ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS
While painters and sculptors and architects and poets during the
Renaissance period were creating masterpieces that were to influence
all succeeding generations, a Spanish soldier, using men as his
material, created a human masterpiece for the accomplishment of great
purposes that was destined to be as vital and enduring as any of the
supreme achievements of the time. As Raphael used color and
Michelangelo marble, and Leonardo da Vinci the original ideas of an
inventive genius of first rank, Ignatius Loyola formed men's wills to
a great creative end that was destined to influence not only Europe
but every continent on the globe perhaps more than any other creation
of the time. The Company of Jesus, as he called it--and he liked to
add the epithet little--the band of trained soldiers whose motto was
to be "For the Greater Glory of God" (_Ad Major em Dei Gloriam_) and
whose purposes were to be as various as all the activities that can be
included under such a standard, came to be within half a century after
his death the most powerful body of intellectual men in their
influence over mankind that the world has ever seen. It was not so
much a deliberate creation as a Providential formation, gradually
finding its place in the world under the guiding genius of a great
soul living on after the death of the body it had informed.
Born in Spain in the Castle of Loyola the year before Columbus
discovered America, the youngest of eleven children, Ignatius until
his thirtieth year was a venturous chivalric soldier. Wounded at the
siege of Pamplona by the French in 1521, when his leg healed in bad
position, he had it rebroken, bearing the awful pain in those
pre-anaesthetic days rather than have his pride annoyed by deformity.
During the enforced idleness he read, after exhausting all the other
reading {207} of the place, especially the romances of chivalry, a
life of Christ and lives of various saints, particularly that of St.
Francis of Assisi, and came to the conclusion that life was only worth
living when lived in imitation of the God Man. Amidst many almost
incredible difficulties, for more than a dozen of years, he formed his
character by spiritual exercises, took up the study of grammar in a
class with little boys, supported himself by begging as one of the
beggar students of the time, and gathered around him at the University
of Paris a group of seven men, who in 1534 took their vows with him as
members of the Company of Jesus. With true Spanish chivalry, their
first object was to win over the Holy Land from the infidels by going
to Jerusalem and converting it. Prevented by war from doing this, they
became teachers and missionaries in Italy. Their zeal was so great and
yet so directed by reason, they were so absolutely unselfish and had a
charm that attracted so much attention, that they accomplished
wonders. The Pope received them with kindness and gave them
provisional confirmation of their rule. Pope Paul III had insisted on
limiting the number of religious orders because of abuses that had
arisen in them, but after reading Ignatius' rule he declared "the
finger of God is here," gave them the fullest confirmation and in 1543
they were acknowledged as one of the religious orders of the Church.
Francis Thompson has summed up very strikingly, with a poet's eye for
effect, the situation in Europe when Loyola was born. That will give
the best idea what a confusion there was all around him at the moment
when this son of an obscure nobleman began the work that was finally
destined to bring order out of much of the religious and educational
chaos of the time at least:
"It was a great, a brilliant, a corrupt epoch, fraught with
possibilities of glory and peril to a youth of Spain. The old order
was yielding. Throughout Europe the nations were loud with the
falling ruins of feudalism, and the consolidation of absolute
monarchies was ushering in the new political creation. In a mighty
dust of war and revolt Christendom itself was vanishing, leaving in
its stead an adjustment of States {208} on a secular basis, to be
known as 'the balance of European Power.'
"In the year after little Loyola's birth Columbus sailed to begin
the New World. When the boy passed to the Court the day of Ferdinand
and Isabella was done; Charles V was waiting to ascend the Spanish
throne. Before he began the campaign which ended in the breach of
Pamplona, Charles had inherited the sceptre of Spain and been
elected to the Empire of Germany. The great captain, Gonsalvo de
Cordova, was dead; Francis I was King of France, singing _'Souvent
femme varie,_ and preparing to tilt with Charles for the supremacy
of Europe. English Harry was still bluff Hal, no gospel light yet
dawned from Boleyn's eyes and many an English Queen, little dreaming
of that perilous dignity to come, still bore her head on her
shoulders. But a thick-necked young German friar, with the
Reformation in his cowl, was about to cut the tow-rope between the
Teuton nations and the boat of Peter. There was a constable Bourbon
who should presently halloo those revolting Teutons to the sack of
Rome, there was Cellini, a goldsmith, who should brag to have killed
him there: a young Gaston de Foix was to flame athwart Italy, and
leave like a modern Epaminondas--the victors weeping at Ravenna: a
Bayard, last of chivalry in an unchivalric age, was to leave a name
_sans peur et sans reproche._ And there was a young Loyola: what of
him? Why, before Cervantes came to laugh Spain's chivalry away,
should he not be a Spanish Bayard, a Spanish Gaston de Foix, or
indeed both in one?"
A knight he dreamed to be and a knight he was to be, but very
different from his dreams. Cervantes did not laugh Spain's nor
Europe's chivalry away. Any such thought was farthest from him.
Ignatius Loyola was to demonstrate the chivalry still in many hearts
and was to form and lead men who should accomplish knight-errant tasks
all over the world, thinking not of themselves, but lifting men up, an
army, as I have said he preferred to call it "a little company," of
leaders of others to what seemed less quixotic in his time than in
ours, the greater glory of God, but was not without its visionary
quality even then. A knight undaunted, _sans peur et sans reproche,_
{209} he surely was, but when he fell his purpose actively survived
him, his own great soul had passed into it and it was destined to
survive him apparently forever.
After nearly four centuries the Jesuits, as Ignatius' "little company
of Jesus" came to be called, are still at their work--teachers,
missionaries, writers, scientists, editors; anywhere and everywhere
accomplishing the purpose of their founder, doing anything and
everything that seems best fitted to advance according to their motto,
"The Greater Glory of God." When they were suppressed in 1773 there
were about twenty thousand of them. After a full generation of formal
non-existence they rose from the dead, as it were, and now there are
some sixteen thousand of them in the world, with some twenty-five
thousand pupils in their schools in this country alone, and probably
two hundred thousand in their schools all over the world. No body of
men have more influence, nor is that influence used more for good,
than is true of the Jesuits. They are human, and individual members
have their faults.
Ignatius was named as the first General, and to him is due the
Constitutions of the Order. His only other writing is the little book
of the "Spiritual Exercises," a compendium of the thoughts with which
men were to exercise their souls and hearts during the thirty days of
retreat which they made in order to strip themselves as far as
possible of earthly motives and of all selfishness, so as to take up
seriously the following of Christ. It has been said, and probably with
justice, that this little book has influenced the conduct of men more
since it was written than any that ever came from the hands of man. It
was composed within the same quarter of a century while Machiavelli
was writing "The Prince." The Jesuit constitutions have been the
admiration of all those who have given them deep study and they are
the model of those of most of the religious orders, both of men and
women, founded since his time. They were not written with ideals alone
in mind, but they were a growth in the mind of Ignatius during the
years of his generalate and represent the condensed practical
experience of the Jesuits during the first ten years of their
existence as it passed through the alembic of a genius {210} for
government, directed by a saint's absolute desire only to secure the
greater glory of God.
The only purpose of Ignatius was to influence men to imitate the life
that the God Man had lived on earth, which had become the absorbing
motive of his own life. He gave himself as a result to all forms of
work for social betterment that would conduce to this. The teaching of
catechism to children was considered most important by him, and he
took it on himself as a personal obligation. The social evil and the
reform of erring women were his special care in Rome, and he did not
hesitate to be seen conducting these women to a house of refuge that
he had had established for them in the city. His work for them
accomplished great and lasting good. He realized that education was
the most important means of influencing men, so to this his order was
particularly devoted.
Ignatius' supreme quality was his marvellous ability to select the men
who would be of service in great undertakings. St. Francis Xavier, who
became the great Apostle of the Indies, acknowledged that he owed
under Providence his call to this sublime work entirely to Ignatius,
who had turned his ambition from the pursuit of scholarly distinction
to a life directed to the extension of Christianity. The brilliant
young professor at the University of Paris who at first rather
despised the elderly student, apparently slow-witted because of
unaccustomedness to the task of study, came to look upon Ignatius
almost as a second father, and his expression "What doth it profit a
man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" became for him the
keynote of existence. Once he had given himself to the new purpose in
life, Francis Xavier took nothing back, and when Ignatius obtained for
him the privilege of going to the Indies as an apostle he succeeded in
the ten years between 1542 and 1552 in planting Christianity firmly
among the natives in both India and Japan, and was only prevented from
accomplishing as much for China by his premature death in 1552. As it
was, he left the inspiration of his example to be the spirit of the
greatest missionary work in the East that has ever been known.
This work of the missions was to be one of the principal {211}
features of Jesuit accomplishment during the after-time. While they
conducted some of the most important colleges in Europe and came to
have more than one hundred thousand students under their care within a
hundred years, their missionaries were soon to be found in every land.
The century of Jesuit missions in Japan after St. Francis Xavier's
time is one of the most glorious, edifying and romantic chapters in
Church history. They succeeded in converting many thousands of
Japanese and organizing them into Christian communities. Unfortunately
political troubles within, commercial rivalries of various kinds from
without eventually led to the persecution of the Christians. The
Japanese Christians showed then that they knew how to die with the
firmness of the early martyrs. All the priests were put to death or
banished, and yet so thorough had been the training of the native
catechists that even in our own time, with the opening up of Japan to
missionary work again, village communities have been found in which
the Christian faith was preserved.
In India their success was not less remarkable and they succeeded in
solving the caste problem, which had been up to this time a hopeless
obstacle in the path of Christianity. Robert de Nobili, the nephew of
Bellarmine, the great theological writer and historian of the Church,
adopted the dress and the extremely difficult habits of life of the
high-caste Brahmin. In a few years he succeeded in converting over one
hundred thousand of this hitherto impossibly exclusive class. He had
many worthy companions as his colleagues and successors. Among others
Andrada, the first Apostle of Thibet, succeeded in penetrating into
the forbidden sacred land of the Lamas and in making many conversions.
All the castes of India were taken care of and there were great
missionary centres at Goa, Mangalore, Madura, Calcutta and Bombay.
The Chinese missions of the Jesuits were in their own good time not
less successful and in certain ways gave the order even greater
prestige. Distinguished scholars like Father Ricci impressed
themselves upon even the contemptuous Chinese mandarins, established
astronomical observatories and succeeded in gaining the favor of the
Court. As a consequence, their brethren received permission to
evangelize the people, {212} and proceeded to make many thousands of
converts. Unfortunately, here as in Japan, political disturbances in
China itself and Western commercial jealousies, with the fear that the
Jesuits might favor certain nations rather than others in trade, led
eventually to their banishment and the destruction of their missions.
It is on the American continent, however, that the story of the Jesuit
missions is particularly interesting for Americans. Ignatius himself
founded the missions in South America, opening up the missions of
Brazil through Father De Nobreza in 1549. Later in Chili, in Peru and
in Mexico the Jesuits labored with unexampled success among the
Indians. At the beginning of the seventeenth century they established
the famous Reductions of Paraguay. These were communities of Christian
Indians living in peaceful ways in the most happy community life. The
story of the life led by the Indians in these Reductions reads more
like some ideal commonwealth than an actual chapter of the history of
a savage people gradually being brought to a happy civilization.
Students of social order have often gone back to study the ways and
means by which this great work was accomplished and have been
enthusiastic in their praise of the marvels accomplished. In 1717
these Reductions in Paraguay counted over one hundred thousand
Christian Indians. With the suppression of the Society in the
Portuguese dominions after the middle of the eighteenth century they
fell into decay, and an accomplished ideal of human life that made men
happier than has perhaps ever before been the case disappeared from
existence.
In North America the labors of the Jesuits were quite as wonderful as
elsewhere, perhaps even more marvellous in the heroism displayed than
in any other part of the globe. Their labors among the Indians, though
they risked and often incurred torture and death and though their
lives involved the most difficult kind of labors under the most trying
conditions of hardship, lack of food and suffering from the
inclemencies of the climate, and the still more uncertain temper of
the savages, form a chapter in the history of humanity that is among
the most stirring tales of human bravery for a high, unselfish
purpose. The lives of such men as Fathers Daniel, Lallemant, {213}
Breboeuf, Jogues and Marquette are monuments of supreme human devotion
to the great cause of humanity and Christianity. They preceded the
pioneers, and their stories of life among the Indians as told in the
"Jesuit Relations" are the most precious documents in the early
history of exploration on this continent, making important
contributions to the sciences of Indian ethnology and of American
geography, as well as other departments of knowledge. Bancroft said of
them: "The history of their labors is connected with the origin of
every celebrated town in the annals of French America; not a cape was
turned, nor a river entered but a Jesuit led the way." Parkman has
paid a fine tribute to their work as missionaries and pioneers, though
it is sad to see how ill he appreciated the motive of their work and
how he failed almost completely to realize the sublime humanity of
their intentions.
Everywhere they went they devoted themselves not only to the spread of
Christianity, but also to the gathering of precious scientific
information, which they transmitted to Europe. They brought about the
introduction into Europe of valuable botanical specimens, especially
of medicinal plants and various substances that they found in use
among the Indians. The name Jesuits' bark for quinine is only a
testimony to the fact that it was a missionary of the order in Brazil
who first learned how valuable this substance was in the treatment of
malarial fevers and brought about its introduction into Europe. They
compiled dictionaries of the Indian languages, which are now the only
remains of some of these native American languages, important
contributions to philology. Often these language studies are the only
significant evidence of the relationships among the Indian tribes and
of their real place of origin in the country. The geographical
knowledge that they gathered and transmitted was most precious.
All this was done in the midst of a self-sacrificing life among the
Indians that a modern reads with ever-increasing astonishment. It
seems almost incredible when it is recalled that the men who bore
these sufferings so heroically were always highly educated, scholarly
graduates of European colleges and often the descendants of gently
nurtured families. Not infrequently the missionaries could see but
very little fruit {214} from their labors for long periods and they
had to be satisfied if they could make even a few converts among the
old and the women and children as the result of years of labor. The
contribution to civilization of these men, formed after the mighty
saintly mind of Columbus' great contemporary Ignatius Loyola, is one
of the greatest things that we owe to Columbus' Century.
The most important function of the Jesuits, however, as planned by
Ignatius himself, was not missionary work, but education. Ignatius
contemplated that his little Company of Jesus should be, first of all,
teachers. His constitutions arranged the training and outlined the
methods. Before a generation had passed after his death they had some
of the best schools in Europe. Everywhere the Jesuit schools were
attended by the better classes, and the first century of the history
of the Jesuits had not closed before there were more than one hundred
thousand students in attendance in their classrooms. The reason for
this was that their system of teaching and of intellectual discipline
turned out scholars better than any other. What they taught as the
basis of education was the classics. The humanities had come in as a
great feature of education with the Renaissance. When the order was
founded the Renaissance spirit was at its height and the schools of
the New Learning had multiplied all over Europe. The Jesuits adopted
it as the best means of training the mind, and how well they used it
history shows.
At once, with that careful attention to details so characteristic of
the order, they began to systematize education, and the great _ratio
studiorum_, probably the most significant contribution to the
literature of methods of education ever made, was the result. It
emphasized particularly the necessity for the prelection, that is, of
preliminary discussion and explanation of the lesson which the
students were expected to study for the next day, careful methods of
recitation and demonstration and then finally insisted on the need of
frequent repetitions. Competition was looked upon as a most precious
element for the arousing of student interest. After a period of
neglect, we are coming back to this thought once more. Themes, that
is, written exercises, and especially those {215} in which the
language to be learned was directly employed, were set down as a most
important factor in linguistic education. The actual use of the
language to be learned in class was dwelt on. After the classics the
student was expected to take a course in philosophy, that is, in logic
and general metaphysics and psychology, before graduation. Above all,
moral as well as intellectual training was insisted on.
In his "Essays on Educational Reformers," Quick summed up in the first
paragraph of his book the place of the Jesuits in education rather
strikingly: "Since the revival of learning, no body of men has played
so prominent a part in education as the Jesuits. With characteristic
sagacity and energy, they soon seized on education as a stepping-stone
to power and influence; and with their talent for organization, they
framed a system of schools which drove all important competitors from
the field, and made Jesuits the instructors of Catholic, and even, to
some extent, of Protestant Europe. Their skill in this capacity is
attested by the highest authorities, by Bacon and Descartes, the
latter of whom had himself been their pupil; and it naturally met with
its reward: for more than one hundred years nearly all the foremost
men throughout Christendom, both among the clergy and laity, had
received the Jesuit training, and for life regarded their old masters
with reverence and affection."
If the estimation of any body of teachers is to be rightly adjudged,
surely there can be no better source of evidence with regard to them
than what is to be obtained from their students. Almost without
exception pupils of the Jesuits are most ardent in their praise. Only
those who do not know them personally have been bitter in denunciation
of them. To know them well enough is to love and honor them.
A few of the names of the great pupils of the Jesuit schools will
serve to exemplify the sort of men that they were influencing by their
education. Among them were: Bossuet, Corneille, Moliere, Bourdaloue,
Tasso, Fontenelle, Diderot, Voltaire, Bourdelais, Descartes, Buffon,
Justus Lipsius, Muratori, Calderon, Vico the jurisconsult, Richelieu,
Tilly, Malesherbes, Don John of Austria, Luxemburg, Esterhazy,
Choiseul, St. Francis de Sales, Lambertini, one of the great scholars
of his {216} time, afterwards the most learned of Popes under the name
of Benedict XIV, and the late Pope Leo XIII, one of the greatest of
the moderns.
Some idea of the productiveness of the Jesuits as scientific,
philosophic and literary writers may be obtained from the catalogue of
their works issued by the Fathers de Backer and which has been brought
up to date by Father Sommervogel. Hughes, in "Loyola and the
Educational System of the Jesuits" in the Great Educators Series
(Scribner's, 1902), has summed up the significance of these works:
"But at length the two Fathers de Backer published a series of seven
quarto volumes, in the years 1853-1861; and the first step they
followed up, in the years 1869-1876, with a new edition in three
immense folios, containing the names of 11,100 authors. This number
does not include the supplements, with the names of writers in the
present century, and of the anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Of
this last category. Father Sommervogel's researches, up to 1884,
enabled him to publish a catalogue, which fills a full octavo volume
of 600 pages, with double columns. The writers of this century, whom
the De Backers catalogued in their supplement, filled 647 columns,
folio, very small print. Altogether the three folios contain 7,086
columns, compressed with every art of typographical condensation.
"Suarez of course is to be seen there, and Cornelius a Lapide,
Petau, and the Bollandists. A single name like that of Zaccaria has
117 works recorded under it--whereof the 116th is in thirteen
volumes quarto, and the 117th in twenty-two volumes octavo. The
catechism of Canisius fills nearly eleven columns with the notices
of its principal editions, translations, abridgments; the
commentaries upon it, and critiques. Rossignol has 66 works to his
name. The list of productions about Edmund Campion, for or against
him, chiefly in English, fills in De Backers' folio, two and a half
columns of minutest print. Bellarmine, in Father Sommervogel's new
edition, fills fifty pages, double column.
"Under each work are recorded the editions, translations, sometimes
made into every language, including Arabic, {217} Chinese, Indian;
also the critiques, and the works published in refutation--a
controversial enterprise which largely built up the Protestant
theological literature of the times, and, in Bellarmine's case
alone, meant the theological Protestant literature for 40 or 50
years afterwards. Oxford founded an anti-Bellarmine chair. The
editions of one of this great man's works are catalogued by
Sommervogel under the distinct heads of 54 languages.
"In the methodical or synoptic table, at the end of the De Backers'
work, not only are the subjects well-nigh innumerable, which have
their catalogues of authors' names attached to them, but such
subjects too are here as might not be expected. Thus "Military Art"
has 32 authors' names under it; Agriculture 11; Navy 12; Music 45;
Medicine 28.
"To conclude then this history of our Educational Order, we have one
synoptical view of it in these twelve or thirteen thousand authors,
all of one family. We have much more. This one work 'attesting,' as
De Backer says in his Preface, 'at one and the same time a
prodigious activity and often an indisputable merit, whereof three
and a half centuries have been the course in time, and the whole
world the place and theatre, is a general record of religion,
letters, science and education in every country, civilized or
barbarous, where the Society of Jesus labored and travelled.'"
Very often it seems to be thought that, since the basis of Jesuit
education was the classics, therefore little or no attention was paid
to the sciences and consequently an important phase of human
intellectual development was neglected and an essential set of
interests of humanity were set back or at least failed of their
evolution. Those who think that, however, fail entirely to know the
history of the Jesuits and their educational efforts and achievements.
As a matter of fact, the Jesuits have always had distinguished
scientists among them, and many of the great discoverers and teachers
in science for the last three centuries and a half have been members
of the order. Very early in their history the Jesuits turned their
attention to astronomy, then the one of the physical sciences most
developed, and nearly every important Jesuit College soon had an
observatory in which good work {218} was done. When Gregory XIII,
scarcely more than a quarter of a century after Ignatius' death,
wanted to bring about the reformation of the calendar, it was to a
Jesuit, Father Clavius, that he turned. Ever since that time there
have been distinguished Jesuit astronomers. In our own time, Father
Secchi, the Jesuit, probably did more important work than any other
single astronomer of the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
Among the names of the Jesuit astronomers are: Father Scheiner, who
made observations particularly on the sun; Father Cysatus, whose
papers on comets are justly numbered among the most important
concerning this subject; Father Zupi, who first described the dark
stripes or bands on Jupiter and first saw the phases of Mercury which
Galileo surmised rather than saw; Father Grimaldi, who studied Saturn
and drew up one of the first maps of the moon worthy of the name;
Father Riccioli, who introduced the lunar nomenclature; Father
Maximilian Hell, whose memory our own Newcomb vindicated, and many
others.
They were noted for their intimate relations with scholars who were
devoting themselves to similar subjects, and they were close
correspondents of Kepler and succeeded in helping him to keep his
professorship at the University of Gratz when the Emperor of Austria
issued a decree banishing all Protestant professors from Austrian
Universities. [Footnote 21]
[Footnote 21: About this same time when Harvey on a trip through
Europe went to visit the Jesuits in their colleges in a number of
towns, the fact was noted by the men who accompanied him, and they
jested with him as regards the possibility of his either converting
the Jesuits or being converted by them. He said, however, that he
found nowhere more sympathetic friends and interested scholars than
among these religious. His friendship for them has even given some
ground for the declaration that he may have been a Catholic.]
It must not be thought, however, that the Jesuits were interested only
in astronomy. They had a large number of mathematicians and of
teachers of all the physical sciences. The famous Roman College,
founded in St. Ignatius' time, was always looked up to as the type of
what a Jesuit College should be. It was here that the great scholarly
Father Kircher taught for nearly half of the seventeenth century. He
was invited to Rome to begin his teaching there just {219} before the
condemnation of Galileo. He would not have received the invitation had
there been the slightest feeling of opposition on the part of the
Church or his order to the teaching of science. While teaching at the
Roman College he wrote a series of text-books on all phases of
physical science. There are several text-books on magnetism, one on
light, a second on sound, a third on astronomy, a fourth on the
subterranean world and many others.
It would be easy to think that these books are mere compilations and
that they were probably scarcely more than small hand-books of the
imperfect knowledge of the time. On the contrary, they are magnificent
large volumes beautifully printed, finely illustrated, bibliographic
treasures full of original observation. They are some of the best
text-books ever issued. Father Kircher's originality is demonstrated
by the fact that he is the perfecter of the projecting stereoscope or
magic lantern, which he was led to invent in his desire to be able to
make demonstrations to his classes. He also founded the Kircherian
Museum, by which the teaching of anthropology and ethnology were
greatly furthered through the curiosities sent to Rome by the Jesuit
missionaries all over the world. His book, "On the Pest," is full of
observations of great value and contains the first suggestions that
infectious diseases are carried by insects. There was no subject that
he touched that he did not illuminate.
Since that time there have been many distinguished Jesuit scientists,
and they have continued their work down to our own day. At the present
time, one of the best known of biologists in the special field of
entomology is Father Wasmann, S.J., who has published some seven
hundred papers on ants, their hosts and guests, and who, taking
advantage of the help of his brethren all over the world, has
described many hundreds of new species. How successful the Jesuits
have been in their pursuit of science will perhaps be best realized
from the fact that, while in Poggendorff's "Biographical Dictionary of
Science" out of something less than nine thousand names nearly one
thousand are Catholic clergymen, about five hundred of these are
Jesuits. Their occupations first of all as priests often left them but
little leisure {220} for scientific investigations, and yet they
succeeded in stamping their names upon the history of science.
Two departments of modern science owe much to them. Father Secchi's
wonderful inventions of instruments for meteorology were awarded
prizes by the French Academy of Sciences, and other members of the
order made successful investigations in the science. The Jesuits in
the Philippines and the West Indies have done more to study out the
conditions which precede cyclones and hurricanes so as to give warning
with regard to them than any others. Their work was fully recognized
by the United States Government. Many of the Jesuit colleges and
universities throughout the world now have seismological observatories
for the study of earthquakes, and undoubtedly their intimate
connection and wide distribution will bring important details of
information into this department of knowledge from which significant
conclusions may be reached.
The work of the Jesuits has come to be better appreciated in
English-speaking countries, where old religious prejudices hampered
its proper recognition, until comparatively recent times. Macaulay, in
his essay on Ranke's "History of the Popes," has summed up the
achievements of the Jesuits in his own striking way. When he wrote the
Jesuits were unknown personally in England, and so it is not
surprising that there are passages in his panegyric that are full of
the old prejudices which had accumulated in English history and by
which the term Jesuitic has become a word of the worst reproach.
Macaulay's wide reading, however, had brought to him a very extensive
knowledge of the wonderful work accomplished by Loyola and his sons
during the two centuries after their foundation. The passage is too
well known to be more than referred to here.
His tribute to their successful work as missionaries all over the
world, which undoubtedly set the fashion after which Protestant
historians in English-speaking countries have come to acknowledge the
marvellous work of the Jesuits among the savages, is not so well
known: "The old world was not wide enough for this strange activity.
The Jesuits invaded all the countries which the great marine
discoveries of the preceding {221} age had laid open to European
enterprise. In the depths of the Peruvian mines, at the marts of the
African slave-caravans, on the shores of the Spice Islands, in the
observatories of China, they were to be found. They made converts in
regions which neither avarice nor curiosity had tempted any of their
countrymen to enter, and preached and disputed in tongues of which no
other native of the West understood a word."
No wonder that Parkman, who in some ways has helped to make us
Americans understand them better but who in many ways is utterly
lacking in proper sympathy for them probably because he failed to know
them well personally, said of them:
"The Jesuit was, and is, everywhere--in the schoolroom, in the
library, in the cabinets of princes and ministers, in the huts of
savages, in the tropics, in the frozen north, in India, in China, in
Japan, in Africa, in America; now as a Christian priest, now as a
soldier, a mathematician, an astrologer, a Brahmin, a mandarin,
under countless disguises, by a thousand arts, luring, persuading,
or compelling souls into the fold of Rome."
He feels sure that there must be much to condemn in them, since they
have been the subject of so much criticism and persecution. Like many
another, he cannot bring himself to think that their founder's last
wish for them, that they should be persecuted even as their Lord and
Master was, should be the symbol of their fate. Where he knows them
best, however, as in Canada, he has unmixed praise for them, though he
declares that it is not for him to eulogize them, but to portray them
as they were.
At once the keynote for the proper appreciation of the Jesuits and the
summary of what Loyola accomplished through them is to be found in the
closing paragraphs of Francis Thompson's "Life of St. Ignatius"
(Benzigers': New York, 1909, pp. 318):
"Issuing from this Manresan cave, forgotten by the world which he
had forgotten, and rejected in the land which bore him, single and
unaided he constructed and set in motion a force that stemmed and
rolled back the reformation which had engulfed the North and
threatened to conquer {222} Christendom. He cast the foundations of
his Order deep; and, satisfied that his work was good, died--leaving
it for legacy only the God-required gift that all men should speak
ill of it.
"Most singular bequest that Founder ever transmitted, it has
singularly been fulfilled. The union of energy and patience,
sagacity and a self-devotion which held nothing impossible that was
bidden it, were the leading qualities of St. Ignatius; and so far as
his Order has prospered, it has been because it incarnated the
qualities of its Founder. The administrative genius which, among the
princes of Europe or the 'untutored minds' of Paraguay, is perhaps
its most striking secular feature, comes to it direct from the man
who might have ruled provinces in the greatest empire of the
sixteenth century; but chose rather to rule, from the altars of the
Church, an army which has outlasted the armies of Spain, and made
conquests more perdurable than the vast empire which drifted to its
fall in the wake of the broken galleons of the Armada."
The Jesuits are literally one of the greatest creations of this great
period. Not to know them as such is to miss the significance of their
order and not a little of the true spirit of the epoch from which they
sprang. The arts and literature of the Renaissance produced no work
destined to live so vividly, nor to influence men in all succeeding
generations so deeply, as "the little company of Jesus," as Ignatius
of Loyola conceived and organized it.
{223}
[Illustration: HOLBEIN, SIR THOMAS MORE]