might be too expensive to reproduce) did not seem too serious a disadvantage? Perhaps he may yet see fit to do so.
It would be easy to find fault with the panegyric on his order and its educational career which Father Hughes has given us. But its very faults, — its needlessly apologetic attitude, the narrow range of its sources, the scantness of its sympathies and of its visions, its chaotic historical method, its unconscious pedantries and half-conscious equivocations, even the polyglot flavor of its style and its un-English punctuation, — while they make it come somewhat short of that "adequate description and criticism" of its subject promised by the editor of the series, yet make it the better exponent of the great system of which it is not only an exposition, but a product. Of criticism, indeed, in the current sense there is nothing in Father Hughes's book. Painfully conscious though he is of the odium resting on his order, he never tells us the precise charges against its work. To him emulation and artificial rewards are incentives to study as blameless as they are effective. He is proud of the "consistent uniformity of doctrine" and the "intellectual concord" which "it may be difficult to find, or at least to ensure, outside of an organization such as the Society of Jesus"; for, as he conclusively adds, translating the first great Jesuit code of instruction, "the most learned men have always been persuaded that there is more subtlety shown, more applause merited and comfort enjoyed, in pursuing the lines of approved and received thought, than in a general license and novelty of opinion." To show subtlety, to merit applause, to enjoy comfort: what more could teacher or student seek? Nor does it trouble Father Hughes that the system of education he expounds takes thought neither for the search of truth as truth nor for the development of man as man. He does not, indeed, urge the system as a final one, and he points out the changes it has undergone; but he has neither strictures for its past nor suggestions for its future.
But, if Father Hughes is so blind to Jesuit defects as even, with touching naiveté, to take for sober praise the irony of Frederic of Prussia, he is keen-eyed to the real merits of his order's work; and nobody can read his pages without a fresh sense of the sources of its power. Its organization, its method, its trained teachers, its freedom to all, its democracy of spirit, its flexibility and tact, its courtesy and deference, are set forth with clearness and warmth. The book, like its
