confined to vestments and robes and forms of worship, and hatred of
ceremonies and holy days, and other matters which seemed to lean to
Romanism. But the grandeur and the permanence of the movement were
in a return to the faith of the primitive Church and a purer
national morality, and to the unrestricted study of the Bible, and
the exaltation of preaching and Christian instruction over forms
and liturgies and antiphonal chants; above all, the exaltation of
reason and learning in the interpretation of revealed truth, and
the education of the people in all matters which concern their
temporal or religious interests, so that a true and rapid progress
was inaugurated in civilization itself, which has peculiarly marked
all Protestant countries having religious liberty. Underneath all
these apparently insignificant squabbles and dissensions there were
two things of immense historical importance: first, a spirit of
intolerance on the part of government and of church dignitaries,--
the State allied with the Church forcing uniformity with their
decrees, and severely punishing those who did not accept them,--in
matters beyond all worldly authority; and, secondly, a rising
spirit of religious liberty, determined to assert its glorious
rights at any cost or hazard, and especially defended by the most
religious and earnest part of the clergy, who were becoming
Calvinistic in their creed, and were pushing the ideas of the
Reformation to their utmost logical sequence. This spirit was
suppressed during the reign of Elizabeth, out of general respect
and love for her as a Queen, and the external dangers to which the
realm was exposed from Spain and France, which diverted the
national mind. But it burst out fiercely in the next reigns, under
James and Charles, about the beginning of the seventeenth century.
And this is the last development of the Reformation in England to
which I can allude,--the great Puritan contest for liberty of
worship, running, when opposed unjustly and cruelly, into a contest
for civil liberty; that is, the right to change forms and
institutions of civil government, even to the dethronement of
kings, when it was the expressed and declared will of the people,
in whom was vested the ultimate source of sovereignty.
But here I must be brief. I tread on familiar ground, made
familiar by all our literature, especially by the most brilliant
writer of modern times, though not the greatest philosopher: I mean
that great artist and word-painter Macaulay, whose chief excellence
is in making clear and interesting and vivid, by a world of
illustration and practical good-sense and marvellous erudition,
what was obvious to his own objective mind, and obvious also to
most other enlightened people not much interested in metaphysical
disquisitions. No man more than he does justice to the love of
liberty which absolutely burned in the souls of the Puritans,--that
glorious party which produced Milton and Cromwell, and Hampden and
Bunyan, and Owen and Calamy, and Baxter and Howe.
The chief peculiarity of those Puritans--once called
Nonconformists, afterwards Presbyterians and Independents--was
their reception of the creed of John Calvin, the clearest and most
logical intellect that the Reformation produced, though not the
broadest; who reigned as a religious dictator at Geneva and in the
Reformed churches of France, and who gave to John Knox the
positivism and sternness and rigidity which he succeeded in
impressing upon the churches of Scotland. And the peculiar
doctrines which marked Calvin and his disciples were those deduced
from the majesty of God and the comparative littleness of man,
leading to and bound up with the impotence of the will, human
dependence, the necessity of Divine grace,--Augustinian in spirit,
but going beyond Augustine in the subtlety of metaphysical
distinctions and dissertations on free-will election, and
predestination,--unfathomable, but exceedingly attractive subjects
to the divines of the seventeenth century, creating a metaphysical
divinity, a theology of the brain rather than of the heart, a
brilliant series of logical and metaphysical deductions from
established truths, demanding to be received with the same
unhesitating obedience as the truths, or Bible declarations, from
which they are deduced. The greatness of human reason was never
more forcibly shown than in these deductions; but they were carried
so far as to insult reason itself and mock the consciousness of
mankind; so that mankind rebelled against the very force of the
highest reasonings of the human intellect, because they pushed
logical sequence into absurdity, or to dreadful conclusions:
Decretum quidem horribile fateor, said the great master himself.
The Puritans were trained in this theology, which developed the
loftiest virtues and the severest self-constraints; making them
both heroes and visionaries, always conscientious and sometimes
repulsive; fitting them for gigantic tasks and unworthy squabbles;
driving them to the Bible, and then to acrimonious discussions;
creating fears almost mediaeval; leading them to technical
observation of religious duties, and transforming the most genial
and affectionate people under the sun into austere saints, with
whom the most ascetic of monks would have had but little sympathy.
I will not dwell on those peculiarities which Macaulay ridicules
and Taine repeats,--the hatred of theatres and assemblies and
symbolic festivals and bell-ringings, the rejection of the
beautiful, the elongated features, the cropped hair, the unadorned
garments, the proscription of innocent pleasures, the nasal voice,
the cant phrases, the rigid decorums, the strict discipline,--
these, doubtless exaggerated, were more than balanced by the
observance of the Sabbath, family prayers, temperate habits, fervor
of religious zeal, strict morality, allegiance to duty, and the
perpetual recognition of God Almighty as the sovereign of this
world, to whom we are responsible for all our acts and even our
thoughts. They formed a noble material on which every emancipating
idea could work; men trained by persecutions to self-sacrifice and
humble duties,--making good soldiers, good farmers, good workmen in
every department, honest and sturdy, patient and self-reliant,
devoted to their families though not demonstrative of affection;
keeping the Sunday as a day of worship rather than rest or
recreation, cherishing as the dearest and most sacred of all
privileges the right to worship God according to the dictates of
conscience enlightened by the Bible, and willing to fight, even
amid the greatest privations and sacrifices, to maintain this
sacred right and transmit it to their children. Such were the men
who fought the battles of civil liberty under Cromwell, and
colonized the most sterile of all American lands, making the dreary
wilderness to blossom with roses, and sending out the shoots of
their civilization to conserve more fruitful and favored sections
of the great continent which God gave them, to try new experiments
in liberty and education.
I need not enumerate the different sects into which these Puritans
were divided, so soon as they felt they had the right to interpret
Scripture for themselves. Nor would I detail the various and cruel
persecutions to which these sects were subjected by the government
and the ecclesiastical tribunals, until they rose in indignation
and despair, and rebelled against the throne, and made war on the
King, and cut off his head; all of which they did from fear and for
self-defence as well as from vengeance and wrath.
Nor can I describe the counter reformation, the great reaction
which succeeded to the violence of the revolution. The English
reformation was not consummated until constitutional liberty was
heralded by the reign of William and Mary, when the nation became
almost unanimously Protestant, with perfect toleration of religions
opinions, although the fervor of the Puritans had passed away
forever, leaving a residuum of deep-seated popular antipathy to all
the institutions of Romanism and all the ideas of the Middle Ages.
The English reformation began with princes, and ended with the
agitations of the people. The German reformation began with the
people, and ended in the wars of princes. But both movements were
sublime, since they showed the force of religious ideas. Civil
liberty is only one of the sequences which exalt the character and
dignity of man amid the seductions and impediments of a gilded
material life.
AUTHORITIES.
Todd's Life of Cranmer; Strype's Life of Cranmer; Wood's Annals of
the Oxford University; Burnet's English Reformation; Doctor
Lingard's History of England; Macaulay's Essays; Fuller's Church
History; Gilpin's Life of Cranmer; Original Letters to Cromwell;
Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury; Butler's Book of the
Roman Catholic Church; Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical biography;
Turner's Henry VIII.; Froude's History of England; Fox's Life of
Latimer; Turner's Reign of Mary.
IGNATIUS LOYOLA.
A.D. 1491-1556
RISE AND INFLUENCE OF THE JESUITS.
Next to the Protestant Reformation itself, the most memorable moral
movement in the history of modern times was the counter-reformation
in the Roman Catholic Church, finally effected, in no slight
degree, by the Jesuits. But it has not the grandeur or historical
significance of the great insurrection of human intelligence which
was headed by Luther. It was a revival of the pietism of the
Middle Ages, with an external reform of manners. It was not
revolutionary; it did not cast off the authority of the popes, nor
disband the monasteries, nor reform religious worship: it rather
tended to strengthen the power of the popes, to revive monastic
life, and to perpetuate the forms of worship which the Middle Ages
had established. No doubt a new religions life was kindled, and
many of the flagrant abuses of the papal empire were redressed, and
the lives of the clergy made more decent, in accordance with the
revival of intelligence. Nor did it disdain literature or art, or
any form of modern civilization, but sought to combine progress
with old ideas; it was an effort to adapt the Roman theocracy to
changing circumstances, and was marked by expediency rather than
right, by zeal rather than a profound philosophy.
This movement took place among the Latin races,--the Italians,
French, and Spaniards,--having no hold on the Teutonic races except
in Austria, as much Slavonic as German. It worked on a poor
material, morally considered; among peoples who have not been
distinguished for stamina of character, earnestness, contemplative
habits, and moral elevation,--peoples long enslaved, frivolous in
their pleasures, superstitious, indolent, fond of fetes,
spectacles, pictures, and Pagan reminiscences.
The doctrine of justification by faith was not unknown, even in
Italy. It was embraced by many distinguished men. Contarini, an
illustrious Venetian, wrote a treatise on it, which Cardinal Pole
admired. Folengo ascribed justification to grace alone; and
Vittoria Colonna, the friend of Michael Angelo, took a deep
interest in these theological inquiries. But the doctrine did not
spread; it was not understood by the people,--it was a speculation
among scholars and doctors, which gave no alarm to the Pope. There
was even an attempt at internal reform under Paul III. of the
illustrious family of the Farnese, successor of Leo X. and Clement
VII., the two renowned Medicean popes. He made cardinals of
Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, Pole, Giberto,--all imbued with
reformative doctrines, and very religious; and these good men
prepared a plan of reform and submitted it to the Pope, which
ended, however, only in new monastic orders.
It was then that Ignatius Loyola appeared upon the stage, when
Luther was in the midst of his victories, and when new ideas were
shaking the pontifical throne. The desponding successor of the
Gregorys and the Clements knew not where to look for aid in that
crisis of peril and revolution. The monastic orders composed his
regular army, but they had become so corrupted that they had lost
the reverence of the people. The venerable Benedictines had
ceased to be men of prayer and contemplation as in the times of
Bernard and Anselm, and were revelling in their enormous wealth.
The cloisters of Cluniacs and Cistercians--branches of the
Benedictines--were filled with idle and dissolute monks. The
famous Dominicans and Franciscans, who had rallied to the defence
of the Papacy three centuries before,--those missionary orders that
had filled the best pulpits and the highest chairs of philosophy in
the scholastic age,--had become inexhaustible subjects of sarcasm
and mockery, for they were peddling relics and indulgences, and
quarrelling among themselves. They were hated as inquisitors,
despised as scholastics, and deserted as preachers; the roads and
taverns were filled with them. Erasmus laughed at them, Luther
abused them, and the Pope reproached them. No hope from such men
as these, although they had once been renowned for their missions,
their zeal, their learning, and their preaching.
At this crisis Loyola and his companions volunteered their
services, and offered to go wherever the Pope should send them, as
preachers, or missionaries, or teachers, instantly, without
discussion, conditions, or rewards. So the Pope accepted them,
made them a new religions Order; and they did what the Mendicant
Friars had done three hundred years before,--they fanned a new
spirit, and rapidly spread over Europe, over all the countries to
which Catholic adventurers had penetrated, and became the most
efficient allies that the popes ever had.
This was in 1540, six years after the foundation of the Society of
Jesus had been laid on the Mount of Martyrs, in the vicinity of
Paris, during the pontificate of Paul III. Don Inigo Lopez de
Recalde Loyola, a Spaniard of noble blood and breeding, at first a
page at the court of King Ferdinand, then a brave and chivalrous
soldier, was wounded at the siege of Pampeluna. During a slow
convalescence, having read all the romances he could find, he took
up the "Lives of the Saints," and became fired with religious zeal.
He immediately forsook the pursuit of arms, and betook himself
barefooted to a pilgrimage. He served the sick in hospitals; he
dwelt alone in a cavern, practising austerities; he went as a
beggar on foot to Rome and to the Holy Land, and returned at the
age of thirty-three to begin a course of study. It was while
completing his studies at Paris that he conceived and formed the
"Society of Jesus."
From that time we date the counter-reformation. In fifty years
more a wonderful change took place in the Catholic Church, wrought
chiefly by the Jesuits. Yea, in sixteen years from that eventful
night--when far above the star-lit city the enthusiastic Loyola had
bound his six companions with irrevocable vows--he had established
his Society in the confidence and affection of Catholic Europe,
against the voice of universities, the fears of monarchs, and the
jealousy of the other monastic orders. In sixteen years, this
ridiculed and wandering Spanish zealot had risen to a condition of
great influence and dignity, second only in power to the Pope
himself; animating the councils of the Vatican, moving the minds of
kings, controlling the souls of a numerous fraternity, and making
his influence felt in every corner of the world. Before the
remembrance of his passionate eloquence, his eyes of fire, and his
countenance of seraphic piety had passed away from the minds of his
own generation, his disciples "had planted their missionary
stations among Peruvian mines, in the marts of the African slave-
trade, among the islands of the Indian Ocean, on the coasts of
Hindustan, in the cities of Japan and China, in the recesses of
Canadian forests, amid the wilds of the Rocky Mountains." They had
the most important chairs in the universities; they were the
confessors of monarchs and men of rank; they had the control of the
schools of Italy, France, Austria, and Spain; and they had become
the most eloquent, learned, and fashionable preachers in all
Catholic countries. They had grown to be a great institution,--an
organization instinct with life, a mechanism endued with energy and
will; forming a body which could outwatch Argus with his hundred
eyes, and outwork Briareus with his hundred arms; they had twenty
thousand eyes open upon every cabinet, every palace, and every
private family in Catholic Europe, and twenty thousand arms
extended over the necks of every sovereign and all their subjects,
--a mighty moral and spiritual power, irresponsible, irresistible,
omnipresent, connected intimately with the education, the learning,
and the religion of the age; yea, the prime agents in political
affairs, the prop alike of absolute monarchies and of the papal
throne, whose interests they made identical. This association,
instinct with one will and for one purpose, has been beautifully
likened by Doctor Williams to the chariot in the Prophet's vision:
"The spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels; wherever the
living creatures went, the wheels went with them; wherever those
stood, these stood: when the living creatures were lifted up, the
wheels were lifted up over against them; and their wings were full
of eyes round about, and they were so high that they were dreadful.
So of the institution of Ignatius,--one soul swayed the vast mass;
and every pin and every cog in the machinery consented with its
whole power to every movement of the one central conscience."
Luther moved Europe by ideas which emancipated the millions, and
set in motion a progress which is the glory of our age; Loyola
invented an agency which arrested this progress, and led the
Catholic world back again into the subjections and despotisms of
the Middle Ages, retaining however the fear of God and of Hell,
which are the extremes of human motive.
What is the secret of such a wonderful success? Two things: first,
the extraordinary virtues, abilities, and zeal of the early
Jesuits; and, secondly, their wonderful machinery in adapting means
to an end.
The history of society shows that no body of men ever obtained a
wide-spread ascendancy, never secured general respect, unless they
deserved it. Industry produces its fruits; learning and piety have
their natural results. Even in the moral world natural law asserts
its supremacy. Hypocrisy and fraud ultimately will be detected; no
enduring reputation is built upon a lie; sincerity and earnestness
will call out respect, even from foes; learning and virtue are
lights which are not hid under a bushel. Enthusiasm creates
enthusiasm; a lofty life will be seen and honored. Nor do people
intrust their dearest interests except to those whom they
venerate,--and venerate because their virtues shine like the face
of a goddess. We yield to those only whom we esteem wiser than
ourselves. Moses controlled the Israelites because they venerated
his wisdom and courage; Paul had the confidence of the infant
churches because they saw his labors; Bernard swayed his darkened
age by the moral power of learning and sanctity. The mature
judgments of centuries never have reversed the judgments which past
ages gave in reference to their master minds. All the pedants and
sophists of Europe cannot whitewash Frederic II. or Henry VIII.
No man in Athens was more truly venerated than Socrates when
he mocked his judges. Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, appeared to
contemporaries, as they appear to us. Even Hildebrand did not
juggle himself into his theocratic chair. Washington deserved all
the reverence he enjoyed; and Bonaparte himself was worthy of the
honors he received, so long as he was true to the interests of
France.
So of the Jesuits,--there is no mystery in their success; the same
causes would produce the same results again. When Catholic Europe
saw men born to wealth and rank voluntarily parting with their
goods and honors; devoting themselves to religious duties, often in
a humble sphere; spending their days in schools and hospitals;
wandering as preachers and missionaries amid privations and in
fatigue; encountering perils and dangers and hardships with fresh
and ever-sustained enthusiasm; and finally yielding up their lives
as martyrs, to proclaim salvation to idolatrous savages,--it knew
them to be heroic, and believed them to be sincere, and honored
them in consequence. When parents saw that the Jesuits entered
heart and soul into the work of education, winning their pupils'
hearts by kindness, watching their moods, directing their minds
into congenial studies, and inspiring them with generous
sentiments, they did not stop to pry into their motives; and
universities, when they discovered the superior culture of educated
Jesuits, outstripping all their associates in learning, and
shedding a light by their genius and erudition, very naturally
appointed them to the highest chairs; and even the people, when
they saw that the Jesuits were not stained by vulgar vices, but
were hard-working; devoted to their labors, earnest, and eloquent,
put themselves under their teachings; and especially when they
added gentlemanly manners, good taste, and agreeable conversation
to their unimpeachable morality and religious fervor, they made
these men their confessors as well as preachers. Their lives stood
out in glorious contrast with those of the old monks and the
regular clergy, in an age of infidel levities, when the Italian
renaissance was bearing its worst fruits, and men were going back
to Pagan antiquity for their pleasures and opinions.
That the early Jesuits blazed with virtues and learning and piety
has never been denied, although these things have been poetically
exaggerated. The world was astonished at their intrepidity, zeal,
and devotion. They were not at first intriguing, or ambitious, or
covetous. They loved their Society; but they loved still more what
they thought was the glory of God. Ad majoram Dei gloriam was the
motto which was emblazoned on their standard when they went forth
as Christian warriors to overcome the heresies of Christendom and
the superstitions of idolaters. "The Jesuit missionary," says
Stephen, "with his breviary under his arm, his beads at his girdle,
and his crucifix in his hands, went forth without fear, to
encounter the most dreaded dangers. Martyrdom was nothing to him;
he knew that the altar which might stream with his blood, and the
mound which might be raised over his remains, would become a
cherished object of his fame and an expressive emblem of the power
of his religion." "If I die," said Xavier, when about to visit the
cannibal Island of Del Moro, "who knows but what all may receive
the Gospel, since it is most certain it has ever fructified more
abundantly in the field of Paganism by the blood of martyrs than by
the labors of missionaries,"--a sublime truth, revealed to him in
his whole course of protracted martyrdom and active philanthropy,
especially in those last hours when, on the Island of Sanshan, he
expired, exclaiming, as his fading eyes rested on the crucifix, In
te Domine speravi, non confundar in eternum. "In perils, in
fastings, in fatigues, was the life of this remarkable man passed,
in order to convert the heathen world; and in ten years he had
traversed a tract of more than twice the circumference of the
earth, preaching, disputing, and baptizing, until seventy thousand
converts, it is said, were the fruits of his mission."* " My
companion," said the fearless Marquette, when exploring the
prairies of the Western wilderness, "is an envoy of France to
discover new countries, and I am an ambassador of God to enlighten
them with the Gospel." Lalemant, when pierced with the arrows of
the Iroquois, rejoiced that his martyrdom would induce others to
follow his example. The missions of the early Jesuits extorted
praises from Baxter and panegyric from Liebnitz.
* I am inclined to think that this statement is exaggerated; or, if
true, that conversion was merely nominal. In any event, his labors
were vast.