labored in other spheres. Loyola himself, though visionary and
monastic, had no higher wish than to infuse piety into the Catholic
Church, and to strengthen the hands of him whom he regarded as
God's vicegerent. Somehow or other he succeeded in securing the
absolute veneration of his companions, so much so that the sainted
Xavier always wrote to him on his knees. His "Spiritual Exercises"
has ever remained the great text-book of the Jesuits,--a compend of
fasts and penances, of visions and of ecstasies; rivalling Saint
Theresa herself in the rhapsodies of an exalted piety, showing the
chivalric and romantic ardor of a Spanish nobleman directed into
the channel of devotion to an invisible Lord. See this wounded
soldier at the siege of Pampeluna, going through all the
experiences of a Syriac monk in his Manresan cave, and then turning
his steps to Paris to acquire a university education; associating
only with the pious and the learned, drawing to him such gifted men
as Faber and Xavier, Salmeron and Lainez, Borgia and Bobadilla, and
inspiring them with his ideas and his fervor; living afterwards, at
Venice, with Caraffa (the future Paul IV.) in the closest intimacy,
preaching at Vicenza, and forming a new monastic code, as full of
genius and originality as it was of practical wisdom, which became
the foundation of a system of government never surpassed in the
power of its mechanism to bind the minds and wills of men. Loyola
was a most extraordinary man in the practical turn he gave to
religious rhapsodies; creating a legislation for his Society which
made it the most potent religious organization in the world. All
his companions were remarkable likewise for different traits and
excellences, which yet were made to combine in sustaining the unity
of this moral mechanism. Lainez had even a more comprehensive mind
than Loyola. It was he who matured the Jesuit Constitution, and
afterwards controlled the Council of Trent,--a convocation which
settled the creed of the Catholic Church, especially in regard to
justification, and which extolled the merits of Christ, but
attributed justification to good works in a different sense from
that understood and taught by Luther.
Aside from the personal gifts and qualities of the early Jesuits,
they would not have so marvellously succeeded had it not been for
their remarkable constitution,--that which bound the members of the
Society together, and gave to it a peculiar unity and force. The
most marked thing about it was the unbounded and unhesitating
obedience required of every member to superiors, and of these
superiors to the General of the Order,--so that there was but one
will. This law of obedience is, as every one knows, one of the
fundamental principles of all the monastic orders from the earliest
times, enforced by Benedict as well as Basil. Still there was a
difference in the vow of obedience. The head of a monastery in the
Middle Ages was almost supreme. The Lord Abbot was obedient only
to the Pope, and he sought the interests of his monastery rather
than those of the Pope. But Loyola exacted obedience to the
General of the Order so absolutely that a Jesuit became a slave.
This may seem a harsh epithet; there is nothing gained by using
offensive words, but Protestant writers have almost universally
made these charges. From their interpretation of the constitutions
of Loyola and Lainez and Aquaviva, a member of the Society had no
will of his own; he did not belong to himself, he belonged to his
General,--as in the time of Abraham a child belonged to his father
and a wife to her husband; nay, even still more completely. He
could not write or receive a letter that was not read by his
Superior. When he entered the order, he was obliged to give away
his property, but could not give it to his relatives.* When he
made confession, he was obliged to tell his most intimate and
sacred secrets. He could not aspire to any higher rank than that
he held; he had no right to be ambitious, or seek his own
individual interests; he was merged body and soul into the Society;
he was only a pin in the machinery; he was bound to obey even his
own servant, if required by his Superior; he was less than a
private soldier in an army; he was a piece of wax to be moulded as
the Superior directed,--and the Superior, in his turn, was a piece
of wax in the hands of the Provincial, and he again in the hands of
the General. "There were many gradations in rank, but every rank
was a gradation in slavery." The Jesuit is accused of having no
individual conscience. He was bound to do what he was told, right
or wrong; nothing was right and nothing was wrong except as the
Society pronounced. The General stood in the place of God. That
man was the happiest who was most mechanical. Every novice had a
monitor, and every monitor was a spy.** So strict was the rule of
Loyola, that he kept Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, three years
out of the Society, because he refused to renounce all intercourse
with his family.***
* Ranke.
** Steinmetz, i. p. 252.
*** Nicolini, p. 35.
The Jesuit was obliged to make all natural ties subordinate to the
will of the General. And this General was a king more absolute
than any worldly monarch, because he reigned over the minds of his
subjects. His kingdom was an imperium in imperio; he was chosen
for life and was responsible to no one, although he ruled for the
benefit of the Catholic Church. In one sense a General of the
Jesuits resembled the prime minister of an absolute monarch,--say
such a man as Richelieu, with unfettered power in the cause of
absolutism; and he ruled like Richelieu, through his spies, making
his subordinates tools and instruments. The General appointed the
presidents of colleges and of the religious houses; he admitted or
dismissed, dispensed or punished, at his pleasure. There was no
complaint; all obeyed his orders, and saw in him the representative
of Divine Providence. Complaint was sin; resistance was ruin. It
is hard for us to understand how any man could be brought
voluntarily to submit to such a despotism. But the novice entering
the order had to go through terrible discipline,--to be a servant,
anything; to live according to rigid rules, so that his spirit was
broken by mechanical duties. He had to learn the virtues of
obedience before he could be fully enrolled in the Society. He was
drilled for years by spiritual sergeants more rigorously than a
soldier in Napoleon's army: hence the efficiency of the body; it
was a spiritual army of the highest disciplined troops. Loyola had
been a soldier; he knew what military discipline could do,--how
impotent an army is without it, what an awful power it is with
discipline, and the severer the better. The best soldier of a
modern army is he who has become an unconscious piece of machinery;
and it was this unreflecting, unconditional obedience which made
the Society so efficient, and the General himself, who controlled
it, such an awful power for good or for evil. I am only speaking
of the organization, the machinery, the regime, of the Jesuits, not
of their character, not of their virtues or vices. This
organization is to be spoken of as we speak of the discipline of an
army,--wise or unwise, as it reached its end. The original aim of
the Jesuits was the restoration of the Papal Church to its ancient
power; and for one hundred years, as I think, the restoration of
morals, higher education, greater zeal in preaching: in short, a
reformation within the Church. Jesuitism was, of course, opposed
to Protestantism; it hated the Protestants; it hated their
religions creed and their emancipating and progressive spirit; it
hated religious liberty.
I need not dwell on other things which made this religious order so
successful,--not merely their virtues and their mechanism, but
their adaptation to the changing spirit of the times. They threw
away the old dresses of monastic life; they quitted the cloister
and places of meditation; they were preachers as well as scholars;
they accommodated themselves to the circumstances of the times;
they wore the ordinary dress of gentlemen; they remained men of the
world, of fine manners and cultivated speech; there was nothing
ascetic or repulsive about them, out in the world; they were all
things to all men, like politicians, in order to accomplish their
ends; they never were lazy, or profligate or luxurious. If their
Order became enriched, they as individuals remained poor. The
inferior members were not even ambitious; like good soldiers, they
thought of nothing but the work assigned to them. Their pride and
glory were the prosperity of their Order,--an intense esprit de
corps, never equalled by any body of men. This, of course, while
it gave them efficiency, made them narrow. They could see the
needle on the barn-door,--they could not see the door itself.
Hence there could be no agreement with them, no argument with them,
except on ordinary matters; they were as zealous as Saul, seeking
to make proselytes. They yielded nothing except in order to win;
they never compromised their Order in their cause. Their fidelity
to their head was marvellous; and so long as they confined
themselves to the work of making people better, I think they
deserved praise. I do not like their military organization, but I
should have no more right to abuse it than the organization of some
Protestant sects. That is a matter of government; all sects and
all parties, Catholic and Protestant, have a right to choose their
own government to carry out their ends, even as military generals
have a right to organize their forces in their own way. The
history of the Jesuits shows this,--that an organization of forces,
or what we call discipline or government, is a great thing. A
church without a government is a poor affair, so far as efficiency
is concerned. All churches have something to learn from the
Jesuits in the way of discipline. John Wesley learned something;
the Independents learned very little.
But there is another side to the Jesuits. We have seen why they
succeeded; we have to inquire how they failed. If history speaks
of the virtues of the early members, and the wonderful mechanism of
their Order, and their great success in consequence, it also speaks
of the errors they committed, by which they lost the confidence
they had gained. From being the most popular of all the adherents
of the papal power, and of the ideas of the Dark Ages, they became
the most unpopular; they became so odious that the Pope was
obliged, by the pressure of public opinion and of the Bourbon
courts of Europe, to suppress their Order. The fall of the Jesuits
was as significant as their rise. I need not dwell on that fall,
which is one of the best known facts of history.
Why did the Jesuits become unpopular and lose their influence?
They gained the confidence of Catholic countries because they
deserved it, and they lost that confidence because they deserved to
lose it,--in other words, because they degenerated; and this seems
to be the history of all institutions. It is strange, it is
passing strange, that human societies and governments and
institutions should degenerate as soon as they become rich and
powerful; but such, is the fact,--a sad commentary on the doctrine
of a necessary progress of the race, or the natural tendency to
good, which so many cherish, but than which nothing can be more
false, as proved by experience and the Scriptures. Why were the
antediluvians swept away? Why could not those races retain their
primitive revelation? Why did the descendants of Noah become
almost idolaters before he was dead? Why did the great Persian
Empire become as effeminate as the empires it had supplanted? Why
did the Jewish nation steadily retrograde after David? Why did not
civilization and Christianity save the Roman world? Why did
Christianity itself become corrupted in four centuries? Why did
not the Middle Ages preserve the evangelical doctrines of Augustine
and Jerome and Chrysostom and Ambrose? Why did the light of the
glorious Reformation of Luther nearly go out in the German cities
and universities? Why did the fervor of the Puritans burn out in
England in one hundred years? Why have the doctrines of the
Pilgrim Fathers become unfashionable in those parts of New England
where they seemed to have taken the deepest root? Why have so many
of the descendants of the disciples of George Fox become so liberal
and advanced as to be enamoured of silk dresses and laces and
diamonds and the ritualism of Episcopal churches? Is it an
improvement to give up a simple life and lofty religious
enthusiasm for materialistic enjoyments and epicurean display?
Is there a true advance in a university, when it exchanges its
theological teachings and its preparation of poor students for
the Gospel Ministry, for Schools of Technology and boat-clubs and
accommodations for the sons of the rich and worldly?
Now the Society of Jesus went through just such a transformation as
has taken place, almost within the memory of living men, in the
life and habits and ideas of the people of Boston and Philadelphia
and in the teachings of their universities. Some may boldly say,
"Why not? This change indicates progress." But this progress is
exactly similar to that progress which the Jesuits made in the
magnificence of their churches, in the wealth they had hoarded in
their colleges, in the fashionable character of their professors
and confessors and preachers, in the adaptation of their doctrines
to the taste of the rich and powerful, in the elegance and
arrogance and worldliness of their dignitaries. Father La Chaise
was an elegant and most polished man of the world, and travelled in
a coach with six horses. If he had not been such a man, he would
not have been selected by Louis XIV. for his confidential and
influential confessor. The change which took place among the
Jesuits arose from the same causes as the change which has taken
place among Methodists and Quakers and Puritans. This change I
would not fiercely condemn, for some think it is progress. But is
it progress in that religious life which early marked these people;
or a progress towards worldly and epicurean habits which they arose
to resist and combat? The early Jesuits were perhaps fanatical,
strict, ascetic, religious, and narrow. They sought by self-
denying labors and earnest exhortations, like Savonarola at
Florence, to take the Church out of the hands of the Devil; and the
people reverenced them, as they always have reverenced martyrs and
missionaries. The later Jesuits sought to enjoy their wealth and
power and social position. They became--as rich and prosperous
people generally become--proud, ambitious, avaricious, and worldly.
They were as elegant, as scholarly, and as luxurious as the Fellows
of Oxford University, and the occupants of stalls in the English
cathedrals,--that is all: as worldly as the professors of Yale and
Cambridge may become in half-a-century, if rich widows and brewers
and bankers without children shall some day make those universities
as well endowed as Jesuit colleges were in the eighteenth century.
That is the old story of our fallen humanity. I would no more
abuse the Jesuits because they became confessors to the great, and
went into mercantile speculations, than I would rich and favored
clergymen in Protestant countries, who prefer ten per cent for
their money in California mines to four per cent in national
consols.
But the prosperity which the Jesuits had earned during their first
century of existence excited only envy, and destroyed the reverence
of the people; it had not made them odious, detestable. It was the
means they adopted to perpetuate their influence, after early
virtues had passed away, which caused enlightened Catholic Europe
to mistrust them, and the Protestants absolutely to hate and vilify
them.
From the very first, the Society was distinguished for the esprit
de corps of its members. Of all things which they loved best it
was the power and glory of the Society,--just as Oxford Fellows
love the prestige of their university. And this power and
influence the Jesuits determined to preserve at all hazards and by
any means; when virtues fled, they must find something else with
which to bolster themselves up: they must not part with their
power; the question was, how should they keep it? First, they are
accused of having adopted the doctrine of expediency,--that the end
justifies the means. They did not invent this sophistry,--it is as
old as our humanity. Abraham used it when he told lies to the King
of Egypt, to save the honor of his wife; Caesar accepted it, when
he vindicated imperialism as the only way to save the Roman Empire
from anarchy; most politicians resort to it when they wish to gain
their ends. Politicians have ever been as unscrupulous as the
Jesuits, in adopting expediency rather than eternal right. It has
been a primal law of government; it lies at the basis of English
encroachments in India, and of the treatment of the aborigines in
this country by our government. There is nothing new in the
doctrine of expediency.
But the Jesuits are accused of pushing this doctrine to its
remotest consequences, of being its most unhesitating defenders,--
so that jesuitism and expediency are popularly convertible terms.
They are accused too of perverting education, of abusing the
confessional, of corrupting moral and political philosophy, of
conforming to the inclinations of the great. They even went so far
as to inculcate mental reservation,--thus attacking truth in its
most sacred citadel, the conscience of mankind,--on which Pascal
was so severe. They made habit and bad example almost a sufficient
exculpation from crime. Perjury was allowable, if the perjured
were inwardly determined not to swear. They invented the notion of
probabilities, according to which a person might follow any opinion
he pleased, although he knew it to be wrong, provided authors of
reputation had defended that opinion. A man might fight a duel, if
by refusing to fight he would be stigmatized as a coward. They did
not openly justify murder, treachery, and falsehood, but they
excused the same, if plausible reasons could be urged. In their
missions they aimed at eclat; and hence merely nominal conversions
were accepted, because these swelled their numbers. They gave the
crucifix, which covered up all sins; they permitted their converts
to retain their ancient habits and customs. In order to be
popular, Robert de Nobili, it is said, traced his lineage to
Brahma; and one of their missionaries among the Indians told the
savages that Christ was a warrior who scalped women and children.
Anything for an outward success. Under their teachings it was seen
what a light affair it was to bear the yoke of Christ. So monarchs
retained in their service confessors who imposed such easy
obligations. So ordinary people resorted to the guidance of such
leaders, who made themselves agreeable. The Jesuit colleges were
filled with casuists. Their whole moral philosophy, if we may
believe Arnauld and Pascal, was a tissue of casuistry; truth was
obscured in order to secure popularity; even the most diabolical
persecution was justified if heretics stood in the way. Father Le
Tellier rejoiced in the slaughter of Saint Bartholomew, and Te
Deums were offered in the churches for the extinction of
Protestantism by any means. If it could be shown to be expedient,
the Jesuits excused the most outrageous crimes ever perpetrated on
this earth.
Again, the Jesuits are accused of riveting fetters on the human
mind in order to uphold their power, and to sustain the absolutism
of the popes and the absolutism of kings, to which they were
equally devoted. They taught in their schools the doctrine of
passive obedience; they aimed to subdue the will by rigid
discipline; they were hostile to bold and free inquiries; they were
afraid of science; they hated such men as Galileo, Pascal, and
Bacon; they detested the philosophers who prepared the way for the
French Revolution; they abominated the Protestant idea of private
judgment; they opposed the progress of human thought, and were
enemies alike of the Jansenist movement in the seventeenth century
and of the French Revolution in the eighteenth. They upheld the
absolutism of Louis XIV., and combated the English Revolution; they
sent their spies and agents to England to undermine the throne of
Elizabeth and build up the throne of Charles I. Every emancipating
idea, in politics and in religion, they detested. There were many
things in their system of education to be commended; they were good
classical scholars, and taught Greek and Latin admirably; they
cultivated the memory; they made study pleasing, but they did not
develop genius. The order never produced a great philosopher; the
energies of its members were concentrated in imposing a despotic
yoke.
The Jesuits are accused further of political intrigues: this is a
common and notorious charge. They sought to control the cabinets
of Europe; they had their spies in every country. The intrigues of
Campion and Parsons in England aimed at the restoration of Catholic
monarchs. Mary of Scotland was a tool in their hands, and so was
Madame de Maintenon in France. La Chaise and Le Tellier were mere
politicians. The Jesuits became political priests; the history of
Europe the last three hundred years is full of their cabals. Their
political influence was directed to the persecution of Protestants
as well as infidels. They are accused of securing the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes,--one of the greatest crimes in the history
of modern times, which led to the expulsion of four hundred
thousand Protestants from France, and the execution of four hundred
thousand more. They incited the dragonnades of Louis XIV., who was
under their influence. They are accused of the assassination of
kings, of the fires of Smithfield, of the Gunpowder Plot, of the
cruelties inflicted by Alva, of the Thirty Years' War, of the
ferocities of the Guises, of inquisitions and massacres, of sundry
other political crimes, with what justice I do not know; but
certain it is they became objects of fear, and incurred the
hostilities of Catholic Europe, especially of all liberal thinkers,
and their downfall was demanded by the very courts of Europe. Why
did they lose their popularity? Why were they so distrusted and
hated? The fact that they WERE hated is most undoubted, and there
must have been cause for it. It is a fact that at one time they
were respected and honored, and deserved to be so: must there not
have been grave reasons for the universal change in public opinion
respecting them. The charges against them, to which I have
alluded, must have had foundation. They did not become idle,
gluttonous, ignorant, and sensual like the old monks: they became
greedy of power; and in order to retain it resorted to intrigues,
conspiracies, and persecutions. They corrupted philosophy and
morality, abused the confessional, privilege, adopted SUCCESS as
their watchword, without regard to the means; they are charged with
becoming worldly, ambitious, mercenary, unscrupulous, cruel; above
all, they sought to bind the minds of men with a despotic yoke, and
waged war against all liberalizing influences. They always were,
from first to last, narrow, pedantic, one-sided, legal, technical,
pharisaical. The best thing about them, in the days of their
declining power, was that they always opposed infidel sentiments.
They hated Voltaire and Rousseau and the Encyclopedists as much as
they did Luther and Calvin. They detested the principles of the
French Revolution, partly because those principles were godless,
partly because they were emancipating.
Of course, in such an infidel and revolutionary age as that of
Louis XV., when Voltaire was the oracle of Europe,--when from his
chateau near Geneva he controlled the mind of Europe, as Calvin did
two centuries earlier,--enemies would rise up, on all sides,
against the Jesuits. Their most powerful and bitter foe was a
woman,--the mistress of Louis XV., the infamous Madame de
Pompadour. She hated the Jesuits as Catharine de Medici hated the
Calvinists in the time of Charles IX.,--not because they were
friends of absolutism, not because they wrote casuistic books, not
because they opposed liberal principles, not because they were
spies and agents of Rome, not because they perverted education, not
because they were boastful and mercenary missionaries or cunning
intriguers in the courts of princes, not because they had marked
their course through Europe in a trail of blood, but because they
were hostile to her ascendency,--a woman who exercised about the
same influence in France as Jezebel did at the court of Ahab. I
respect the Jesuits for the stand they took against this woman: it
is the best thing in their history. But here they did not show
their usual worldly wisdom, and they failed. They were judicially
blinded. The instrument of their humiliation was a wicked woman.
So strange are the ways of Providence! He chose Esther to save the
Jewish nation, and a harlot to punish the Jesuits. She availed
herself of their mistakes.