledge that was not cultivated by these champions of the Church; indeed they stood for a century at the summit of learning[1]. And now, in the most recent epoch of that stigmatised century, Galileo the layman steps forth upon the arena of the science of the heavens and the earth, and teaches the astonished world truths before which the whole edifice of scholastic sophistry must fall to the ground. The Jesuit monopoly of the education of youth and of teaching altogether, became day by day more insecure, and the influence of the society was threatened in proportion. Was it to be wondered at that the pious fathers strained every nerve in this final conflict for mastery, and in the attempt to prevent their world-wide mission of educating from being torn from their hands? This explains why the reformers of science appeared just as dangerous to them as those of religion; and they resisted the former, as they had done the latter, with all the resources at their command.
Galileo, as one of the most advanced pioneers of science, was in the highest degree inconvenient to the Jesuits; members of their order had also repeatedly measured lances with the great man in scientific discussion—Fathers Grassi and Scheiner, for instance—with very unfortunate results, by no means calculated to make the Society of Jesus more favourable to him. But now that his "Dialogues on the Two Systems of the World" had appeared, which, as every intelligent man must perceive, annihilated with its overwhelming mass of evidence the doctrines of the old school, and raised the modern system upon its ruins, the Jesuits set every
- ↑ Comp. on this subject the chapters on "Die Gesellschaft Jesu" in "Kulturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entwicklung bis zur Gegenwart," by Fr. v. Hellwald, Augsburg, 1874, pp. 691-966.
