Full text of "A Candid History Of The Jesuits"

A CANDH) HISTORY OF THE JESUITS

JOSEPH M C GABE

AUTHOR OF
"THE DECAY OF THE CHURCH OF ROME" ETC,

LONDON

EVELE1GH NASH

1913

PREFACE

IT is the historic custom of the Church of Rome to
enlist in its service monastic or quasi-monastic bodies in
addition to the ordinary clergy. In Its hour of greatest
need, at the very , t outbreak of the Reformation, the
Society of Jesu^^was. 'formed as one of these auxiliary
regiments, and in the war which the Church of Rome
has waged since tjia.t d^ttp the Jesuits have rendered the
most spirited and conspicuous service. Yet the pro-
cedure of this Society has differed in many importan'
respects from that of the other regiments of the Church
and a vast and unceasing controversy has gatheret
about it. It is probable that a thousand times, o:
several thousand times, more books and pamphlets anc
articles have been written about the Jesuits than abou
even the oldest and most powerful or learned of th<
monastic bodies. Not a work of history can be opened
in any language, but it will contain more references t<
the Jesuits than to all the other religious orders collect
ively. But opinions differ as much to-day as they did ;
hundred or two hundred years ago about the characte
of the Jesuits, and the warmest eulogies are chilled b;
the most bitter and withering indictments.

What is a Jesuit? The question is asked still in
every civilised land, and the answer is a confusing mas
of contradictions. The most learned historians read th

PREFACE

facts of their career so differently, that one comes fc) a
verdict expressing deep and criminal guilt, and another
acquits them with honour. Since the foundation of the
Society these drastically opposed views of its action
have been taken, and the praise and homage of admirers
have been balanced by the intense hatred of an equal
number of Catholic opponents. It would seem that
some impenetrable veil lies over the history and present
life of the Society, yet on both sides its judges refuse to
recognise obscurity. Catholic monarchs and peoples
have, time after time, driven the Jesuits ignominiously
over their frontiers ; Popes have sternly condemned
them. But they are as active, and nearly as numerous,
in the twentieth century as in the last days of the old
political world.

No marshalling of historical facts will change the
feeling of the pronounced admirers and opponents of the
Jesuits, and it would be idle to suppose that, because
the present writer is neither Roman Catholic nor
Protestant, he will be awarded the virtue of impartiality.
There seems, however, some need for an historical study
of the Jesuits which will aim at impartiality and candour.
On one side we have large and important works like
Cr&ineau-Joly's Histoire religieuse.politique, et litter air e
de la Compagnie de J6sus, and a number of smaller works,
written by Catholics of England or America, from the
material, and in the spirit, of the French historian's work.
Such works as these cannot for a moment be regarded
as serious history. They are panegyrics or apologies :
pleasant reading for the man or woman who wishes to
admire, but mere untruth to the man or woman who

PREFACE vii

wishes to know. Indeed, the work of M.
written in conjunction with the Jesuits, which is at times
recommendea as the classical authority on the Society,
has worse defects than the genial omission of unedifying
episodes. He makes the most inflated general state-
ments on the scantiest of material, is seriously and
frequently inaccurate, makes a very generous use of the
" mental reserve" which his friends advocate, and some-
times embodies notoriously forged documents without
even intimating that they are questioned.

Such works naturally provoke an antagonistic class
of volumes, in which the unflattering truths only are
presented and a false picture is produced to the prejudice
of the Jesuits. An entirely neutral volume on the
Jesuits does not exist, and probably never will exist.
The historian who surveys the whole of the facts of their
remarkable and romantic career cannot remain neutral.
Nor is it merely a question of whether the writer is a
Roman Catholic or no. The work of M. Cr^tineau-Joly
was followed in France by one written by a zealous
priest, the Abb6 Guettde, which tore its predecessor to
shreds, and represented the Society of Jesus as fitly
condemned by Pope and kings.

It will be found, at least, that the present work
contains an impartial account both of the virtue and
heroism that are found in the chronicles of the Jesuits,
and the scandals and misdeeds that may justly be
attributed to them. It is no less based on the original
Jesuit documents, as far as they have been published,
and the work of Cr&ineau-Joly, than on the antagonistic
literature, as the reader will perceive. Whether or BO it

viii PREFACE

seems to some an indictment, it is* a patient endeavoyi
give all the facts, within the compass of the volume,* <
enable the reader to form a balanced judgment on
Society. It is an attempt to understand the Jesuits :
understand the enthusiasm and fiery attachment of <
half of the Catholic world no less than the disdain
detestation of the other, to employ the white and i
black, not blended into a monotonous grey but in th
respective places and shades, so as to afford a truth
picture of the dramatic fortunes of the Society duri
nearly four centuries, and some insight into the charac
of the men who won for it such ardent devotion and si
intense hostility.

J- M.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE ORIGIN OF THE SOCIETY . . . i

II. THE FIRST JESUITS . . . . 27

III. EARLY STORMS . . . . . - 55

IV. GENERAL FRANCIS BORGIA . . . 8c
V. PROGRESS AND DECAY UNDER ACQUAVIVA . . 106

VI. THE EARLY JESUITS IN ENGLAND . . .142

VII. THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM . . .165

VIII. UNDER THE STUARTS . . . . . 195

IX. THE STRUGGLE WITH THE JANSENISTS . . . 22c

X. THE EXPULSION FROM PORTUGAL AND SPAIN . . 252

XI. THE FOREIGN MISSIONS . . . . . 279

XII. IN THE GERMANIC LANDS . . . . 311

XIII. THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY . . . 334

XIY. THE RESTORATION . . . . .364

XV. THE NEW JESUITS . . . . . 390

XVI. THE LAST PHASE . . . . . -424

INDEX ....... 445

A CANDID HISTORY OF THE
JESUITS

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGIN OF THE SOCIETY

IN the early summer of the year 1521, some months
after Martin Luther had burned the Pope's bull at
Wittenberg and lit the fire of the Reformation, a young
Basque soldier lay abed in his father's castle at the foot
of the Pyrenees, contemplating the wreck of his am-
bition. Inigo of Loyola was the youngest son in a large
family of ancient lineage and little wealth. He had lost
his mother at an early elate, and had been placed by a
wealthy aunt at court, where he learned to love the flash
of swords, the smile of princes, the softness of silk and
of wonaen's eyes, and all the hard deeds and rich
rewards of the knight's career. From the court he had
gone to the camp, and had set himself sternly to the
task of cutting an honourable path back to court. Fear-
less in war, skilful in sport and in martial exercises,
refined In person, cheerful in temper, and ardent in love,
the young noble had seen before him a long avenue of
knightly adventure and gracious recompense. He was,
in 1521, in his thirtieth year of age, or near it his
birth-year is variously given as 1491 or 1493; a clean-
built, sinewy little man, with dark lustrous eyes flashing
in his olive-tinted face, and thick black hair crowning his
lofty forehead. And a French ball at the siege of

2 THE JESUITS

Pampeluna had, at one stroke, broken his leg ,nd
shattered his ambition.

It took some time to realise the ruin of fiis ambition.
The chivalrous conquerors at Pampeluna had treated
their brave opponent with distinction, and had, after
dressing his wounds, sent him to the Loyola castle in
the Basque provinces, where his elder brother had
brought the surgeons to make him fit for the field
once more. The bone, they found, had been badly
set ; it must be broken again and re-set. He bore
their operations without a moan, and then lay for
weeks in pain and fever. He still trusted to return
to the camp and win the favour of a certain great
lady probably the daughter of the Dowager-Queen of
Naples whose memory he secretly cherished. Indeed,
on the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, he spoke of
it with confidence; he told his brother that the elder
apostle had entered the dark chamber and healed him
on the eve of the festival. Unhappily he found, when
the fever had gone, that the second setting of his leg
had been so ill done that a piece of bone projected
below the knee, and the right leg was shorter than the
left. Again he summoned the mediaeval surgeons and
their appalling armoury, and they sawed off the pro-
truding piece of bone and stretched his leg on a rack
they used for such purposes ; and not a cry or curse
came from the tense lips. But the right leg still refused
to meet its fellow, and shades gathered about Ifiigo's
glorious prospect of life. A young man who limps can
hardly hope to reach a place of honour in the camp, or
the gardens of the palace, or the hearts of women.
Talleyrand, later, would set out on his career with a
limp ; and Talleyrand would become a diplomatist

Ifiigo lay in the stout square castle of rugged stone,
which is now reverently enclosed, like a jewel, in a vast

THE ORIGIN OF THE SOCIETY 3

hom of the Jesuits. It then stood alone in a beautiful
valley, just at the foot of the last southern slopes of the
Pyrenees, about a mile from the little town of Azpeitia.
The mind of the young Basque heaved with confused
and feverish dreams as he lay there, in the summer heat,
beside the wreck of his ambition. He called for books
of knight-errantry, to while away the dreary days, but
there were none in the Loyola castle, and someone a
oious sister, perhaps brought him a Life of Christ and
a Flowers of the Saints. For lack of anything better
he read them : at first fingering the leaves with the
nearest approach to disdain that a Christian soldier dare
admit, then starting with interest, at length flushing with
enthusiasm. What was this but another form of chivalry ?
Nay, when you reflected, it was the only chivalry worth
so fierce a devotion as his. Here was a way of winning
a fair lady, the Queen of Heaven, whose glances were
worth more than the caresses of all the dames in Castile :
here was a monarch to serve, whose court outshone the
courts of France and Spain as the sun outshines the
stars : here were adventures that called for a higher
spirit than the bravado of the soldier.

The young Basque began to look upon a new world
from the narrow windows of the old castle. Down the
valley was Azpeitia, and even there one could find
monsters and evil knights to slay in the cause of Mary.
Southward were the broad provinces of Spain, full of
half-converted Moors and Jews and ever-flourishing
vices. Across the hills and the seas were other kingdoms,
calling just as loudly for a new champion of God and
Mary. One field, far away at the edge of the world,
summoned him with peremptory voice ; after all the
Crusades the sites in the Holy Land were still trodden
by the feet of blaspheming Turks. The blood began to
course once more in the veins of the soldier.

4 THE JESUITS

During the winter that followed his friends noticed
that he was making a wonderful chronicle of the lives of
Christ and His saints. He was skilled in all courtly
accomplishments they did not include learning and
could write, and illuminate very prettily, sonnets to the
secret lady of his inner shrine. Now he used his art to
make a pious chronicle, with the words and deeds of
Christ in vermilion and gold, the life of Mary in blue,
and the stories of the saints in the less royal colours of
the rainbow, and his dark pale face was lit by a strange
light. There were times when this new light flickered
or faded, and the fleshly queen of his heart seemed to
place white arms about him, and the sunny earth fought
with the faint vision of a far-off heaven. Then he
prayed, and scourged himself, and vowed that he would
be the knight of Christ and Mary ; and so he told his
followers long afterwards the heavy stone castle shook
and rumbled with the angry passing of the demon. He
told them also that he had at the time a notion of burying
himself in the Carthusian monastery at Seville, and sent
one to inquire concerning its way of life ; but such a
design is so little in accord with his knight-errant mood
that we cannot think he seriously entertained it

By the spring the struggle had ended and Ignatius
he exchanged his worldly name for that of a saint-model
set out in quest of spiritual adventure. The "sudden
revolution," as Cr&ineau-Joly calls his conversion, had
occupied about nine months. Indeed, friends and foes
of the Jesuits have conspired to obscure the development
of his feelings : the friends in order that they may
recognise a miracle in the conversion, the foes in order
that they may make it out to have been no conversion
at all, but a transfer of selfish ambition from the camp to
the Church. Whatever be the truth about Inigo's earlier
morals, he had certainly received a careful religious

THE ORIGIN OF THE SOCIETY 5

eduation in boyhood,* and he would just as certainly
not *learn scepticism at the court set up by Ferdinand
and Isabella 1 ; His belief that he had a vision of
St. Peter, a few weeks after receiving his wound and
before he read the pious books, shows that he had kept
a vivid religious faith in the camp. Some looseness of
conduct would not be inconsistent with this, especially
in Spain, but the darker descriptions of his adolescent
ways which some writers give are not justified. " He
was prone to quarrels and amatory folly/' is all that the
most candid of his biographers says. Let us grant the
hot Basque blood a quick sense of honour and a few
love-affairs. On the whole, Ifiigo seems to have been
an officer of the stricter sort, and a thorough Catholic.
Hence we can understand that, as earth grows dark and
cheerless for him, and the casual reading brings before
him in vivid colouring the vision of faith, his fervent
imagination is gradually won, and he sincerely devotes
his arms to the service of Christ and Mary.

Piously deceiving his brother as to his destination,
he set out on a mule in the month of March. He
would go to the shrine of Our Lady at Montserrat,
to ask a blessing on his enterprise, and then cross
the sea to convert the Mohammedans in Palestine.
His temper is seen in an adventure by the way. He
fellin with one of the Moors who had put on a thin
mantle of Christian profession in order that they might
be allowed to remain in Spain, and talked to him of Our
Lady of Montserrat. Being far from the town and the
ears of Inquisitors, the Moor spoke lightly of the Mother
of Christ, and, when the convert showedj heat, fled at a
gallop. Ignatius .wondered, with his hand on his sword,
whether or no his new ideal demanded that he should
follow and slay the man. He left the point to God, or
to his mule, and was taken on the road to Montserrat.

6 THE JESUITS

At last he came to the stee'p mountain, with

have to look closely into these early Jesuit accounts of
missions which covered the infant Society with glory.
A prudent examination of them discovers features which
have been carefully eliminated from later Jesuit, or pro-
Jesuit, works on the subject

As Henry vm. died in 1547, and Edward vi. in
1553, it may seem singular that Ignatius did not, when
the Catholic Mary acceded to the throne, at once dis-
patch a band of his priests to help in restoring the
old faith. Neither Orlandini nor his discreet follower,
Cr&ineau-Joly, throws any light on the mystery, but a
few important hints may be gathered frofti the more
candid early Jesuit historian Polanco, a close associate
of Ignatius, and the full solution is indicated in Burnet's
History of the Reformation (ii. 526, in the Oxford
edition). This rare discovery of an independent
document suggests that the early story might read
somewhat differently in many particulars if we were not
forced to rely almost entirely on Jesuit authorities.

From the brief statements scattered over the various
volumes of Polanco's Historia Societatis it appears that
from 1553 until his death Ignatius made the most
strenuous efforts to secure admission into England.
Cardinal Pole, it seems, asked the prayers of Ignatius
for his success when he was summoned to England, and,
when Ignatius died and Lainez again approached Pole,
the cardinal pointedly replied that the only way in which
the Jesuits could aid him was by their prayers. In the
meantime (1554) Ignatius pressed Father Araoz, who
was in great favour at the Spanish court, to urge Philip,
and induce ladies of the court to urge him, to take Jesuits
to England. In 1556 he sent Father Ribadeneira, a
courtly priest, to join Philip in Belgium and press the
request, but the reply was always that Pole was opposed
to admitting the Jesuits, Polanco makes it quite clear

THE FIRST JESUITS 39

that,Pole resisted all the efforts of Ignatius from 1554 to

1556.

Burnet supplies the solution of the mystery. A
friend of his discovered a manuscript at Venice, from
which it appears that Ignatius had overreached himself
and aroused the hostility of the cardinal. He had
writtten to Pole that, as Queen Mary was restoring
such monastic property as had fallen to the throne,
it would be advisable to entrust this to the Jesuits,
since the monks were in such bad odour in
England ; and he added that the Jesuits would soon
find a way to make other possessors of monastic
property disgorge. Pole refused their co-operation
and left the Jesuits angry and disappointed. The
historian cannot regard an anonymous manuscript as
in itself deserving of credence, but the statement very
plausibly illumines the situation. I may add that in
1558 Father Ribadeneira was actually smuggled into
England in the suite of Count Gomez de Figueroa, who
had gone to console the ailing Queen. 1 The count
was a warm patron of the Jesuits, but Queen Mary died
soon after his arrival, and the last hope of the Jesuits
was extinguished.

We cannot examine with equal freedom all the
chronicles of early Jesuit activity, and must be content
to cull from the pages of the Historia Sodetatis Jesu,
the first section of which is written by Father Orlandini,
such facts as may enable us to form a balanced judgment
of the Society under Ignatius. Italy was, naturally, the
first and chief theatre of their labours, and in the course
of a few years they spread from the turbulent cities of
Sicily to the foot of the Alps. I have already described
the work of Ignatius at Rome, and need add only that,

1 See Ribadeneira's Historia Ecdesiastica del Stisma del Reyno de
Inglaterra (1588), L, ii. ch. xxii.

40 THE JESUITS

as Orlandini tells us, he was one of the most urge at in
pressing the reluctant Pope to " reform " the Roman
Inquisition, or to equip it with the dread powers of the
Spanish tribunal. At the very time when he was devising
pleas for toleration in Protestant and pagan lands, he
was urging that in Italy and Portugal there should be
set up the most inhuman instrument of intolerance that
civilisation has ever known. The psychology of his
attitude is simple ; he was convinced that he was asking
tolerance for truth and intolerance for untruth. The
liberal-minded Romans were not persuaded of the justice
of his distinction, and the opposition to the Society
increased. The hostility, which at times went the length
of breaking Jesuit windows, is ascribed by his biographers
chiefly to his zeal for the conversion of prostitutes. He
founded a large home for these women, and would often
follow them to their haunts in the piazze and lead them
himself to St. Martha's House. On the whole, his great
philanthropic services and personal austerity secured
respect for his Society at Rome, and it prospered there
until his later years.

In the south of Italy the Society met little opposition
in the early years. Bobadilla had done some good work
in troubled Calabria before the Society was founded,
and within the next ten years colleges were opened
at Messina (1548), Palermo (1549), and Naples (1551).
The poet Tasso was one of the first students of the
Naples college. It was in the north that the more
arduous work had to be done. The seeds of the
Reformation were wafted over the Alps and found a
fertile soil in the cities of the Renaissance. Hardly
anywhere else were monks and clergy so corrupt and
ignorant, and nowhere was there so much familiarity with
the immorality of the Vatican system. Rome itself lived
on this corruption and regarded it with indulgence, but

THE FIRST JESUITS 41

in te university towns of the north educated men, and
even women, who almost remembered the lives of
Sixtus iv., Innocent vin., Alexander vi., Julius n., and
Leo x., were but provoked to smile when they were
exhorted to cling to the " Vicar of Christ"

To tear these prosperous seedlings of heresy out of
the soil of northern Italy was the congenial task of the
early Jesuits, and Lainez, Brouet, and Salmeron, with
some of the new recruits, went from city to city, chal-
lenging the Protestants to debate, strengthening the
Catholics to resist, and founding colleges for the sound
education of youth. Their procedure, and the resent-
ment it constantly excited, may be illustrated by their
experience at Venice. Lainez was sent by the Pope to
Venice in 1542, at the request of the Doge. An honour-
able apartment awaited him in the Doge's Palace, but he
humbly declined and went to live among the sick at the
squalid hospital, varying his learned campaign against
the Lutherans with the lowliest services to the poor and
ailing. Many were edified, especially one Andrea
Lippomani, an elderly and wealthy noble. Presently
there came an instruction from Ignatius that Lainez
must accept the hospitality offered him by Lippomani ;
and a little later the noble's heirs were infuriated to
learn that he had assigned a rich benefice of his at Padua
to the Jesuits. They appealed to the Venetian Council,
and lost, for Lainez and Salmeron were ordered by the
General to defend the donation. So the first college of
the Society was founded, at Padua, and Lippomani after-
wards enabled them to found one at Venice. Whatever
view one takes of it, this was the normal procedure :
tend the sick and beg your bread until "men of wealth
and position" open their purses, then throw all your
energy into the founding of colleges and the securing of
novices. It was unquestionably a most effective method of

42 THE JESUITS

serving the Church ; it also had an aspect which attracted
critics.

In the Catholic atmosphere of Spain and Portugal the
Society might be expected to grow luxuriantly, as it
eventually did, but its fortunes in the Peninsula are
rather due to the General's policy of securing influential
patrons than to any popular welcome. As early as 1540
Ignatius had sent his nephew Araoz into Spain, and
one reads between the lines that he had little success.
At last a college was founded at Alcala, to the anger of
many of the University professors. One professor
maintained his opposition so long and so violently that
Father Villanueva, the Jesuit rector, fraternally informed
him that the Inquisition proposed to put him a few
questions, and the professor sullenly withdrew. Then a
learned ex-rector of the university itself was won by
Ignatius, during a visit to Rome, and was sent back,
a Jesuit, to found a college at Salamanca. It was, as
usual, founded in poverty ; the fathers had not even a
crucifix to put over their altar, and one of their number
had to draw the figure on a sheet of paper. From the
general laws of these phenomena one might deduce that
the story brought a shower of crucifixes. However, the
favour of the King of Portugal and the influence of
Rome smoothed their paths, and little colonies were soon
planted at Valladolid, Toledo, Saragossa, and other
towns.

It was in Spain that the Society encountered the
most virulent of its early Catholic antagonists, Melchior
Cano. He was a very learned and sober Dominican
monk, and a professor at the university : an enemy of
mysticism and eccentricity. He knew of the early
penances and " visions " of Ignatius, and had seen him at
work in Rome. When the pale, black-robed, mysterious
youths walked demurely into learned Salamanca and set

THE FIRST JESUITS 43

up a college for the instruction of youth, the monk
erupted. They were hybrids neither the flesh of the
secular clergy nor the fish of the regular clergy : they
were leeches, fastening on wealthy saints and sinners ;
and so on. Miguel de Torres, the rector, called upon
the irate friar, and told him of the great privileges the
Pope had bestowed on the Society and the high missions
he had entrusted to its members. This inflamed him
still more, and he flung at them Paul's fiery warnings
against the hypocrites who would come after him. He
exaggerated heavily, especially in regard to the personal
character of the Jesuits, but he saw very clearly those
dangerous features and practices of the early Society
which I have indicated. The struggle came to a
diplomatic close. Melchior Cano was appointed Bishop
of the Canaries, and the Jesuits invite us to admire the
way in which Ignatius returned good for evil. It may
be added that Cano afterwards recognised the ruse, laid
down his mitre, and returned to plague his benefactors.

In the midst of this conflict the Jesuits made a most
important convert, and their future in Spain was assured.
Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, one of the leading
nobles of the kingdom, met and was enchanted by Favre
in 1544, when the King of Portugal brought that gentle
and persuasive Jesuit on a visit to the Spanish court.
He was conducted through the Exercises by Favre, one
of the most lovable and sincere of the early fathers.
When Favre died two years afterwards, prematurely
worn by his labours, Borgia wrote to ask Ignatius to
admit him to the order. Observe the procedure once
more. He was secretly initiated, not even the Pope
knowing his name : which enabled him to remain in the
eyes of men the Duke of Gandia, and shower his
wealth and his patronage on the Society. It really
matters little what lofty purposes are alleged for such

44 THE JESUITS

sinuous procedure ; it was a new policy in the history of
religious founders. When, a few years later, the Pope
offered a cardinal's hat to the Duke of Gandia, and
the King of Spain insisted that he should accept it, the
truth had to come out. Ignatius had sternly enjoined
that no dignity should ever be accepted by any member
of his Society, yet, to avoid giving offence to the king,
he said that he left the decision to Borgia.

Under Borgia's patronage the net of the Society
spread over Spain, many blessing and some cursing.
At Saragossa, where they had built a chapel, the
Augustinian friars complained that it encroached on
their sphere. To prevent unedifying conduct on the
part of rival friars, the Church had decreed that no order
should establish itself within five hundred feet of a house
belonging to a different order. When the Jesuits who
had broken this law, refused to yield, they were excom-
municated by the Vicar-General, and a pleasant
procession was arranged by the townsfolk, in which
effigies of damned Jesuits were propelled toward their
destination by little devils. The Augustinians were
popular. But the long arm of Ignatius was extended
once more, and the Papal Nuncio intervened in favour
of the Jesuits. Before many years the Jesuits won from
the Pope a declaration that the law did not apply to
them, and they might build where they pleased. They
prospered, and were hated.

An incident of the same significance occurred at
Alcal^. The college obtained many pupils, though little
wealth, and the Jesuit fathers began to be very active.
In 1551 they were surprised to hear that the Archbishop
of Toledo had suspended the whole of them from
priestly functions for daring to hear confessions without
his authorisation. The Jesuits produced their privileges,
and persuaded the Governor of Toledo, and even the

THE FIRST JESUITS 45

Royal Council, to explain to the prelate that the Pope
had exempted them from the jurisdiction of bishops.
He refused to recognise such extraordinary privileges,
and maintained the suspension. Ignatius then laid the
matter before the Pope, and the Archbishop was directed
from Rome to withdraw his opposition.

When we turn to Portugal we find an interesting
illustration of the early effect of great prosperity on the
Society. On the throne at the time was John IIL from
whose reign all historians date the downfall of what had
become one of the most brilliant and wealthy Powers in
Europe. Blind to the gross administrative corruption in
his kingdom, and to the decay of the stirring patriotism
which had borne the Portuguese flag over the globe, John
was concerned only about the religious needs of his
country and his new colonies. He had invited Xavier
and Rodriguez in 1540, intending to send them to the
Indies, but he was so charmed with them that he wished
to keep them in Portugal. Ignatius allowed Rodriguez
to remain, and Xavier set out on his historic mission to
the far east. In this Ignatius showed his usual discern-
ment : Rodriguez proved as supple and graceful a
courtier as Xavier proved a fiery missionary. John
then wished to entrust the tutorship of his son to
Rodriguez, and Ignatius consented. His own followers
were puzzled at times to know which were the dignities
that they were forbidden to accept. When John asked
for a Jesuit confessor, Rodriguez refused, but Ignatius
overruled him. The next step was to set up the Inquisi-
tion, through the mediation of Ignatius, and Orlaadiai
admits that when, in 1555, the king wished to make
Father Merin, his confessor, head of the Inquisition,
Ignatius seriously considered the proposal. He did not
refuse, as is sometimes said ; the negotiations broke
down, j

46 THE JESUITS

In this genial atmosphere the Society flourished.
Its chief college was at Coimbra, the great university
centre, where the Jesuits rapidly ran their course. At
first they shocked staid Catholics with the excesses of
their zeal, A youth in the college confessed to tempta-
tions of the flesh, and was ordered to walk the streets at
mid-day without a hat or a cloak, holding a skull in his
hand. Another student went forth almost naked in a
cold wind, begging from door to door; and, finding a
crowd of folk dancing and singing in a church, he
mounted the pulpit to admonish them, and was dragged
out and severely chastised. At nights Father Simon
would send out a procession of youths to cry in [the ears
of indignant sinners or quiet wine-bibbers some such
doggerel as : u Hell, hell, hell, for those in grave sin " ;
or long processions of children with masks and lanterns
paraded the streets and squares. We gather that the
boys of Coimbra had a pleasant time during these exhibi-
tions. But the college flourished ; there were in a few
years a hundred and fifty pupils in it, and it supplied
large numbers of missionaries.

In 1546 Favre visited Coimbra, and reported to
Ignatius that prosperity had flushed the veins of his
brothers. Nicolini and other anti- Jesuit writers speak
of the college as having become a place of " debauch,"
but this is not stated in the chronicles. Frivolity and
good-living are the only vices charged, whatever we
may suspect. The students stooped to writing sonnets,
and the King's money provided plenty of good cheer.
Ignatius felt that Father Simon had lost his fervour at
the court, deposed him from office he was Provincial
(or head of the province) and ordered him to go either
to Brazil or Aragon. The piety of Rodriguez had
evidently deteriorated, and he made a struggle to hold
his place. He was a handsome and comfortable man,

THE FIRST JESUITS 47

muclj liked for his liberality. He went to Coimbra,
where Ignatius had appointed a new rector, and the
liberals tried to induce the court to protect them. The
King was alarmed, however, and Father Simon had to
submit, and the college to mend its ways. Numbers of
students left or were expelled, and for the rest, when the
new rector piously walked the streets of Coimbra, laying
the bloody lash on his own bare shoulders, they fell to
tears and went out in a body scourging themselves
under the eyes of the townsfolk. The story ends
in Orlandini with Simon Rodriguez submitting in holy
joy and kissing the rebuking letters of his General.
But when we turn to Sacchini, the Jesuit writes of the
next section of the " Historia Societatis Jesu," who
does not always carefully notice what his predecessor
has said, we learn that Rodriguez smarted for years
under the humiliation, and awaited an opportunity to
undo it. However, the province returned to piety,
and before the death of Ignatius we find the Jesuits
capturing, after a long siege, the famous University of
Coimbra.

In France the Society wholly failed under Ignatius.
He placed students, supported by wealthy patrons, at
the University of Paris, and sent fathers after a time to
gather their neophytes under one roof. Then the
outbreak of war with Spain drove most of them abroad,
and even when the war was over the colony made slow
progress, amid poverty and hostility. In 1549 Ignatius
won the favour of Cardinal Guise de Lorraine and,
through him, of the French court. The King issued
letters authorising the Jesuits to live and teach at Paris,
and Brouet was sent to conciliate the Parisians. Then
began a long and famous struggle between the Parle-
ment and University of Paris and the court and Jesuits.
Parlement bluntly refused to register the King's letters,

48 THE JESUITS

and they were of no effect until this powerful legal Jbody
had accepted them. Henry ordered his Privy Council
to examine the Jesuit Constitutions and approve them ;
Parlement retorted by inviting the Archbishop, who was
very hostile, and the theological faculty of the university
to advise it, and the issue was a violent condemnation of
the Jesuits in the vein of Melchior Cano. It was said
that they admitted all sorts of aspirants to their ranks,
and that the extraordinary privileges they professed
to have were insulting to the spiritual and temporal
authorities and opposed to the interests of the other
orders and the university.

In the main, it was undoubtedly the privileges of the
Jesuits which made the greater part of Paris and of
France hostile to them. Bishops were not to look at
them, civic authorities were not to tax them, universities
were to be opposed by free classes, and were to respect
degrees granted by Jesuits to any whom they thought
fit The hostility was quite natural, and it was fed by
indiscretions on the part of the Jesuits. They received
a nephew of the Archbishop, against the uncle's will,
and they first turned the brain (with their Exercises)
of, and then put out of doors, a very learned ornament
of the university named Postel. The Archbishop bade
them leave Paris, and they remained helpless outside
the city, at St Germain aux Pns, until after the death
of Ignatius. He pressed the case at Rome, and doctors
of the Sorbourne went there to exchange arguments
with Jesuit doctors, but nothing was done until years
afterwards.

During the war the Spanish Jesuits had gone from
Paris to Louvain and began to teach there. Here
again the university scorned and opposed them, and for
many years (until they secured the interest of the
Archduchess) they made no progress. Ribadeneira,

THE FIRST JESUITS 49

who ^as in charge, used to break down and retire from
the room to weep. In Germany they had a different
and more spirited struggle, but they seem to have had
little influence in the various conferences and diets at
which attempts were still made to reconcile the parties.
Favre was at the Diet of Worms in 1540, then at the
Ratisbon Conference, where Bobadilla and Le Jay
succeeded him. They were restricted to an effort to
reform the Catholics themselves, and found it difficult
The letters of these early Jesuits make it quite im-
possible for any historian to question the appalling
corruption of priests, monks, and people in every part of
Europe at the time of the Reformation. From Worms
Favre wrote to Ignatius that there were not three priests
in the city who were not stained by concubinage
or crime. At Ratisbon the Catholics threatened to
throw Le Jay into the river. "What does it matter
to me whether I enter heaven by water or land?"
he said. They knew very little German, generally
preaching in Latin, and had slight influence for some
years.

In time, as they learned German, and confined them-
selves to the Catholic provinces, their work was more
successful. They fastened especially on Cologne, and
assailed the Archbishop, a very worldly prelate of the
old type, who was annoyed to find these Jesuit wasps
buzzing about him, and their house was closed for a
time by the authorities. But they had the favour of the
Emperor, and the Archbishop was deposed. In 1545
the Council of Trent opened, and Lainez and Salmeron
appeared there as the Pope's theologians, together
with Peter Canisius (an able German student whom
Favre had attracted to the Society) as theologian
of the new Archbishop of Cologne. It need only
be said of the earlier sittings of the famous Council

SO THE JESUITS

(in 1545 and 1551) that the Jesuits had little influence,
and this they used to oppose any concession to the
Protestants and magnify the authority of the Pope.
This will be plainer in connection with the later
sittings.

The work in Germany was afterwards thwarted by
the zeal of the fiery Bobadilla. It had at last come to
war with the Protestants, to the satisfaction of the
Jesuits, and Bobadilla marched with the troops and was
severely wounded at Miihlberg. In 1548, however,
Charles published his Interim, or provisional concession
of certain Protestant claims (such as the marriage
of the clergy) until the Council of the Church should
decide the points at issue. It may be recalled that the
general Council of Trent was first intended as a common
meeting of Protestant and Catholic divines, and the
hope of reconciliation was not yet dead. Reconciliation,
however, could mean only concession, and the Jesuits
were resolutely against concession. Whatever influence
they had in Germany, apart from their effort to reform
the morality of the Catholics, was reactionary and
mischievous in the highest degree Bobadilla over-
flowed with wrath at the Interim, and denounced it
fiercely by pen and tongue. Charles angrily ordered
him to leave the Empire, and he returned to Rome ;
and it is recorded that Ignatius so warmly resented his
" indiscretion " that he refused at first to admit him to
the house. Thus did the saint vindicate the majesty of
kings, says M. Cr&ineau-Joly. The outbreak did
unquestionably hamper the progress of the Jesuits for
a time, but before the death of Ignatius they were
firmly established in Vienna, Prague, Cologne, and a
few other cities. At Vienna the court demanded that
Canisius should accept the office of archbishop, and
Ignatius compromised by allowing him to administer the

THE FIRST JESUITS 51

see apd refuse its revenue. In the same year a Jesuit
was made " Patriarch of Abyssinia." It was just seven
years since Ignatius had induced the Pope to decree
that no Jesuit should ever accept an ecclesiastical
dignity.

Of the foreign missions it is impossible to speak here
at any length. In 1540 Francis Xavier had come for
his leader's blessing as he started for the Indies. His
cassock was worn and patched, and Ignatius took off his
own flannel vest and put it on the young priest before
dismissing him with the usual : "Go and set the world
on fire." It was a different Xavier from the one he had
seen, a vain and brilliant teacher, at the University of
Paris, and it is well known how he did set the world on
fire. He was a handsome, blue-eyed man of thirty-six,
and no Portuguese sailor ever fronted the unknown with
more courage and heroism than Xavier displayed in his
famous travels from India to Japan. After a year's
work at Goa, where his first need was to convert the
Christians and the Portuguese priests, he went on to
Malabar, to the Moluccas, to Malacca, and on to Japan,
ending his life, in 1552, in an attempt to reach China.
What the result of his mission was it is difficult to
estimate soberly. The Jesuit chronicler forgets the con-
fusion of tongues, and makes Xavier leap from land
to land, preaching to and converting thousands every-
where, as if they all spoke Portuguese. In Japan
he clearly failed, although the Portuguese merchants
were greatly anxious for success, and the Japanese, of
their own high character and out of respect for the
great king (of Portugal), his friend, were extremely
polite.

The other foreign missions of the early Jesuits were
less irradiated with miracle, or with heroism. Lainez
Went in the wake of the Spanish troops to Tunis, said

52 THE JESUITS

mass there, and left no trace behind. Nunez., the
" Patriarch of Abyssinia," went out with two others to
take over his diocese, but found a " Patriarch " there
already, who made a lively opposition, and the Jesuits
had to retire to Goa. Four Jesuits were sent to the
Congo. Two died at once, and the other two became
so interested in commerce that the king was alarmed.
Ignatius recalled and replaced them, but the king
expelled the newcomers. In Brazil they made more
progress, penetrating the forests and winning the favour
of the natives by their medical and other material aid.
They tried to save the intended dinners of the cannibals,
and, when they failed, sprinkled the poor men with holy
water ; but the cannibals found that it made them less
succulent and forbade the practice. They did useful
work in Brazil, and laid the foundation of a great
mission.

Such were the labours of the first Jesuits during the
generalship of Ignatius, and it remains only to close the
career of their able leader. The varied story of success
and failure, the showers of glowing testimonials and
bitter diatribes, the heroism of some and the frailty of
others, kept him alternately elated or depressed to the
end. He must have seen that the first fervour could
not be maintained, and that opposition became more
serious as the Society grew. It had now nearly a
thousand members scattered over* the world, and a
hundred houses and colleges. The figures are mis-
leading, however, as there were only thirty-five pro-
fessed fathers and only two professed houses ; many of
the so-called colleges had no pupils and were little
more than names. Ignatius had twice attempted to
resign his office in the last few years; and there was
much to distress him. He had hardly composed the
trouble in Portugal, in 1552, when Lainez gave him

THE FIRST JESUITS 53

anxiety. Lainez, who was made Provincial of Italy
when Brouet was sent to Paris, complained that the
general was robbing his colleges of their best teachers
for the sake of Rome. Ignatius dictated to his secre-
tary an angry letter. "He bids me tell you," says
the scribe, " to attend to your own charge . . . and
you need not give him advice about this until he
asks it."

In the next year (1553) he had a grave quarrel with
Cardinal Caraffa. The Jesuits of Sicily had admitted a
youth against his parents' wishes, and Caraffa, to whom
the mother appealed, ordered Ignatius to give up the
youth. He appealed to the Pope, and got Caraffa's
verdict cancelled. When, two years afterwards, Caraffa
became Pope Paul iv., Ignatius remembered his moment-
ary triumph with concern, and there were grave faces In
the Jesuit house. Paul IIL had died in 1549. His
successor Julius in. had been, as the previous record
shows, very generous to the Jesuits, though funds had
fallen very low in Rome, owing to the Reformation,
and Ignatius had great work to keep alive the
German college he had founded. Julius died in
1555, and it is said by the Jesuit writers that five
cardinals voted for Ignatius himself at the next con-
clave. Marcellus, the next Pope, lived less than a
month, and then Caraffa occupied the see. To Caraffa
the Spaniards were " barbarians," and the Jesuits were
Spaniards. But he postponed the struggle which he
was to have with the Society, and received Ignatius
courteously.

Work, austerity, and anxiety had at length seriously
impaired the strong frame of Ignatius, and he began to
prepare for the end It is marvellous how he lived to
see his sixty-fifth year, and continued to control the
mighty struggle of his Society against its various

54 THE JESUITS

enemies. With the opening of 1556, howeveV, he
retired to a great extent from the labours of his office,
and spent his days chiefly in prayer. He died in the
early morning of 3ist July 1556, and the struggle for
the succession began.

CHAPTER III

EARLY STORMS

FOR the events of the next ten years, which will be
narrated in this chapter, we still rely almost entirely on
Jesuit writers. The statement may sound like an
insinuation of dishonesty, but it is merely a reminder
that our authorities are panegyrists rather than
historians. Their purpose was wholly different from
that of the modern historian, and their selection and
treatment of documents correspondingly differed. It
would be ingenuous to imagine that they loaded the
scales of good and evil, success and failure, with im-
partial hand. Here and there, however, some scandal
was so widely known in their day, and so eagerly pressed
by their opponents, that it were wiser to put a bold gloss
upon it than to ignore it, and thus we of the later date
can just discern the human form under the thick veil of
panegyric It becomes more and more apparent after
the death of Ignatius. Father Sacchini, who takes up
the pen laid down by Orlandini, is just as loyal to his
order, but it becomes more frequently necessary to
excuse and explain, and at times he candidly censures.
The Society is shaken by " very fierce storms," and one
of these breaks upon it in his earliest pages.

The Constitutions provided that at the death of a
General there should be a Vicar-General appointed, and
he. should proceed to summon the leading fathers of
every province for the election, Now, Ignatius had

56 THE JESUITS

appointed a Vicar to assist him in his last years, and it
was generally felt that this Father Natalis would be
Vicar-General and control the election. Natalis was in
Spain, however, and Lainez, although very ill, was in
Rome. We remember Lainez as the learned and
masterful Castilian who had once provoked Ignatius to
use very plain speech. There were only five fathers at
Rome, including Lainez, who were entitled to vote for
the Vicar-General, and Lainez helped to simplify the
issue by casting a blank vote, like Ignatius, or "leaving
the matter to God/' He was appointed, and he fixed
the more important election for November. For this he
had to summon the Provincials, Assistants, and two
Prefects from each of the twelve provinces of the Society.
One imagines a large and varied body, but in point of
fact there were only about twenty voters ; those in
Brazil and the Indies could not be expected, while the
" province of Ethiopia " (or Abyssinia) existed only on
paper. It happened, moreover, that as the Pope was at
war with Spain, the Spanish fathers could not come,
and Lainez dare not proceed without them. They
were of opinion that Natalis ought to have been
recognised as Vicar-General.

Thus the election had to be postponed for two years,
and Lainez continued, on the strength of four votes, to
act as General. The remarkable events of those two
years are of great importance in studying the character
of the early Society. Two very serious conflicts arose,
one between the Jesuits themselves, and one with the
Pope, and it is in such conflicts that the real character
appears. Cr6tineau-Joly suppresses the one altogether
and grossly mis-states the other; he is not only less
candid, but far less truthful, even than the original
Jesuit authorities. If we wish to form a just estimate
of the early Jesuits, not merely to , admire the many

EARLY STORMS 57

viruses they possessed, we must consider these conflicts
with care, as they are recorded by Sacchini in the
" Historia Societatis."

Lainez at once presented himself, as temporary
head of the Society, to the Pope, and prepared for a
struggle. Ranke's fine picture of Caraffa, who had
now become Paul iv., will be remembered. A dark and
stormy Neapolitan, an ardent Italian patriot, he would,
as he sat over his fiery southern wine, express the
fiercest disdain of the Spaniards, and trust to see them
swept out of the Italian peninsula. He had disliked
Ignatius and, Sacchini says, spoken slightingly of him
after his death. On the other hand, he was a deeply
religious man and sincere reformer, and he recognised
that there was precious stuff, from the Church's point
of view, in this new Society. Should he fuse it with
the Theatines, or merely clip its outrageous privileges,
and bring it nearer the common level of the religious
orders? He was known to hesitate between the two
policies, and Lainez was determined to resist both,
implacably, and teach the papacy the real value of the
famous fourth vow. And Lainez was a cold, resolute,
clear-headed man of forty-five : Caraffa a nervous and
impetuous old man of eighty. The conflict was
postponed, however, until the Society had a properly
constituted authority. Paul was content to warn
Lainez that the Jesuits must be careful of their ways,
and to remind him that what a Pope had given a Pope
might take away.

A few months later the domestic conflict opened.
The spirited Bobadilla protested that Diego Lainez had
usurped authority over the Society; the proper thing
to do in these unforeseen circumstances was to divide
the leadership between the five survivors of the ten
original Jesuits. Rodriguez, who still smarted undei

58 THE JESUITS

his humiliation, Sacchini says, was persuaded to *take
this view; Cogordan a "stiff-necked" brother whom
Lainez had ventured to correct, joined them ; and even
the meek and gentle Brouet was drawn into the revolt.
For many months the austere silence of the Roman
house was enlivened with the singular quarrel. The
rebels wrote lengthy indictments of Lainez and secretly
circulated them among the brethren ; and somehow,
says the historian, copies of their libelli always reached
the hands of Lainez, while he himself wrote nothing.
Then Cogordan told two cardinals, who were to tell the
Pope, that Lainez proposed to hold the election in
Spain, so that they might pass their Constitutions
without the Pope's interference. The idea was certainly
entertained, and we can easily believe that Lainez
favoured it. Paul angrily ordered that no Jesuit was
to quit Rome, and closed his door against Lainez. A
union of this powerful and casuistic body with the King
of Spain was one of the last things Paul wished to see ;
and he looked forward to the passing of their Constitu-
tions as his opportunity to clip their wings. At last
Lainez severed Rodriguez and Brouet from the rebels,
and Bobadilla made a direct application to the Pop'e
for his share in the administration of the Society. To
the scandal or the entertainment of Rome, Cardinal
Carpi was appointed to arbitrate on the domestic
quarrels of the children of St. Ignatius. His decision
that Lainez should remain Vicar-General, but consult
the older fathers did not put an end to the unseemly
quarrelling, and Lainez in turn appealed to the Pope,
secured the appointment of another cardinal, and
silenced the rebels. We can imagine the feelings of
Paul iv. When a cardinal told him that Lainez had
charged Bobadilla with an honourable mission at
Foligno, and had sentenced the wicked Cogordan to

EARLY STORMS 59

say one Pater and Ave, he crossed himself : as a
Neapolitan does when the spirit of evil is about He
was astonished at the obstinacy of the rebels, says
Sacchini ; but there are those who fancy that what
really impressed him was the astuteness of Lainez. He
was to have more painful experience of it anon.

While the leaders quarrelled for the mantle of the
master at Rome, there was grave trouble in the
provinces. In that year (1557) John in. died in
Portugal, many valuable workers were lost, and the
judgment of the University of Paris and the scalding
indictments of Melchior Cano were translated into
every tongue in Europe. There was no possibility
under Paul^iv. of countering these things by conversa-
tion at the Vatican. It was imperative to hold the
election as soon as possible and return to the field.
The end of the war came in 1558, and by May the
twenty voters were assembled in the Roman house.
They were to elect a general and endorse the
Constitutions, now completed by Lainez.

There was friction at first because Lainez issued to
the fathers certain orders which aimed at preventing
canvassing, but in July they proceeded to the election.
To their dismay Cardinal Pacheco entered the room,
on the election day, and said that the Pope had sent
him to preside. He genially assured them, however,
that he would not interfere, and they cast their votes.
Lainez was elected by thirteen votes out of twenty.
They then held a number of sittings on the Con-
stitutions, and prepared for a struggle with the Pope.
This struggle is not without some humour when we
reflect that the Society of Jesus was, so to say, the Pope's
private regiment, the one order that made a special vow
of obedience to him, the most exaggerated champion
in Christendom of his authority. It was the first

60 THE JESUITS

occasion on which the Vatican was to realise "that
it might count on the abject obedience of the Jesuits
as long as the Jesuits dictated its decrees. Lainez
and his colleagues were determined by every means
in their power to thwart the will of Paul iv. and suffer
no interference with their own will. They quietly
endorsed their Constitutions, and prepared to go to
their provinces. It is impossible to find what precise
order the Pope had given them to alter their Con-
stitutions, but he had certainly done so in some form,
and his anger broke out stormily. He sent a cardinal
to say that they must reconsider the question of
chanting in choir, as other religious bodies did, and of
appointing a general only for a term of three years.

The Jesuits were " surprised," but obedient. They
" reconsidered " the points, and drew up a report to the
effect that they were unanimously opposed to change.
Lainez and Salmeron were directed to wait on the Pope
and present this report, and some brave language
such language as a Pope rarely heard, and must have
been amazed to hear from a Jesuit, if it were really
spoken is put into the mouth of Lainez at the audience
by Sacchini. The historian admits, however, that
they did not present the report. Paul sternly told
them that they were "contumacious/' indeed not far
removed from heresy (which was true), and he cut
short their defence with a peremptory command to do
as they were bidden. With an eye on the gray hairs
of the octogenarian Pope they retired to mend their
rules and order the chanting of the office. It now
appeared that of their hundred establishments only two
were "houses," and they contented themselves with
ordering that vespers should be chanted in these houses
until Paul iv. died. They had^secretly asked the opinion
of a learned cardinal on the value of the Pope's command.

EARLY STORMS 6 1

Cardinal Puteo was not merely an expert on such
matters ; he was Dean of the Rota, and in a position to
dissolve the Pope's order, as he eventually did. He
told them that it was a " simple command," and that,
as the decree of his predecessor, excusing them from
choir, was not expressly abrogated, it would come into
force again at the death of Paul iv. With this assurance
they meekly submitted to the Pope, and scattered to
their respective missions.

I have narrated this curious story at some length,
relying entirely on the Jesuit Sacchini, because it is of
extreme significance for one who would judge the char-
acter and history of the Society. Catholic historians,
who suppress it entirely or give a very misleading
version of it, are clearly of opinion that the mere record
of the facts will disturb their readers, while anti-Catholic
writers enlarge on it with pleasure. Those who desire
to have an intelligent and just estimate of the Jesuits can
neither ignore nor misinterpret such facts. That Lainez
was personally ambitious, that his eagerness for power
had not entirely the unselfish character of such ambition
as we may recognise in. Ignatius, can hardly be doubted
But Brouet and Salmeron shared and supported his
conduct, and in those two, at least, one is disposed to
see the first spirit of the Regiment of Jesus in its
original purity. The clue to the seeming inconsistency
or hypocrisy of such men defying or evading the Pope's
commands I have already indicated. The Society of
Jesus had consecrated diplomacy to the service of God.
If a Pope would strip their order of those distinctions
and privileges which, in their conviction, peculiarly fitted
it to carry on the holy war, he was not acting as the Vicar
of Christ, and his commands must be evaded. It did not
occur to them that this was, in the end, the Protestant
principle of private judgment, against which they

62 ' THE JESUITS

thundered the doctrine of papal authority. They
were the children of Ignatius, who had always felt
that his private judgment was the judgment of
God. So Jesuitism moved slowly toward its inevitable
goal

One other incident at Rome may be recorded before
we distribute the events of the next seven years in their
national departments. A little more than a year after
the election, on i8th August 1559, Paul iv. died. How
the Romans, stung by the misery they had suffered
during his war with Spain and the brutalities of his
Inquisition, burst into the streets with wild re-
joicing, and attacked the palace of the Inquisitors, and
how the new Pope surrendered the criminal nephews of
his predecessor, including a cardinal of the Church, to
the scaffold, must be read in general history. The fact
that the Jesuits were called to sustain Cardinal Carafifa
in his last hours is of no significance. It is more
pertinent to tell that Lainez returned to the learned
Cardinal Puteo, and the odious command of Paul iv. was
declared to have died with him.

It is said that Lainez himself was proposed for the
papacy after the .death of Paul iv. The conclave of
cardinals on such an occasion is, as is known, as isolated
as a jury-room, but a cardinal might summon his con-
fessor, and it is not only stated by Sacchini, but con-
firmed by Cardinal Otho years afterwards, that Lainez
was called in by Otho and told that his name would be
proposed. We have no just ground to doubt this state-
ment, but we have very good reason to refuse to regard
it as a serious proposal. The papal election of 1559
lasted three months, and was marked by a bitter struggle
of France, Spain, and Italy. It engrossed the attention
of Europe, yet not a single Roman ambassador or prelate
of the time mentions the name of Lainez. Even the

EARLY STORMS 1 63

worcjs used by Cardinal Otho years afterwards are known
to us only in a Jesuit version.

Cardinal Medici, who now became Pius iv., proved
to be one of the most generous patrons of the Society.
Although he was a Pope of the cultured and liberal type,
and would have little personal inclination to favour them,
he seems to have concluded that the Jesuits were the
most formidable champions of his authority, and he gave
them many privileges. It was he who, in 1561, gave
them permission to build within the sphere of other
orders, and to grant academic degrees in their colleges,
and he directed his local representatives everywhere to
protect and aid them. With such an auxiliary the
vigorous and gifted general was enabled to conduct the
affairs of his Society with a success which will appear
as we review its life in the various provinces. Only
one further personal detail need be added in regard to
Lainez. Although the orders of Caraffa had been
declared void, he prqfessed a scruple when he had held
the generalship for three years, and proposed to resign.
In view of his behaviour at the election one is not dis-
posed to look for sincerity in this scruple, nor does the
issue suggest it. His confessor told him that he must
consult his councillors (or assistants). They resisted
his proposal, but he still affected qualms, and sent a
circular letter to all the professed fathers, in which he
purported to place before them, for their guidance, all
the pros and cons of his design. The letter is, however,
a transparent plea for power. The electors unanimously
insisted that he should retain office, and he returned to
his task with firmer authority.

The British Isles still remained a dark and almost
inaccessible territory on the Jesuit map, but Englishmen,
flying from the penal laws of Elizabeth, began to enter
the Society on the continent, and one or two secret

64 * THE JESUITS

missions were sent out. Thomas King was sent from
Louvain to England, but he died in the following year
(1565), and is merely stated to have made a few converts.
Another refugee in Belgium, an Irishman named David
Woulfe, had been sent in 1560 to his native land with
the position of Nuncio. He was so effectively disguised
that in France he was arrested as a Lutheran. His
early jeports represent him as an austere spectator of
the general corruption of the Irish clergy, monks, and
people. He speaks of giving absolution, in one year, to
a thousand penitents who had contracted " incestuous
marriages," and describes the people coming to his
retreat in their shirts and bare feet. Father Woulfe
seems to have caught the taint, however, as he was
some years later ignominiously expelled from the Society.
William Good, a Somersetshire man, and " Edmund the
Irishman," joined him in 1564, distributing to the
peasantry the dispensations and indulgences which
England proscribed, to the grave inconvenience of the
papal treasury.

The mission to Scotland was not less adventurous.
It was the year 1562, when Mary Queen of Scots had
returned from France, full of sad foreboding, to the land
of John Knox. Nicholas Gouda was sent from Louvain,
in the secret character of Nuncio, to console and assist
her, and two Scottish students, Hay and Crichton,
accompanied him. They were dressed as gentlemen of
quality, who would see the world. Unfortunately,
Crichton betrayed the secret to an acquaintance at
Leith, and the fiery cross passed from pulpit to pulpit
in the city of Edinburgh. Gouda sent Crichton back
to Louvain and went on himself to Edinburgh. After
many fruitless attempts to see Mary, he was at last
admitted one night, by a postern gate, to the presence
of the beautiful and distracted young queen, but there

EARLY STORMS 65

%
was ^nothing to be done, He asked that the bishops

might be assembled somewhere to meet him, and it
appeared that there was only one bishop, on one of the
islands, who would venture to receive him, if he were
well disguised. It seems that the least remarkable dress
to don on visiting his lordship was that of a money-
lender, and Father Nicholas, so habited, traversed wild
and stern Caledonia. The rumour of his presence got
about, and the Covenanters kept watch at Edinburgh
for his return. A French merchant coming in from
Aberdeen was sorely beaten by them before he could
prove his identity. But two of the faithful met Gouda
outside Edinburgh, and they sailed, with a small band of
Scottish aspirants, for Belgium.

In Italy the story is one of much progress and bitter
hostility. By 1561 there were two hundred and sixty
Jesuits (in the broadest sense of the word) in Rome, of
whom a hundred and ninety were students in the Roman
college. They were prospering in the sunshine of the
Pope's favour. Elsewhere in Italy, however, they re-
ceived hard blows. No less than four serious storms
broke on the Society in various parts of Italy in the
year 1561.

First it was reported from the Valtellina that the
fathers had been expelled, and forbidden the whole
territory of the Orisons, on the ground that they had
shown an undue eagerness in securing an old man's
money. Next there was trouble in Montepulciano.
The good fathers had, Sacchini says, induced so large
a proportion of the women of Montepulciano to lead
proper lives that the men were infuriated. They bribed
a loose woman to attempt to seduce one of the Jesuits,
and they engaged a man to dress as a Jesuit and let
himself be seen coming from a disorderly hotise. The
Montepulciano version of the matter is, of course, that
5

66 * THE JESUITS

one Jesuit accosted a woman and another was .seen
leaving an unbecoming house. To make matters worse,
a woman accused the Jesuit rector, Father Gambar, of
intimacy with her sister. It was an act of jealousy, as
the two sisters had competed for the rector's smiles ; it
is, however, admitted that Father Gambar had been
" indiscreet " in his letters to the lady, which were made
public. The civic authorities took the darker view, and
requested the removal of Gambar. When Lainez re-
fused, the townsfolk threatened to talk to the rector
themselves, and he fled. Lainez held that he was
innocent, but expelled him from the Society for running
away without permission. He sent some of the older
Jesuits to restore order in Montepulciano, but it was
no use. The citizens withdrew the pension they had
hitherto given the Jesuits, for teaching, and refused to
give them alms or house. Lainez fought, with his
ablest men and subsidies from Rome, for a year or two,
but he was beaten and forced to dissolve the college.

Then Venice reported difficulties. The new Arch-
bishop, Trevisani, detested the Jesuits, and assured his
friends that the chiappini (" humbugs," to translate it
politely) would not remain long in Venice under his
rule. Incidents multiplied, and in 1561 the Senate fell
to discussing the fathers and did not spare them. The
gist of the charge was that they were foreigners medd-
ling with the affairs of Venice ; they confessed all the
noble* ladies of Venice, called on them in their homes,
and through them learned the official secrets. The
debate ended with words, though the Doge summoned
Father Palmio and warned him to be prudent ; and the
men of Venice, quoting Montepulciano, used a little
domestic authority to keep their wives away from Jesuit
confessionals.

From Naples, in the same year, came news of

EARLY STORMS 67

hostility and obloquy. Salmeron had been recalled from
Naples to Rome, and offensive observers began to form
theories of the recall. When the legend had grown to
its full proportions, it ran that Father Salmeron had
extorted four thousand pounds from a dying woman,
before he would absolve her, and had, when the Pope
heard and asked an explanation, fled to Geneva and
turned Protestant. The boys sang ballads in the street
about Father Salmeron and his four thousand pounds,
and the college had troubled experiences. Why
Salmeron was not sent down to refute the legend, and
whether there really was some little difficulty about a
sum of money, we cannot say. But the incident shows
that Catholic Naples was largely hostile to the Jesuits.
The Pope had to intervene and use the authority of the
Viceroy.

A few years later a more serious storm broke out in
the north. In all these cases of charges against the
early Jesuits it is extremely difficult to ascertain the
truth ; the case is always stated for us by the defence.
It happens that in the case of the trouble at Milan in
1563 we have one independent document, and I state
the facts a little more fully. It matters little whether
the various Jesuits were guilty or not in these local dis-
turbances, and most people will conclude, roughly, that
they were probably not all immaculate and impeccable.
But it is worth while ascertaining if all this violent
hostility to the Jesuits, among Catholic peoples, is really
founded on disappointed vice or idle calumny, and we
may take the Milan affair as a type.

The famous Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan, Carolo
Borromeo, was a nephew of the Pope. He received his
position in 1560, at the early age of twenty-two, and
was soon under the influence of the Jesuits. It was
reported to the Pope that Charles was giving large sutfis

68 THE JESUITS

of money to the Jesuits, and seemed to have an idea of
joining the Society, Then the young archbishop's Jesuit
confessor, Father Ribera, was accused of unnatural vice
with a page in the establishment of Donna Virginia,
Charles's sister-in-law. Sacchini says that Charles
investigated the charge and found it false, and that a
bishop who insisted on it (and accused other Jesuits
besides Ribera) was brought before Cardinal Savelli at
Rome, produced his witnesses a number of discharged
or former students at the Jesuit college and was himself
punished for libel. It is added that Charles continued
to entrust his seminary to the Jesuits, and would not
have done so if they were guilty. Ribera, it is
acknowledged, was sent to the Indies by Lainez,
but only because the Pope disliked his influence on
Charles.

The Jesuit case is, as usual, plausible, but does not
satisfy a close inquirer. To send a distinguished and
fashionable Jesuit to the Indies because he is making
his penitent more pious than the Pope likes, especially
at a time when he is charged with vice, is hardly the
kind of action we should expect in so prudent a man as
Lainez. It was a very drastic measure to put five
thousand miles between Ribera and his saintly penitent.
As to Cardinal Savelli's inquiry, we can quite believe
that the Pope would be willing to draw a veil over a
scandal, which might ruin the Society in Italy, once
Lainez had sent the chief culprit on the foreign
missions ; Cardinal Savelli was, moreover, the patron
and protector of the Jesuits, and he seems to have dis-
missed the witnesses unheard on the ground that they
were expelled or seceding students of the Society, We
can further understand that Charles might remain
friendly with the Jesuits if he believed that one man
only was guilty, and that man was punished; but we

EARLY STORMS 69

shair see in the next chapter that the relations of Charles
and the Jesuits were disturbed, and that in 1578 they
made an extraordinarily insolent attack on the cardinal
in his own city.

But the chief point is that an almost contemporary
writer, Caspar Schoppe, maintains on the highest
authority that the Jesuit schools at Milan were deeply
tainted with vice. Schoppe is an ardent anti-Jesuit,
and must be read with discretion when his authority
is remote. In this case he calls God to witness that
Cardinal Frederic Borromeo, the nephew and successor
of Charles, said in his (Schoppe's) presence that he had
himself found the Jesuit college at Braida so corrupt
that he would not suffer any Jesuit to come near him,
would not allow any student of his seminary to approach
a Jesuit teacher, and would, if he had the power, for-
bid any Jesuit to teach. 1 Cr6tineau-Joly replies that
Schoppe is evidently lying, since the known date of
his birth makes it impossible that he should ever have
conversed with Charles Borromeo. This confusion of
Frederic and Charles is originally due to Quesnel, who
makes that mistake in quoting Schoppe, but it is very
singular that the French apologist for the Jesuits should
not know that Schoppe spoke of Frederic Borromeo,
not Charles, as is pointed out in later editions of
Quesnel. It is still more singular that Cr6tineau-Joly
assures his readers (who are not likely to make an
arduous search for Schoppe's ancient work) that the
statement is made "sous forme dubitative," when he
must know that it is the most solemn and emphatic
statement in Schoppe's book. The impartial student
must conclude that there is grave evidence against the
Milan Jesuits, and that hostility to the Jesuits had at

1 Rclatio ad Reges^ by Alphonsus de Vargas (Caspar Schoppe), 1636,
p. 40.

70 THE JESUITS

times a more respectable ground than they are willing
to admit

The Pope did not stint his patronage of the Society
on account of these accusations. When the Cardinal-
Protector of the Society died in 1564, Pius iv. under-
took that office himself, as if to intimidate its critics;
though the critics were not in the least intimidated.
Shortly afterwards he appointed a commission of
cardinals and prelates to consider the establishment of a
seminary at Rome, and they recommended that the
Jesuits should have charge of it The proposal inflamed
the Roman critics of the Society, and Montepulciano
and Milan and all the other scandals were fiercely dis-
cussed. The Pope held firm, however, and the struggle
had not ended when Lainez died.

In Spain and Portugal the Society continued to
make material progress and, in the same proportion,
morally to deteriorate. Favoured by the genial clime
of the Peninsula, the Society ran quickly through its
normal course of development and bore precocious fruit.
The college at Coimbra had, as we have seen, needed
purification even under Ignatius. It now prospered
again, and maintained about a hundred and fifty novices
and priests. Eat the most notable feature of the
Portuguese province was the early interference of the
Jesuits in politics. The primitive design of avoiding
politics and forbidding Jesuits to frequent the courts of
princes had first been set aside by Ignatius himself, and
was quite inconsistent with the general idea of obtaining
the favour of the rich and powerful. In Portugal the
court was now dominated by Jesuits ; Father Miguel de
Torres was confessor of the Queen- Regent Catherine,
Father Gonzales da Camara confessor of the young
King Sebastian, and Father Leo Henriquez confessor of
Cardinal Dom Henry, the King's grand-uncle. It may

EARLY STORMS * 71

be read in any history of Portugal how the Cardinal
began, at the instigation and with the assistance of the
Jesuits, to intrigue for the Regency, and in 1562 forced
Catherine to abdicate. In a letter, dated 8th June
1571, which Catherine afterwards wrote to General
Borgia, we are plainly informed of the intrigues of the
confessors. " Everyone knows," says the Queen, "that
the evils which afflict this kingdom are caused by some
of your fathers, who are so misguided as to advise the
King, my grandson, to displace me and expel me from my
State." She had dismissed her confessor Torres, who
advised her to submit to the intrigues of her brother and
Father Gonzales, but after a five years' struggle she was
forced to retire from Spain. Father Gonzales then
became the most powerful man in Portugal, and made
his brother Prime Minister, until, as we shall see,
Sebastian became old enough to put an end to their
intrigues.

In Spain the Society was less prosperous. The
historic struggle at Alcala had ended in the capture of
the university by the Jesuits, but at Seville, Valladolid,
and other towns there was persistent opposition, and at
Grenada a dangerous agitation arose because a Jesuit
confessor compelled a penitent to name her accomplice
in vice. Borgia himself had many enemies at court,
and the opposition to him culminated at length in an
attack which compelled him to fly to Portugal. Two
works of piety which he had written in earlier years were
denounced to the Inquisition and condemned. It is said
by the Jesuits that the suspected passages in his books
were interpolated by the man who published them, and
the point is of little interest Borgia did not remain to
face the questions of the Inquisitors, and the King became
so angry with him that, when he was invited by Lainez
to the metropolitan house at Rome, the Spanish fathers

72 THE JESUITS

warned Lainez that if any dignity were conferred on
Borgia it would be deeply resented at the court.

This trouble had hardly ended in the disgrace and
flight of Borgia when a very grave domestic quarrel
arose in the Castilian province. Lainez had sent Father
Natalis from Rome to inspect the province, and the
Castilian Provincial, Father Araoz (nephew of Ignatius),
discovered that Natalis had secret instructions to destroy
his position at court, Araoz, the oldest Jesuit in Spain,
and a favourite at court, had won a position of comfort
and power which was certainly not consistent with the
personal ideal of the Society. When, however, they
endeavoured to dislodge him, he took a drastic revenge
on the Roman authorities. Natalis was collecting and
sending to Rome a good deal of money, when an instruc-
tion was suddenly issued from the court pointing out that
it was against the laws of the kingdom to send money
abroad or send men to study in other countries. This
order was openly attributed by the Jesuits to the influence
of Father Araoz. An angry quarrel ensued, and one of
the friends of Araoz produced the secret instructions which
Lainez had given to Natalis and some father had stolen.
We need not enlarge on this quarrel. It is more interest-
ing to note that the Jesuits urged that their action in
sending money to Rome did not come under the royal
order since the Church has no frontiers. For some years
the affairs of the Society in Spain remained in a very
troubled condition, in spite of their great prosperity.

In France we naturally find the sternest struggle
of the decade, as the large Protestant population was
supported by the majority of the Catholics in opposition
to the Jesuits. The early effort to woo Paris by
austerity of life and humble care of the sick had wholly
failed. The Archbishop, the university, and the
lawyers of the Parlement had observed that these

EARLY STORMS 73

humbie ministers had the most formidable privileges in
their reserved baggage, and they had put the Jesuits out
of the gates. They remained in the meadows of St.
Germain for five or six years, and then, in 1560, Lainez
ordered a fresh campaign. His representative at Paris
was the astute intriguer, Father Cogordan, who had
given Lainez painful proof of his ability at Rome. France
was on the eve of a terrible struggle of Catholics and
Huguenots, and Cogordan had little difficulty in per-
suading the Queen that the Jesuits were the appointed
force for checking Protestantism. The Parlement was
ordered to register the letters of Henry n., authorising
the Jesuits. The courageous lawyers refused once more,
and the whole of the faculties of the university joined
in an emphatic condemnation of the Jesuits and their
privileges.

The next move of the Jesuits Is noteworthy.
Cogordan was instructed to reply that the Jesuits would
sacrifice, in France, any privileges which were opposed
to the laws of the country or the rights of the French
Church. Their opponents were quite aware that the
sacrifice was insincere and temporary, but the manoeuvre
greatly weakened the position of the Archbishop. As a
last resource he stipulated that they should also abandon
the name " Society of Jesus," which many Catholics
considered offensively arrogant, and again Cogordan
assented. The Parlement, however, still refused to
register the royal letters, and threw the decision upon a
Council which was to be held at Poissy, where Catholics
and Huguenots were to meet in a dialectical tourney,

Francis n. had died at the close of 1560, and
Catherine de Medici, the virtual ruler, was entirely won
to the Jesuit view. But the Huguenots, led by the
Prince de Cond< and Admiral de Coligny, were so
powerful that sober Catholic opinion favoured concession

74 THE JESUITS

to them in the interest of peace: a policy which the
Jesuits ruthlessly opposed wherever the Catholics were
still in the majority. The Colloquy at Poissy was,
therefore, doubly interesting to the Jesuits, and Lainez
went in person, in the train of the Pope's legate,
Cardinal cTEste, to secure their aims ; he was to obtain
the recognition of the Society and to prevent the recon-
ciliation of Catholics and Huguenots. Unhappily he
succeeded in both designs. The Colloquy opened in
July, when a small group of the abler Huguenot divines
confronted six cardinals and forty bishops and arch-
bishops, under the eyes of the King and Queen. When,
after a few sittings, it was seen that concessions must
be made to the heretics, Lainez delivered a fiery and
eloquent discourse against this proposed sacrilege.
Catherine de Medici trembled, and would attend no
more sittings. The Colloquy ended in a futile wrangle
of Lainez and the Huguenots, and France, thanks
very largely to Lainez, went on her way toward St.
Bartholomew.

The sincerity of Lainez in this fanatical gospel of
intolerance cannot be doubted, but it is in piquant
contrast to the second part of his mission, in which he
equally succeeded. He brought with him testimonials
to the work done by his Society in a hundred places,
confirmed the promise that they would lay aside their
privileges and their very name (until it was safe to
resume them), and thus secured the right of entry into
Paris for this nameless body of priests. This was done,
of course, by quiet activity among the prelates, without
any public discussion. Lainez remained several months
in France, strengthening the new foundation andat the
very time when he was urging Cond<, in a friendly
correspondence, to induce the Protestants to join in
the Council of Trent using the whole of his great

EARLY STORMS 75

influence over the Queen and court to prevent any
concession of churches or other normal rights to the
Huguenots. As a result of his success, the Jesuits
moved into Paris and took possession of the hotel
which the Bishop of Clermont had bequeathed them
some years before. We can hardly suppose that they
were following the advice of the sagacious Lainez when
they inscribed over the door the words " College of the
Society of the Name of Jesus." This flippant evasion
of their promise to abandon their name did not tend to
conciliate Parisians. When they succeeded in a short
time, with their free classes and ablest teachers, in
drawing some hundreds of youths from the university,
they became bolder and announced that the " Clermont
College" was incorporated with the university. The
rector, Marchand, indignantly challenged their claim,
and they produced letters of incorporation which they
had secretly obtained from his predecessor two years
before. They could not insist on the validity of this
irregular diploma, and the close of the generalship of
Lainez saw them once more in a position of grave
insecurity and unpopularity.

A somewhat similar struggle was taking place in
Belgium. The university and civic authorities at
Louvain resisted them, and their college remained so
poor that we find its rector complaining to Rome of the
burden of supporting Father Ribadeneira, who, as we
have previously seen, had been sent to further Jesuit
interests at the court of Philip in Belgium. Even when
Margaret of Austria, whom they easily secured, bade
the States of Brabant admit the Jesuits, they refused,
and they yielded only to the direct intervention of
Philip in 1564.

On the other hand, the able and devoted Jesuit
Canisius was laying the foundation of his Society very

76 ' THE JESUITS

firmly in the Catholic provinces of Germany. Cattisius
Is the greatest figure in the second decade of the Society's
life, and seems to have been a more deeply religious
and conscientious man than Lainez. He maintained
to the end the more austere standard of life, travelling
afoot from city to city, from Rhineland to Poland and
Austria, and inaugurating everywhere the effective
system of education which Ranke has declared superior
to that of the Reformers. The University of Dillingen
was entrusted to the Jesuits, the frontiers of the Society
were extended to Poland in 1554, and the laity were
identified with its interests in the Catholic cities by
being drafted into the numerous sodalities or confra- 1
ternities which the Jesuits controlled. The historian
can dwell with more sympathy on their generally en-
lightened struggle with Protestantism and with Catholic
corruption in Germany, where heresy provided them
with a bracing atmosphere and a healthy incentive to
work. Even here, however, we find them at times
stooping to tactics which we cannot admire, and the
next chapter will introduce them to us in some singular
adventures. Their conduct in Bavaria, especially, does
not invite close scrutiny. Albert v. was heavily
burdened with debt, and it is something more than a
coincidence that, the moment he admitted the Jesuits,
the Vatican made him a large grant out of ecclesiastical
funds ; it is even clearer that the Jesuits were chiefly
responsible for the persecution of Protestants which
followed their settlement in Bavaria,

Lainez had made a tour of these provinces after
establishing his Society in France. From Paris he had
passed to Belgium, where the Duchess of Parma was
ruling in the name of her brother. Margaret had heard
Lainez preach at Rome, and he easily secured her
interest for his struggling brethren in Flanders. He

EARLY STORMS y 77

then went on to Trent, where, in 1562, the Council
resumed its sittings. There was no longer the least
hope of persuading the Reformers to attend, and it now
remained for the* Church to decide what modifications
it would adopt in order to meet the Protestant indict-
ment The northern monarchs, confronted with the
task of reconciling large Catholic and Protestant popu-
lations, were disposed to make concessions, and their
clergy were at least eager to check the arrogant claims
and moderate the extravagance of the papal court.
This policy was opposed by Italy, Spain, and the
Papacy, and the Jesuits were the most violent partisans
of the ultramontane attitude. It would, perhaps, be an
error to ascribe to Lainez a preponderant r61e in the
unhappy councils that were adopted at Trent, but what-
ever influence his learning and eloquence gave him was
used for the purpose of magnifying the papal authority.
Even the wealth and luxury of the Roman court,
which had been so largely responsible for the schism,
found in him an eloquent defender. He was able to
return to Rome with an assurance that the Catholic
States made no concession, while the northern prelates
had to retire to their seats with grave foreboding of
bloody struggle.

Of the Jesuit missions beyond the, seas during this
decade little need be said. In India alone some material
progress was made, and it was largely due to tactics
which promised no permanent result. Writers like
Cr^tineau-Joly deliberately omit the most significant
details in regard to these early missions, and give a
most misleading impression that tens of thousands of
natives were gathered into the fold by the spiritual
teaching and exalted labours of the missionaries. The
early Jesuits themselves are more candid. They tell,
fpr instance, how in 1559 they made a descent, with an

78 " THE JESUITS

accompanying troop of soldiers, on an island whese in-
habitants had long resisted baptism. The natives were
held up by the troops, and their leaders were put in
irons and told that they were to be deported. In the
circumstances they professed themselves eager to be
baptized, and the sacred rite and a good dinner were
at once bestowed on five hundred " converts." The
Portuguese authority was the chief agency on which
the missionaries relied. The most tempting privileges
were granted to converts ; the administrative offices
which the Hindoo clergy had exercised for ages were
transferred to the Jesuits; and in 1557 even the tribunal
of the Inquisition was set up by them in India.

In other lands the missionary record was singularly
barren during the decade. In Brazil the fathers still
wandered in the forests, slowly winning the confidence
and allegiance of the natives by medical and other
humane services. Abyssinia was once more invaded,
and some of the fathers entered the Congo, but both
missions were destroyed after a few years. In Egypt
an attempt was made to induce the Copts to recognise
the authority of the Pope. Rich presents were made
to the Patriarch, and the Papacy was flattered for a
time by reports of success; but the adventure ended
in the painful and ignominious flight of the missionaries
from the country. The Japanese missions also were
almost destroyed in the course of the decade, and two
ingenious attempts to enter China proved unsuccessful
In 1556 Father Melchior Nunez was permitted to reach
Canton, but his very diplomatic account of his object
did not convince the mandarins and he was politely
expelled. In 1563 a further attempt was made. The
mandarins were informed that an embassy had arrived
from Europe with valuable presents for the Emperor.
The cautious mandarins asked to see its credentials.

EARLY STORMS 79

"!>

and, when they were told that these had been accident-
ally destroyed on the voyage, they again amiably con-
ducted their visitors to the frontier. There were three
Jesuits, in disguise, among the " envoys," and it is clear
that the whole expedition was a fraudulent attempt of
the merchants and missionaries from Goa to break the
reserve of the Chinese.

Such were the fortunes of the Society of Jesus
during the decade which closed with the death of
Lainez in 1565. The hundred establishments which
Ignatius had bequeathed to him in 1556 had now in-
creased to a hundred and fifty ; the thousand subjects
had become three thousand. From Portugal to Poland
the Jesuits were the most ardent soldiers in the war
against the advancing heretics, and there was hardly
a Catholic court in Europe that did not welcome the
children of Ignatius and bow in secret to their advice.
Yet a keen observer like Lainez must have perceived
that this prosperity was less solid than it appeared, and
his last years were saddened by announcements of
hostility and defeat. In France and Belgium the gain
was wholly disproportionate to the exacting struggle
they had maintained; in Portugal the material success
and political action were lowering the ideal of the
Society ; in Spain the Catholic monarch, the Inquisi-
tion, and the higher clergy were hostile ; and England
kept its doors sternly closed against the Jesuits. The
future was still uncertain, and another Caraffa might
at any time accede to the papal chain With a last
glance at the ex- Duke of Gandia, as if to intimate
that Borgia was the fittest to take up the burden he
laid down, the second General of the Society, able,
energetic, and high-minded to the last, sank wearily to
his rest

CHAPTER IV

GENERAL FRANCIS BORGIA

THE election which followed the death of Lainez was
not marred by any of the painful incidents which we
frequently find on such occasions in the Jesuit chronicles.
When the leading fathers of the Society reached Rome
in the early summer, to compare their stories of warfare
in every clime of Europe and consult about the future
of their great organisation, there was one amongst them
who had so natural a pre-eminence that his election was
assured. This was Francis Borgia, ex-Duke of Gandia
and Viceroy of Catalonia. There were in the distin-
guished gathering many of far greater ability and service
indeed, there was probably none of less ability than
Borgia but his high birth, his friendship with half the
kings of Europe, his venerable person and austere life
marked him clearly for the supreme command. Philip
of Spain had outgrown his hostility, and, at the death of
Lainez, Borgia was appointed Vicar-General So plain
was the intention of the electors that he sincerely begged
them not to impose on him so heavy a responsibility.
They disregarded his protest, and on 2nd July he
became General of the Society.

He was then a feeble and venerable man of sixty-
five, worn with austerity, profoundly sincere and religious,
In his person he singularly illustrated the change that
had come over Catholicism. The name of Borgia at
once suggests the groves of pleasure or the chambers of

GENERAL FRANCIS BORGIA 8l

crimeout of which the Papacy had been startled by the
voice of Luther: his father had been a son of Pope
Alexander vi,, his mother an illegitimate daughter of
the Archbishop of Saragossa, who in turn had been a
natural son of Ferdinand v. But with his hair-shirts,
his bloody scourges, and his long fasts, Francis belonged
to the new age, and seemed to have taken on himself
the expiation of the scarlet sins of the Borgias. He
had been Viceroy of Catalonia from 1539 to 1543, and
had then suffered for some years a mild and obscure
disgrace. During this enforced retirement to his duchy
he had met, and fallen under the charm of. Peter Favre,
and he was, as we saw, secretly admitted to the Society.
Although he had been driven from Spain only a few
years before, the Pope had restored his prestige, and his
election was acclaimed throughout the Society and the
Church.

We may, perhaps, see a reflection of his religious
spirit, as well as an indication that grave abuses had
crept into the Society, in the long series of decrees which
the Congregation proceeded to pass. No Jesuit was
henceforward to live at a royal court at least, " not for
more than two or three months " : Jesuit communities
were not to own and manage large farms, and sell their
produce in the public markets; lawsuits on behalf of
legacies were to be avoided ; salaries for teaching were
to be abandoned when a teacher joined the Society.
These and other commands give us an authoritative
assurance that there was much disorder. Even in the
Congregation the liberals or casuists were represented.
When, in the discussion of the impropriety of going to
law to secure legacies, one of the sterner brethren quoted
the Sermon on the Mount, another plausibly argued that
it wds wrong to yield to worldlings funds which might be
used in the service of God, The Puritans won, and their

82 THE JESUITS

decrees went forth ; but the farms were not abandoned,
as we shall see, nor the lawyers impoverished.

In view of the despotic power which a General had,
it may seem strange that the electors should venture to
entrust the office to a man of such mediocre ability as
Borgia. We must remember that the General had a
council of four able assistants, and it could safely be
trusted that the humility of Borgia would leave the
power in their hands. Nor was it long before their
statesmanship was put to a severe test. Their princely
benefactor, Pius iv., died before the end of 1565, and a
Dominican monk, Pius v., occupied the chair. He was
a personal friend of Borgia, but he belonged to a rival
order, and Rome was greatly agitated by the hope that
he would strip the Society of its excessive privileges*
To the relief and delight of the Jesuits, Pius v. took
the earliest opportunity to show his friendliness. As he
drove in solemn procession past their church, he sum-
moned the General to his carriage, and talked affection-
ately with him for a quarter of an hour under the eyes of
his officers. When he went on to nominate Jesuits for
certain important offices, it seemed that they had found
another protector.

In 1567, however, they were dismayed to receive an
amiable, but firm, suggestion from Pius to chant in
choir, as other religious bodies did, and abandon the
"simple" or temporary vows which enabled them to
keep priests in the Society for years without being
solemnly pledged to it. 1 A commission of cardinals was
at the time engaged in discussing the reform of the
monastic world, and .the Jesuits submitted to it a lengthy

1 I have previously explained the distinction between simple and solemn
vows, and the advantage which the Jesuits had in confining the latter to a
chosen few of their body. See p. 30. These < simple" vows are now
admitted in other orders, but they were for centuries peculiar to the Jesuits,
and were very distasteful to the older orders.

GENERAL FRANCIS BORGIA 83

and skilful memoir in defence of their institutions.
Ought not a regiment of light horse, ready to fly at
a moment's notice to any part of the Pope's dominions,
to have special characters? Would those hundreds of
men who had joined the Society in its actual form not
have ground to complain if it were made more onerous ?
Would the benefactors who had built their homes and
chapels be indifferent to the changes? Nay, what
would the heretics say when the decisions of a whole
series of Popes, to say nothing of the revelations made
to Ignatius, were ruled improper? These ingenious
considerations were then orally impressed on the Pope
by Borgia and Polanco, and they flattered themselves
that they had once more evaded the commands which
it was their chief business to see respected by the rest
of Christendom. The Pope had agreed to postpone the
question of choir until his new edition of the Breviary
was published, and he did not seem to insist on the
reform of the vows. A few months later, however, they
heard that the Pope was about to decree that in future
no member of a religious body should be admitted to
the priesthood until he had taken his final vows.

The details of the struggle need not be repeated
here, but we must assuredly see a significance in these
repeated conflicts with the Pope. In the whole history
of the monastic orders of the Catholic Church there is
no example of persistent opposition to, or determined
evasion of, the commands of the Pope to compare for
a moment with this behaviour of the men who took a
special vow to obey him. Moreover, the Jesuit writers
of the time frankly confess that they resisted the Pope's
wish in their own interest. If the solemn vows were to
be taken in a youth's early twenties, they would have to
examine much more closely the characters of aspirants
to the Society, and their numbers would shrink. It was

84 THE JESUITS

the Netherlands. Here the
Jesuits had miscalculated the strength of the Catholics,
and, in encouraging the policy of violent repression,
led to their own undoing. Only the favour of princes
had secured some shelter for them in Belgium, and
their houses now disappeared in the flames of the civil
war. Their college at Douai had been interdicted by
the university authorities in 1567, but relieved by papal
authority. As the Spaniards proceeded, however, in the
drastic and bloody policy which the Jesuits were known
to favour, the crowds stormed their residences, and by

92 f THE JESUITS r

1570 they were almost driven from the country. They
returned in the wake of Alva, but there was bitter
hostility to them, and they were generally accused of
rebuilding their house at Antwerp out of the loot of
Flemish towns. Father Sacchini is moved to lament
the perversity of men who could entertain such a
suspicion, though, as their sardonic critic Steinmetz
observes, "it would have been better to supply the
place of this moral maxim by stating whence the funds
were obtained for building or beautifying the house at
Antwerp."

When we pass to Germany we naturally find that
the Jesuits are apostles of toleration, charity, and calm
intellectual discussion of differences of creed in the
north, fanatical intolerantists in the south, and advocates
of every conceivable compromise between the two
extremes in the intervening or mixed States. Canisius
still maintained his great work and his austere standard.
Appointed Legate of the Pope in 1565 he traversed the
whole of Germany on foot, and strengthened the loyalty
of the Catholic rulers to the Council of Trent In the
following year we find him, at the Diet of Augsburg,
helping to unite Protestants and Catholics against the
Turk. Many new colleges were founded by him, in-
cluding three in Poland, before the death of Borgia.
On the other hand, grave reports had to be sent to
Rome from the more Catholic and prosperous centres.
The University of Dillingen, which the Jesuits controlled,
was found in 1567 to be permeated with heresy, and a
rigorous scrutiny ended in some of the Jesuits (including
an English refugee, Edward Thorn) going over to the
Protestants, In 1 570 the Jesuit rector of Prague College
became a Protestant and married In Bavaria the cry
was raised that they mutilated boys in their colleges.
A most extraordinary trial resulted in their acquittal,

GENERAL FRANCIS BORGIA * 93

but there was a deep and widespread prejudice against
them. In the same year, 1565, they were fiercely assailed
in Austria. Their college at Vienna was raided by an
angry mob ; and the nobles, who had been convoked
by Maximilian, refused to give their aid in the campaign
against the Turk unless the Emperor expelled the
Jesuits.

In Italy the chronicles of the Society tell of slow
advance chequered by fits of hostility. By the year
1567 the Roman college had more than a thousand
pupils, but the provinces were beginning to murmur
at the burden of supporting this establishment, and
the next congregation would restrict its growth. In
Genoa, Siena, and other cities, the fathers struggled
with poverty ; in one place a college had to abandon
the struggle and die. In most parts, however, the
Society flourished and adapted its work to the cir-
cumstances. At Palermo we hear, in 1567, of a weird
pageant, known as "The Triumph of Death," arranged
by the Jesuits. Sack-clothed men bearing candles, a
huge figure of Christ in a coffin, and two hundred
flagellants, stimulated to their ghastly exercise by a
troop of choristers dressed as hermits, went before a
car containing a monstrous skeleton, higher than the
roofs of the houses, with a mighty scythe in its hand.
In the north the appeal was to princes. Borromeo
still favoured the Society at Milan, while at Ferrara
and Florence the Jesuits directed the consciences of
princesses. The daughters of the Emperor who had
married the Duke of Ferrara and Francis de Medici
insisted on retaining their Jesuit confessors; and, when
Borgia would refuse permission, the confessors them-
selves pleaded that the fair ladies could not possibly
be abandoned to strange influences. Borgia reluctantly
consented- He saw, and regretted, that one of the

94 r THE JESUITS

sternest rules of the Society was being sacrificed to
expediency, but his counsellors seemed to have over-
ruled him. Ignatius had sanctioned the first royal
confessor : now there were four.

From his survey of the provinces, in which he saw
much to distress his austere feelings, Borgia returned,
exhausted, to Rome. He died a few weeks afterwards
(ist October 1572), and Polanco, one of the ablest
administrators at the Roman centre, was appointed
Vicar-General. He fixed the election for April, and
in the early spring the most famous officers of the
army began to come in from their remote battlefields.
Auger was occupied in so congenial a task in France
that he would not come to Rome; he was with the
Catholic troops besieging the Huguenots in La
Rochelle. But there was an impressive gathering of
the veterans of the Society. Salmeron and Bobadilla
were still there to tell the story of their humble begin-
ning on the flanks of Montmartre thirty years before ;
Ribadeneira, Miguel de Torres, Canisius, Possevin,
Manares, Leo Henriquez, Miron, Polanco, and other
fathers, before whom kings would bow, came in from
the frontiers to the eternal city, as the commanders of
legions had done before them. And of this brilliant
group one of the lowest in ability and distinction,
Father Everard Mercurian, was chosen to be General

The new Pope, Gregory xni., had intervened
" How many Spanish Generals have you had?" he
asked, when the older Jesuits came to greet him. All
three had been Spaniards. " How many votes have
the Spaniards amongst you?" he then asked. Quite
enough to elect a Spaniard once more, as they were
bent on doing ; and the man on whom they had fixed
their thoughts was the gifted and energetic Polanco.
But Polanco was descended from converted Jews, a

GENERAL FRANCIS BORGIA, 95

class disliked by high-born Spaniards, and Kings
Philip and Sebastian had written to ask the Pope to
prevent him from being elected. The fathers respect-
fully protested that the Pope, who was Protector of
their Society, ought not to coerce their decisions.
" Are there no able men amongst you except
Spaniards ? " he went on ; and he suggested Everard
Mercurian. Gregory knew that the blind obedience
of the Jesuits to the Pope was not of the kind which
hastens to carry out the slightest wish of the ruler, and
on the morning of the election he sent a cardinal to
tell them that they must not elect a Spaniard. They
still expostulated ; but Gregory insisted, and Mercurian,
a mild and mediocre old man, was made General.
Being a Belgian, he was at least a subject of Spain ;
and he was sixty-eight years old.

Then the conscript fathers assembled, day after
day, to discuss the mass of secret reports from every
centre, and pass those instructive decrees forty-eight
were issued on this occasion which tell us so plainly
the decay of the original spirit. Ignatius had taught
them to seek power and wealth for God : it had proved
a dangerous lesson. The Congregation dispersed in
June, and Mercurian entered upon his seven years 1
generalship. The real control was openly entrusted
to Father Palmio, the Italian assistant, until Father
Manares ousted him, and secured the chief place and
the hope of succession. There was, at this, some
unedifying language ; we shall see presently that
Manares, at least, undoubtedly sought the generalship.
But the various provinces were now under the command
pf such able men that the progress of the Society was
not retarded. Let us glance at the more significant
happenings in the provinces, and then sum up the work
of the Society in its first four decades.

96 , THE JESUITS

In the case of Spain we need note only that the
Pope's interference in the election was bitterly resented,
and a feeling spread among the fathers which we shall
find breaking into the most singular expression under
the rule of Acquaviva. In spite of the stern design of
Ignatius and the emphatic rule of the Society that the
Jesuit was to benumb every patriotic fibre in his heart,
and know himself only as a citizen of the city of God,
the Spaniards cherished their national pride in an
alarming degree. Under the ambitious and masterful
Philip IL, who dreamed of world-empire and was
willing to include the Jesuits in his diplomatic corps,
they prospered and were the most important body in
the Society. They were annoyed that the generalship
passed out of their hands, and they began to meditate
secession from the Roman authorities. When the papal
Nuncio died at Madrid in 1577 a memoir written in this
sense was found amongst his papers* We shall see later
how the feeling developed, and how the war with Rome
brought into notice the degenerate character of the
Spanish province.

Italian affairs in that decade are chiefly remarkable
for a violent quarrel with St. Charles Borromeo at
Milan. He had continued for some years to patronise
and employ them. Father Adorno remained his con-
fessor; and in 1572 he gave them the Abbey of Braida
for a college, and in 1573 entrusted to them the College
of Nobles at Milan. They were already in charge of
the seminary of the diocese, and the trouble seems to
have begun with the transfer of this institution to the
Oblates (a religious body founded by Charles) in 1577*
Cr&ineau-Joly explains that the Jesuits were now con-
trolling so many institutions in Milan that they were
overworked, and they begged to be relieved of the
seminary. He appeals to Giussano, the saint's bio*

GENERAL FRANCIS BORGIA 97

grapher ; but Giussano merely says that Charles " gave
the seminary to the Oblates, with the consent of the
Jesuits," which is a polite way of saying that they were
dismissed. We shall see, in fact, that Charles was
convinced that the Jesuits were in a lax and degenerate
condition.

In the following year, 1578, the cardinal quarrelled
with the Governor of Milan, and the Jesuits divided in
allegiance. Adorno and a few others were faithful to
Charles, but a courtly and fashionable Jesuit preacher,
who was appointed to preach the Lent, attacked and
ridiculed the cardinal-archbishop from one of the chief
pulpits of his own city, before a crowded audience of
wealthy Milanese. This preacher, Mazzarino, uncle of
the famous minister, was the confessor and friend of
the governor. Charles protested against the unseemly
attack, but the Jesuit provincial appointed Mazzarino
again to preach the Lent in 1579, and he attacked
Charles more virulently than ever. All the less austere
ladies of Milan, for whom he made smooth the paths
of rectitude, flocked to his chapel, and listened with
pleasure to his ridicule of the ascetic prescriptions of
their saintly archbishop. Charles drew the attention of
the Provincial to the fact that Mazzarino was preaching
moral principles of scandalous laxity, and his attacks on
the chief clerical authority were very injurious. The
Provincial would not chide Mazzarino, and Charles
appealed to the General. The only reply of the General
was, at the request of a certain countess, to direct
Mazzarino to preach all the year round. Charles
threatened to suspend the preacher, and he was defied
from the pulpit; he threatened to bring his principles
to the notice of the Inquisition, and the Jesuits sent
a courier to Rome to defend their preacher. Then
Charles instructed his Roman agent, Spetiano, to la$r
7

98 " THE JESUITS

the case before the papal court, and Mazzarino was
recalled by his General and suspended from preaching
for two years by an ecclesiastical tribunal.

This quarrel is of interest for two reasons. In the
first place, it illustrates the value of Cr&ineau-Joly's
history of the Jesuits. The French writer ignores the
attack in 1577, and says that, as soon as Mazzarino
began to misbehave, "the Milan fathers hastened to
disapprove of the imprudent orator," and the General
recalled him, It is, of course, true that Charles's con-
fessor, Adorno, "disapproved " of his brother Jesuit, but
the Mazzarino faction retorted that he was jealous,
because Mazzarino had larger audiences for his sermons ;
and Cr6tineau-Joly suppresses the fact that the Provincial,
and for a time the General, defiantly supported Mazzarino,
We know this from Barromeo's letters to his agent 1 The
further interest of the quarrel, which is entirely sup-
pressed by the French historian, is that in these letters
Charles passes very severe strictures on the Jesuits as
a body. Instead of finding fault with one man only,
Mazzarino, he found fault with all except one, his
confessor, to whom he remained attached. " I confess,"
he writes to Spetiano, "that for some time I have felt
the Society to be in grave danger of decadence unless a
prompt remedy be applied." The Jesuits, he explains,
admit clever youths without regard to their character,
and they grant extravagant liberties to their literary
colleagues. They are inflated by the favour of the
nobility and the crowds of wealthy women who
flock to lax moralists like Mazzarino. We may also
recall here the grave statement of Charles's nephew
and successor, Archbishop Frederic Borromeo, who
was educated by the Jesuits ; a statement repeated,

1 See a selection in the Annales de la Socittg Sa 7 s Crdtineau-Joly, "a monotonous stretch
of felicity." When, however, we turn to the official
Jesuit historian, Cordara, who continues the Historic*,
Sociatatis, we find that the year which immediately
followed the election was marked by serious disturbances
or scandals at Castellone, Genoa, Artois, Paris, Lyons,
Freiburg, and Worms, and in Sicily, B^arn, Castile,
Poland, and Hesse-Cassel We shall further see that
the monotony of the thirty years is relieved by a
scandalous bankruptcy of the fathers at Seville, a
temporary expulsion from Malta, Bohemia, and
Hungary, a combined attack upon the Society by the
leading universities of Europe, the publication of the
Secret Instructions, the complete extinction of the
great Japanese mission and the new mission in Abyssinia,
and a quite normal succession of scandals and tribula-
tions in France and Catholic Germany. The serious
historian cannot therefore dismiss the generalship of

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 169

Vitelleschi with a short assurance that it was a period
of virtue, heroism, and prosperity. We must, as before,
carefully consider the life of the Society in each of its
provinces.

The record of the Society in Italy is an uninteresting
chronicle of small scandals and unobtrusive work.
The former class may be briefly illustrated by the
adventures of the Neapolitan Jesuit, Father Onufrio de
Vermi, in the year 1623. The historian tells us that
the honours awarded him by his illustrious penitent the
Count d'Elda so inflated his spirit that he rebelled
against his authorities. Passing over to Spain, he
contrived to secure a bishopric from the queen, and
was expelled from the Society on the charge of ambition.
It is needless to quote such trifles as these from the
chronicles. The outstanding event at Rome under
the rule of Vitelleschi was the canonisation of Ignatius
and Xavier in 1622. Their place in the distinguished
gallery it would be invidious to question, but the curious
student of such matters would find it interesting to
trace the appearance of the miracles which were needed
to secure canonisation for them* In the case of Xavier,
whose life was spent in the Far East, it would be easy
to adduce evidence of miracles, and difficult to examine
it The miracles of Ignatius are more interesting.
When Ribadeneira, who knew him, first wrote his life,
he seemed not to have heard of any miracles; when,
however, forty years later, the question of canonisation
was mooted, Father Ribadeneira corrected his defect
by publishing a shorter life which shone with miracles.
As time went on, the monarchs of Europe wherever
the Jesuits had influence began to press the Pope to
canonise Ignatius and Xavier, and in 1622 the Jesuits
obtained that supreme assurance of the sanctity of their
founders. It need hardly be said that they illuminated

1 70 THE JESUITS

Europe with their festivities, and made considerable
profit by the honour, which they represented as un-
sought by themselves.

The island of Malta was the scene of one of the
storms which broke upon the Society in this half-
century. The fathers had established a college at
Lavaletta in 1592, and prospered there until 1632,
when a sudden and mysterious tempest swept them,
for a time, out of the island. The Jesuit version of the
adventure is that the Grand Master Lascaris had
attempted to curb the well-known licence of the knights
and had, at their protest, thrown the responsibility of
the reform on the Jesuits. When the carnival arrived,
and the knights were hampered in their amusements,
some of them took the revenge of masquerading as
Jesuits in the gay throng ; and when the Master im-
prisoned them, at the entreaty of the Jesuits, they
forced the doors of the jail and compelled Lascaris to
exile the Jesuits. This story is not implausable, but we
are equally bound to notice the different version put
forward by their opponents. They say that the Jesuits
had incurred general contempt by hiding great stores
of food in their house during a famine (as we have seen
them do in Paris) and by their indulgence in vice.
One is disposed to think that the former charge cannot
be entirely devoid of foundation. It is singular that,
when the French king, at the request of the French
Jesuits, forced the knights to readmit the fathers, the
two leading Jesuits were not suffered to return to the
island.

The most serious event of the half-century was,
however, the bankruptcy of one of the Jesuit houses at
Seville, and in this case we have serious independent
evidence. The condition of the Spanish province
evidently remained unchanged in spite of " visitations "

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 171

from Rome and decrees of the Congregation. Their
generous patron Philip m., whose dominion they had
so materially helped to enlarge, died in 1621, but his
successor Philip iv. was even more generous to them.
They prospered, and continued to deteriorate. We
may not be disposed to admit implicitly all the sordid
stories about them which we find in the Teatro Jesuitico,
one of the fiercest anti-Jesuit works of the period/ but
we have independent evidence of such episodes as the
murder of a Spanish Jesuit by an injured husband.
Instead, however, of wasting time on these isolated
disorders, it will be enough to examine the story of the
famous bankruptcy.

One of the seven residences which the fathers had
at Seville failed in 1644, an d acknowledged a debt of
two and a quarter million francs. The Jesuit system,
it may be recalled, was to place the administration of
the house in the hands of a " Lay Coadjutor" (or lay-
brother, who had not made a vow of poverty), and their
defence in this singular case is that Brother Villar,
who held this charge at Seville, borrowed large sums
of money and invested them in shipping and other
concerns, without the knowledge of the fathers. His
speculations proved disastrous, and the fathers found
themselves bankrupt. Crdtineau-Joly genially closes
the episode with an assurance that the fathers found
the money and expelled the offending brother from the
fraternity.

That the brother was expelled is quite certain, but
I can find no trace that the Jesuits, in spite of their great
collective wealth in Spain, ever paid more than a

1 This rare and curious work, which was often condemned and burned
in subsequent years, was published in 1654, and affords a particularly
unpleasant picture of the Spanish Jesuits. It was attributed to a dis-
tinguished Dominican monk. He denied the authorship, but many believe
that the denial was merely a matter of policy.

172 THE JESUITS

partial dividend, and the whole of the circumstances
merit consideration. That we should be asked to
believe that a community of Spanish Jesuits, the
keenest business-men in the whole Society, suffered a
lay brother to conduct vast operations, and to borrow
large sums from their own followers in Seville, without
their having the least knowledge how he conducted
their affairs, is little short of impertinence. We have,
however, positive knowledge that the Jesuit version is
most untruthful. Not only does Bishop Palafox, one
of their most conscientious adversaries, give a different
version in his second letter to Pope Innocent x., but a
paper written by one of the creditors and submitted to
the King of Spain (who favoured the Jesuits) has
survived, and must command our confidence. From
this memoir or petition, which is reproduced in the
Annales de la Socittd des soi-disans J ^suites (iii. 976),
I propose to take the facts of the scandal.

From communities of nuns and the pious laity of
the town, both rich and poor, Villar had borrowed sums
amounting in all to 450,000 ducats, and invested them
in unwise speculations. Villar protested throughout
that he had acted under the directions of the fathers,
and it would be quite impossible for him to borrow so
extensively among their admirers without their knowing
it; even if we could suppose that, contrary to all
custom, they left their affairs blindly in the hands of
a lay-brother. In 1644 the fathers summoned their
creditors, declared themselves bankrupt, and proposed
a settlement. Some of the creditors endeavoured to
secure a payment in full by representing that the
Jesuits would suffer severely in credit if they did not
draw on the immense resources of their Society to dis-
charge the debt " The loss of our credit does not
trouble me," said the rector; "as the proverb says, the

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 173

raven cannot be blacker than its wings." The creditors,
however, refused to yield, and a receiver was appointed.
The petition to the king affirms that this official found
among their papers certain letters which plainly showed
that they had directed Villar, and secret instructions for
the dishonest diversion of legacies they had received
on condition of paying out certain monies.

The next step of the Jesuits was to secure the
appointment of a judge who would favour themselves.
Though there was grave distress among the poorer
creditors, this official declared that three-fourths of the
Jesuit assets were sacred funds, and that little remained
for division. The creditors appealed to the Royal
Council, the judge was dismissed for corrupt procedure,
and the whole of the property was declared to be "lay"
for the purpose of the case. Indeed, the higher court
declared that the action of the Jesuits was " infamous,"
and would, on the part of a private individual, merit a
capital sentence. Yet in 1647 we fi n d this petitioner
still appealing for a discharge of the debt, and com-
plaining that the Jesuits are trying to induce the more
pious of their creditors to agree to a composition.

The significance of this ugly episode does not
consist in its illustration of the conduct of a single
community of Jesuits. As such it would not be entitled
to lengthy consideration in serious history. The more
unpleasant feature is that it involves the whole of the
Jesuits of Castile, and, in spite of the fact that the
petitioner says they owed a collective debt of two
million ducats, they formed one of the most numerous
and wealthy provinces of the Society and dwelt in most
imposing establishments. They clearly trusted that
their colleagues would evade the discharge of a legiti-
mate debt, and they incurred a storm of anger and
disdain. The Roman house itself had taken vast sums

I 74 THE JESUITS

from Spain, yet it permitted the local Jesuits to resist
their obligations for several years, relying on a purely
legal and worldly view of the local responsibility.

The Jesuits of Portgual, which was still under the
dominion of Spain, exhibit the same prosperity and
worldly temper, and their behaviour in connection with
the revolution of 1640 was sinuous and unattractive.
In 1635, when the agitation began for the restoration
of the Portuguese throne, they punished some of their
number who sided with the revolutionaries. As time
went on, however, and the movement gathered strength,
they wavered and temporised in the most amusing
fashion; and so shrewdly did they follow the national
movement that the successful completion of the revolu-
tion in 1640 found them entirely on the side of the
Portuguese people.

When we survey the thirty years' life of the Society
in France under the rule of Vitelleschi, we get much the
same impression of poor character, or character warped
by casuistry. Under so Catholic a monarch as Louis
xiii. and so powerful a statesman as Richelieu we do
not expect to find any of the large political intrigue in
which they had indulged in earlier years. We find no
grave scandal, no exalted virtue, no religious heroism.
Their life is a chronicle of assiduous teaching and
ministration, punctuated by unworthy manoeuvres here
and there to obtain power or repress rivals, and never
rising above mediocrity. A few words on their
relations to the court and Richelieu, to the bishops
and universities, and to new reformers like Cardinal
de Bdrulle and St. Vincent de Paul, will suffice for our
purpose.

The petty intrigues and successive dismissals of the
Jesuit confessors to the court are not of sufficient
consequence for us to linger over them. In 1624

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 175

Richelieu became first minister of France and put an
end to their political pretensions. In that year they had
again incurred the anger of the university. Henri de
Bourbon, illegitimate son of Henry iv., had been
appointed bishop of Metz. He had been educated by
the Jesuits, and was Induced to make his "act of
theology " in their college, instead of at the Sorbonne, as
was customary, and the whole court had been attracted
to and entertained in the college. Richelieu had,
however, no idea of espousing the quarrel of the
university ; he would quickly enough come into conflict
with the Jesuits, as he was determined to reverse at the
first opportunity the pro-Spanish policy of Marie de
Medici and her clerical advisers. His first act was to
drive the Pope's troops out of the Valtelline and defy
Spain, and the Jesuits contented themselves with
contributing anonymously to the shower of violent
ultramontane pamphlets which now fell on the minister.
Two of them especially, written (it seems) by Father
Keller, the Jesuit confessor of Maximilian of Bavaria,
and entitled Mysteria Politico, and Admonitio ad Regem
Christianissimum, gave him great annoyance. They
were condemned and burned, together with Father
Santarelli's De Hceresi (1626), but Richelieu was almost
exhausted by the violence of the first storm his policy
brought upon him, and he did not take the extreme
measure against the Jesuits which he was said to
contemplate. It is clear that they realised his power
and resolved to be discreet. After a fruitless appeal to
the young king against him, they signed a series of
propositions drawn up by the Sorbonne, and resigned
themselves to the patriotic policy of the great minister.

The position of the Jesuits during the next two
decades was one of great prosperity but acute dissatis-
faction, on account of their political impotence. They

176 THE JESUITS

had (in 1627) 13,195 pupils in their schools in the Paris
province alone, and more than that number in the
remaining French provinces. Their opponents were,
however, numerous and active, and Richelieu was not
unwilling to see this check on their ambition. We find
Father Suffren, the king's confessor, complaining in 1626
of the number and violence of their enemies, and adding :
" Few of our friends have the courage openly to under-
take to defend us." What we shall see presently of
their relations to the bishops and universities will throw
some light on this. There can be little doubt that
Richelieu despised the Jesuits, but preferred to have
them under his eye, engaged in the teaching of the
young, rather than as open opponents. He punished
them ruthlessly when they interfered in politics. He had
Father Monod, confessor to Christiane of Savoy,
imprisoned for his political intrigues, and when Father
Caussin, who was appointed confessor to Louis in 1637,
was discovered by Richelieu's spies to be making a
secret and insidious attempt to turn the king against
Richelieu, he was promptly exiled. Louis had shown
Caussin a list, supplied by Richelieu, of Jesuit theologians,
who approved the policy of the minister. "Ah, sire,"
said the Jesuit, piqued at this astute move, " they had a
church to build."

In a word, the Jesuits were politically powerless
under Richelieu, and gave him little serious anxiety.
It seems rather that he induced many of them, however
insincerely, to support him in his policy a policy which
was angrily repudiated by Rome and the Catholic
powers. In 1638 he threatened to cast off the yoke of
the papacy, and, by making some of the gravest
concessions demanded by the Reformers, unite the
Huguenots and Catholics of France in an independent
Gallican Church. If we may believe a story given in

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 177

Bayle's Dictionary (article "Amyrant"), which was
written shortly afterwards, he actually used the Jesuit
Amyrant to negotiate with a leading Huguenot divine,
and promise to surrender such Catholic doctrines as
purgatory and the invocation of the saints. 1 Two years
later we find a Jesuit enlisted in the regiment of pam-
phleteers who defended Richelieu's singular policy. It
is perhaps, in view of their constant policy toward the
Reformation, one of the most curious instances of their
power of adaptation to circumstances.

I have said that Richelieu despised the Jesuits, and
his correspondence with Father (later Cardinal) de
B&rulle suggests this. De Bdrulle, a man of exalted
character and piety, was the founder of the Oratorian
priests, and a valued friend of the minister. We have
a letter that he wrote to Richelieu in 1623, which con-
tains, in the mild and charitable language of a saint, a
very painful indictment of the French Jesuits. Their
jealousy of the new congregation and determination
to prevent its growth led to some extremely unworthy
conduct In town after town, as de B^rulle describes
in detail, the Oratorians removed the prejudice against
the Jesuits, and even surrendered property to them,
and the Jesuits then repaid their benefactors with
slander and intrigue. At Dieppe the governor refused
to allow the Jesuits to found a college, but gladly
admitted the Oratorians. A Jesuit then asked the
hospitality of the Oratorians, and used the opportunity
to intrigue against them, iu favour of the Society,
among the citizens. A letter in which he informed
his colleagues of his hope of winning the college from
the Oratorians was intercepted and sent to de B&nlle.
At Paris the King offered the Oratorians a hotel, but
the Jesuits intervened and prevented the gift. They

1 See the author's Iron Cardinal (1909), p. 341.

178 THE JESUITS

told " strange and atrocious calumnies" of de B^rulle
at the court, and at Bordeaux they proposed to indite
him for heresy. The intrigue covers the whole of
France during more than ten years, and betrays a very
general lack of moral sensitiveness among the French
Jesuits. In a similar, though less vigorous, way they
attempted to hinder the growth of the new congregation
of priests founded by St. Vincent de Paul. 1

A more general view of the conduct of the French
Jesuits from 1615 to 1645 does little to alter this un-
favourable impression. Even in the pages of their
French apologist their record of service is singularly
mediocre ; they taught tens of thousands of pupils and
preached to hundreds of congregations, is all that one
can say. On the other hand, when we turn to the
numerous facts which the French apologist has discreetly
omitted, we find them making unedifying efforts to
extend their work and influence. In 1620 the Jesuits
of Poitiers defy the bishop, who lays an interdict on
their church ; the bishop has decreed that his people
must attend their parish churches once in three weeks
at least, and the Jesuits reply from the pulpit that it
is enough if the people attend their church. At
Angoulme, in 1622, they secure, through Father Coton
and by a secret contract with the mayor, the monopoly
of teaching and the control of the university. They
continue for four years to defy the bishop and stir the
people against him, although they are condemned by
Cardinal de Sourdis and their contract is declared void
by the Parlement, until the bishop is compelled to
excommunicate them. In 1623 they have similar
trouble, due to their determination to found petty

1 Cr6tineau-Joly suppresses the whole of these facts, and describes Pre
de Brulle as " intimately united with the Jesuits "I De B ii. 738.

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 179

universities at Toulouse, Pontoise, and Tournon, and
all the universities of France combine in what the
French apologist calls a " ferocious war " against them.
A few years later they obtain from the King letters
permitting them to found a house at Troyes, "at the
request of the inhabitants." The inhabitants were so
little minded to invite them, and so angry at the fraud,
that they kept them out of Troyes, in spite of all
their efforts, for a hundred years. Their record in
France is full of such details. Toward the end of the
period it begins to tell of the famous struggle with
the Jansenists ; but we will consider this story in full
in a later chapter.

An incident that occurred in the province of
Lorraine, which was annexed by Richelieu in 1633,
deserves special consideration. The impetuous and
sensuous young Duke, Charles iv., chose the Jesuit
Cheminot as his confessor in 1637, and a week later,
although his first wife still lived, he married the Princess
Beatrix de Cusance. Instead of retiring from the court,
which was at once assailed from all parts of France for
the bigamy, Cheminot wrote a casuistic memoir to
prove that the marriage was valid, and clung to the
duke for six years. The misconduct of an individual
Jesuit is, as I have said, not matter for serious history,
and, if it were true that Cheminot defied his own
superiors, there would be no occasion to dwell on it.
But the correspondence published by Cr&ineau-Joly
shows plainly that the Jesuit authorities acquiesced in
Cheminot's position for many years. We find Charles
writing to General Vitelleschi in 1639, in friendly
terms, to complain that some of the other Jesuits are
hostile to his accommodating confessor. Three years
later we find Charles declaring to Cheminot that he
will not grant him permission to retire, as his General

1 8o THE JESUITS

"presses" him to do; as if a Jesuit needed such
permission. It was only in 1643, when the scandal
was known to all Europe, that the Roman authorities
excommunicated Cheminot. They had waited five
years in the hope that they would not be compelled
to sacrifice a place in a ducal court.

Their fortunes in Belgium and Holland also were
less romantic than they had been in earlier years. The
settlement of Belgium as a Catholic province enabled
them to spread over it with easy prosperity, and obtain
a very large share in the education of the young. The
Flemish fathers made a singular contribution to the
literature of the Society, which has given its more
sober admirers much embarrassment. In the year
1636, which they chose to regard as the centenary of
the Society, they published a work, the Imago Primi
S&culi) in which they gave, by pen and pencil, a
marvellous account of the first hundred years of the
Society's life. Its progress and virtues were put on
the highest scale of miraculous heroism ; the Jesuits
were represented as a troop of angels transferred
to the planet earth in the crisis of its religious
development As, however, the modern apologist
for the Jesuits represents the work as a "touching
fiction" and " pious dithyramb/' we need not give it
serious attention. Undoubtedly it was imposed on
Belgium and other countries at the time as veracious
history.

M. Crdtineau-Joly is not so candid when he turns to
Holland. He marks how, in spite of the heretical atmo-
sphere, the Jesuits have planted colonies at Amsterdam,
The Hague, Utrecht, Leyden, Harlem, Delft, Rotter-
dam, Gouda, Hoorn, Alkmaer, Harlingen, Groningen,
Bolsward, Zutphen, Nimegues, and Vianen; how they
mingle with the Spanish troops and board their vessels

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 181

in the war; how they press on to Denmark, and are
seen everywhere as the fearless " standard-bearers of
the Church." It was, perhaps, natural that he should
be indisposed to mar this picture with an account of
the relations of the Jesuits to the secular clergy ; but,
since our purpose is to attain a just and complete view
of the Jesuit character, we are compelled to consider it.
During forty years they maintained a struggle similar
to that they had conducted in England in the days of
Elizabeth.

The secular clergy of Holland pressed for the
appointment of a bishop, and the Jesuits used all their
resources to prevent such an appointment, since it
threatened their ascendancy. When a priest named
Sasbold was named for the office, they made a scandal-
ous attack on his character; and when, in 1602, he was
appointed Archbishop of Utrecht, they had his name
changed to Archbishop of Philippi. Until his death
in 1614 they conducted an unceasing intrigue against
Sasbold, and they first endeavoured to prevent the
appointment of a successor, and then transferred their
rancorous hostility to him. They had been banished
from Holland in 1612, but they again secured tolera-
tion, and by 1628 there were seventy Jesuits in the
country. The struggle against the archbishop con-
tinued all through the period, in spite of several papal
injunctions that they were to obey him ; but it is
unnecessary to enter into all the details. We need
not question the bravery of the Jesuits as standard-
bearers of the Church, but it is impossible to admire
their efforts to prevent the employment of other
standard-bearers. Their work was, in point of fact,
less effective than that of the secular clergy, because
the Dutch Protestants hated and distrusted them.
They were found in 1638 to be implicated in a

1 82 THE JESUITS

political plot to introduce the Spaniards, and two of
them were tortured and executed.

Since the period we are considering coincides with
the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), we naturally find
that the record of the Jesuits in Germany is full of
life and adventure. Their share in bringing about
that disastrous and paralysing struggle cannot be
measured by the historian. Now that the world realises
the baneful effect of that war and of the Catholic
policy of intolerance which led to it, in retarding
the development of European civilisation, the Jesuit
authorities are not likely ever to publish such documents
in their archives as would reveal their activity. We
must be guided by two chief considerations. In the first
place, the general historian can trace the movements
which led to the outbreak of war without any reference
to the Jesuits, and is therefore not disposed to think that
their intrigues were an essential element in the incite-
ment of it; on the other hand, however, the Jesuits
were the most earnest and insistent advocates of the
harsh Catholic policy which occasioned the war, and
they had considerable influence over the Catholic
leaders. Ferdinand n., Maximilian of Bavaria, and
Wallenstein had been trained m Jesuit schools; Tilly
had actually entered the Society, but withdrawn before
he had taken the vows. Jesuits swarmed in the Catholic
camp, especially about the tent of Tilly, fired the
soldiers to their work, and advanced in the rear of the
army to occupy whatever towns fell to their arms.

The war began, it will be remembered, in Bohemia,
and here the Jesuits were very clearly interested.
When the Protestants cast off the yoke of the Emperor
in 1618, they swept the Jesuits from their country and
burned some of their colleges. We can very well '*
imagine the plaints of the Jesuits at the courts of

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 183

Ferdinand and Maximilian, and are not surprised to
learn that eighteen Jesuits accompanied Tilly's troops
when they came to subdue Bohemia. It was the
beginning of the war. Similarly, when Bethlen Gabor
took Hungary in 1622, one of his first measures was
to expel the Jesuits ; and the victorious Swedes had
expelled them from Livonia in the preceding year.
It is, however, unnecessary here to follow them through
the long course of the Thirty Years' War. They
retreated and advanced with the soldiers of the Catholic
League, died of plague in the camp or fell under the
sabres of the heretics, and maintained the struggle to
the end with all the energy which non-combatants
could exert. There were even occasions, as at the
siege of Prague, when they took arms and fought
desperately in the van of the Catholic troops. The
alliance of France with the Protestants was a bitter
disappointment to them, and they were among the
few in Europe who profoundly deplored the Peace
of Westphalia (1648), which at last gave a just liberty
to Protestantism in Germany. The war, as conceived
by them, was a costly and lamentable failure.

I have said that they fiercely resented the attitude
of Richelieu ; yet, it is curious to note, they took a
singular advantage of it in their own interest One
of the articles of the treaty which Richelieu made with
the northern heretics provided that after their victories
they should respect Jesuit settlements. Cr^tineau-Joly
reproduces a letter in which Louis xm. reminds his
Protestant allies of this provision. The French apolo-
gist would have us believe that the agreement was
distasteful to the Jesuits themselves, on this point he
quotes no documents, but we should find it hard to
conceive Richelieu making so exacting a demand of
the Protestants if the Jesuits were even indifferent to

1 84 THE JESUITS

it. It accords only too well with their sinuous and
accommodating policy.

Their work of education proceeded in the provinces
which were not ravaged by the troops ; but even here
they met much hostility and had some disastrous ex-
periences. It was during this period, in 1612, that
the famous Secret Counsels ("Monita Privata") came
to light and drew a large amount of odium upon them.
It is the general belief that this book was written by
a Polish priest and ex-Jesuit, Jerome Zahorowski,
whose bishop proceeded against him on that ground.
Since, however, manuscript copies of the work were
afterwards discovered in the Jesuit colleges at Prague,
Paris, Roermond, Munich, and Paderborn, their critics
submit that it was a secret code of instructions issued
by the Roman authorities to their professed members,
and that Zahorowski merely published what the Society
had already circulated in private. This question must
still remain open. The occurrence of so many manu-
script copies in Jesuit colleges is singular, but it is
impossible to prove that any of these were earlier than
the printed edition of 1612.

If we regard the contents of the work, we find that
it is, in almost every paragraph, a summary of prin-
ciples and tactics on which the Jesuits actually proceeded
in their pursuit of wealth and power ; but there is a
callousness, at times a cynicism, in this deliberate
codification which makes one hesitate to think that it
was written by high Jesuit officials. It seems to me
that Zahorowski at least recast such instructions as
were genuine, and intended to write a satire on Jesuit
procedure. It is incredible that the Roman authorities
should enjoin the fathers always to settle in wealthy
towns, " because the aim of our Society is to imitate
Christ, our Saviour, who dwelt mainly at Jerusalem/'

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 185

and it is difficult to believe that they expressly laid
it down that " everybody must be brought into a con-
dition of dependence on us," and that wealthy widows
must " be allowed to have secret recreation with those
who please them/' Nearly a fourth of the book is
occupied with instructions on the way to conciliate
wealthy widows : notoriously, one of the chief sections
of Jesuit practice. Much of the remainder is devoted
to the conciliation of princes, and the drastic procedure
to be taken against apostates. There are few lines
which do not describe the well-known procedure of the
Jesuits ; but, in its actual form, at least, the work seems
to be a deliberate and just satire.

A second incident which brought much odium on
the Jesuits in the period occurred at Cracow. Here,
as at so many places, the University, conscious that
the Jesuits wished to win the control of higher educa-
tion, kept a jealous eye on their school. In 1622 the
fathers endeavoured to evade the restrictions placed on
them by including in their celebration of the canonisa-
tion of St. Ignatius a public discussion of certain theses.
The university professors and students prevented them
from doing so, and a long and angry quarrel followed.
In 1626 a decree of the States-General of Poland
(reproduced in the Mercure Jdsmte, ii. 312) closed the
Jesuit school, and the University sent a formal report
to Louvain and other universities, begging them to
unite against the intrigues of the Jesuits. This letter,
dated agth July 1627, contains very grave charges against
the Society, and considerably strengthened the opposi-
tion to them in the university towns of Europe. It
complains that the Jesuits sent their pupils in arms
against the university students, and, when a riot occurred,
induced the King to send troops against the students.
As grave trouble occurred about the same time at

1 86 THE JESUITS

Louvain, Douai, Liege, Salamanca, and other univer-
sities, there was a general concentration of the professors
throughout Europe in hostility to the Society. How-
ever much we may suspect partiality or exaggeration
in their severe charges, it is clear that the Jesuits made
unscrupulous efforts to capture the universities.

And this feeling against them was strongly reinforced
by their efforts to secure the property of other monastic
bodies. We saw how Ignatius himself had set an
example by endeavouring to get the estates of the
Benedictines in England, and how constantly this
charge is made against the Society. In 1629, Ferdinand
ii. ordered the Protestants of his dominions to restore
ecclesiastical property ; and [we learn from the decree
of Pope Urban vm, that the Jesuits were ' f the chief
authors of the imperial edict." The Benedictines,
Cistercians, and Premonstratensians at once began
to claim their property, and were not a little agitated
when the " chief authors " of the edict succeeded in
getting from the Pope an order that they were to share
in the division. The Emperor's confessor was, of
course, a Jesuit (Lamormaini), and it is admitted by
their apologist that they secured the "best part" of
the restored property. To cover their lack of moral
or legal title to this property, the Jesuits freely
reproached the older orders with corruption and de-
cadence, and a war of pamphlets was maintained for
many years. From these publications we learn some
remarkable stories of Jesuit procedure.

At Voltigerode in Saxony some Bernardine nuns
had, in 1631, obtained one of the restored houses. The
Jesuit fathers persuaded them that the building was
unsafe, and, when the nuns retired, claimed it as
44 abandoned property." The nuns returned, however,
and a very lively scene was witnessed. The Jesuits

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 187

brought the police, and the nuns, who clung valiantly
to the seats of the chapel, were physically dragged
out of the building. The Cistercian monks afterwards
took up the case and secured the expulsion of the
Jesuits. At Prague the Jesuits coveted a handsome
Cistercian abbey, and persuaded the Emperor that
only a half-dozen degenerate monks occupied the vast
establishment. An imperial commissary was sent, and
found that there were sixty-one monks and thirteen
novices in the abbey. The angry Jesuits, who accom-
panied the commissary, protested that the abbot had
put the monastic dress on his farm-labourers ; but the
Cistercians held their ground and obtained the protection
of the Emperor. The Vicar-General of the Order
of Cluny reported a large number of these fraudulent
attempts of the Jesuits to obtain the property of his
monks ; and we have civic and ecclesiastical documents
relating to great numbers of similar cases in France,
Germany, and Switzerland in the early part of the
seventeenth century. 1

When we turn to the missionary field of the Society
during this period, we find a remarkable activity which
would in itself merit a volume. The casuistic methods
of the Jesuits are applied in a singular way to overcome
the obstacles to their success, and devices are adopted
from which the modern missionary, of any denomina-
tion, would shrink with astonishment. The simple
fervour of a Xavier had, as we saw, early given way to
more calculating methods and political intrigue, but the
extent to which this diplomatic procedure was carried
in the seventeeth century brought a storm of criticism

1 Many of the documents are collected in the Annales de la SotittS des
soi-disans Jlsuites. The most familiar procedure of the Jesuits was to
accuse the monks of corruption and rely on their influence at court to
prevent too close an inquiry. The French Conseil d'etat forced them, as
late as 4th August 1654, to restore three abbeys to their lawful owners.

i88 THE JESUITS

upon the Jesuits. Here we have only to notice the
beginning of the more unusual tactics, and we will in
a later chapter consider the missions in the height of
their prosperity and irregularity.

An amusing instance of this readiness to adopt
questionable, and even downright dishonest, practices
in the service of religion is furnished by the mission to
the Hindoos. It appears that after all the' hundred
years of activity in India, with a free and not very
delicate use of the Portuguese authority, the results
were regarded as meagre and unsatisfactory. Hitherto
we have heard nothing but most optimistic accounts of
the work of the missionaries in India ; but when the
hour comes, at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, for justifying a new and strange policy, the
Jesuits tell us that the effect of the older policy had
been slight, and that the high-caste Hindoos smiled
with disdain on the crowds of ignorant natives who
had, on one pretext or other, accepted baptism. In
1605 the Jesuit Robert de Nobili, an Italian of noble
birth and a nephew of Bellarmine, joined the Indian
mission and initiated the new policy.

Isolating himself from his colleagues before he
became known in India, he made a very close study of
the customs and sacred writings of the higher caste
Hindoos, learned Tamil and Sanscrit, and after a few
years appeared before the people of India as a member
of the penitential (or highest) caste of the Saniassi,
He lived apart, in a turf hut, and abstained rigorously
from flesh and fish- His head was shaved, save for a
single tuft of hair, and he had the yellow mark of the
caste on his forehead. Dressed in a flame-coloured
robe and tiger-skin, with the peculiar wooden sandals
of the caste on his feet, he posed in all things as one of
the devout Saniassi, and attracted the veneration of

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 189

the natives. The Brahmans naturally suspected this
mysterious addition to their brotherhood, and came to
interrogate him. He took oath that he was of high
caste, a quite innocent thing, the Jesuit apologists say,
since he was a noble by birth, and produced a
document certifying that he was the Tatuva Podagar
Swami whom he pretended to be. This document was
itself a gross imposture, and we may be further quite
sure that the Brahmans would not pass him, as they
did, until he had made very plain professions of belief
in the Vedas and the Hindoo gods, and practised the
idolatrous rites of his adopted caste.

For a time he lived apart, and was content to edify
by the austerity of his life. Then, like his forerunner,
the Swedish Jesuit Nicolai, he began to attract a few
impressible Brahmans, and cautiously to initiate them
to the Christian faith. Other missionaries were now
aware of this action, and he was summoned to appear
before the archbishop at Goa. From Goa he was, in
1618, sent to justify his conduct before the Inquisition
at Rome ; and many of his own brethren, including his
learned uncle, were scandalised at his flame-coloured
robe and painted brow. He maintained that there was
no superstition whatever in the practices of the saniassi,
and he actually obtained permission from the Pope to
return and continue his work on the understanding that
the peculiarities of his dress and the rites of his caste
had no more than a civic and sanitary significance !
Other members of the Society now followed his
example, and the imposture continued throughout the
seventeenth century. At his death in 1656 it was
claimed that Robert had made 100,000 high-caste
converts, and that one of his colleagues had made
30,000. In a more precise document, however, we
read, at a later date, that one of the most insidious of

190 THE JESUITS

these Jesuit saniassis baptized nine Brahmans in eight
months, and that this was more than his colleagues had
done in ten years. The whole questionable episode
was little more than an indulgence in the romantic
adventure to which his diplomatic principles always
disposed the Jesuit. He instinctively loved disguise
and palliated deceit The work in India continued on
the old lines. Thousands of children were stealthily
baptized, to swell the lists published in Europe ; the
favour and wealth of the Portuguese were assiduously
used ; and, as we gather from the letters sent to
Europe, a great deal of trickery was employed in order
to make the ignorant natives believe that the Jesuits
could work miracles and control devils. Coloured
lights were cunningly placed at times so as to shine on
their statues and altars and create a belief in miracles.

Missionaries from India penetrated Ceylon and
Thibet, but they were expelled after a few years. The
Chinese mission continued to prosper, and by 1620 claimed
to have made a hundred thousand converts. One of the
missionaries, Adam Schall, an expert in mathematics
and mechanics, was employed by the Emperor to
correct the Chinese calendar, make guns for his army,
and construct fortifications. He received in return
permission for his colleagues to preach throughout
the Empire, and hundreds of churches were built.
Presently, however, the rival Dominican missionaries
reported to Rome that the Jesuits owed their success
to a scandalous compromise with the native religion.
There is no doubt that the Christianity they set before
the Chinese was a very different creed from that which
Xavier had intended to bring. They did not obtrude
the crucifix on the notice of their converts, and they
looked leniently on the worship of ancestors and the
veneration for Kung-fu-tse. When the Dominicans

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 191

and Franciscans insisted on the drastic purity of the
faith, and characterised the pagan moralist with all the
vigour of mediaeval intolerance, the Jesuits persuaded
the Chinese to expel them, and a spirited struggle,
which will engage us at a later stage, took place in
regard to their " Chinese rites/'

The Japanese mission, on the other hand, was totally
extinguished under the generalship of Vitelleschi. For
a time after 1616 the new Emperor Xogun was in-
different to the labours of the Jesuits, who entered the
country fn disguise, and the converts were once more
gathered into the Church. It is said that they numbered
400,000, and the record of the persecutions which
followed shows that at least a large proportion of them
were fervent and convinced Christians. In 1617,
however, Xogun ordered all missionaries to leave the
country, and a long and bloody persecution set in. The
English and Dutch merchants had now supplanted the
Portuguese, and they fed the animosity of the Emperor.
Large numbers of the Jesuits and their followers were
brutally tortured and executed ; yet with signal heroism
they continued to enter the land and lay down their
lives for their work. But the fierce persecution was
sustained by Xogun n. and his son, and by the time
of the death of Vitelleschi, Christianity was extinct in
Japan.

The next most interesting field of missionary activity
was South America, where the Jesuits came to set up
the remarkable commonwealths of which their admirers
still speak with unstinted admiration. We must defer
until a later stage the full consideration of these
communities, and can only tell here the story of their
origin and early fortunes. The natives of Paraguay had
been so brutally treated by the Spaniards that when,
in 1586, the Jesuits entered the country, they found it

192 THE JESUITS

exceedingly difficult to disarm their apprehensions.

They scattered over the country, winning thousands of

the natives by their kindly and humane aid, but usually

leaving them, after baptism, to their original ways.

The mission was better organised in 1602, and definite

Christian settlements began to appear. As a natural

result of their sympathy with the natives they soon

quarrelled with the Spaniards. While the Spaniards

expected the missionaries to make the natives more

pliant and submissive to their authority, the Jesuits

reported that the natives would have nothing to do with

the European colonists, whom they denounced for their

cruelty and rapacity. The Spaniards retorted that the

Jesuits sought to keep the trade in native products and

industries for their own profit, and a bitter controversy

was provoked. In 1610 the Jesuits obtained from

Philip in. permission to colonise, and founded the first

of their " reductions," or industrial settlements.

For many years the work proved extremely difficult
The natives appreciated the protection of the Jesuits,
who obtained a royal order that none of their converts
could be enslaved, but were little attracted to their
creed. At the least pressure they would return to the
forests, and could only be recovered with great labour.
More workers came from Europe, however, by 1616
there were a hundred and fifty Jesuits in Paraguay,
and more settlements were founded. By the year 1632
there were twenty " reductions/ 3 each containing about
a thousand families. Not only was the ground assidu-
ously tilled, but Jesuit lay-brothers taught the arts and
crafts of civilisation, and even formed an armed and
trained militia for defence. The children were taught
and decently clothed, and the evenings and days of rest
were brightened by song and dance. The hours of
prayer, work, and sleep were appointed by the two

THE FIRST CENTURY OF JESUITISM 193

Jesuit fathers who controlled each reduction ; idleness
was severely punished and industry rewarded with
presents of knives, or mirrors, or trinkets ; the products
of their industry were distributed each week ; and a
very close observation was kept on the morals of all the
members.

We will consider these "ideal republics'' more
closely when we find them reorganised and more ex-
tended at a later date. For the moment it is enough to
notice a curious inconsistency which appears even in
apologetic accounts of them. To the Spaniards the
Jesuits declared that the natives were so suspicious that
no European could be allowed to visit the reductions,
and the intercourse of the fathers with other Europeans
had to be concealed ; yet they refused to teach Spanish
to the natives on the ground that intercourse with the
Spaniards would corrupt their morals. Their critics
naturally inferred that they kept the races apart so that
their monopoly of the trade might not be disturbed, and
drew unfriendly comparisons between the comfortable
houses of the missionaries and the rough unfurnished
huts of their converts. We will return to the point
when the great controversy about the reductions begins
after 1645. Before that date they had a series of
disasters to face and were partially destroyed. The
hostile tribe of the Mamelus descended on them and
drove most of them out of Paraguay. Of a hundred
thousand subjects in the province of Guayra the Jesuits
only retained and transferred twelve thousand.

The remaining Jesuit missions of the period may be
dismissed briefly. They extended their operations to
New Granada, but were expelled by the Archbishop of
Santa Fe, at the complaint of the Spanish merchants,
for mingling commerce with their preaching of the
Gospel. In Canada they made little progress until the
13

194 THE JESUITS

English abandoned that region in 1632, and even
afterwards they found great difficulty in forming settle-
ments among the Indians. Another attempt was made
to enter Abyssinia, and this also ended in disaster. For
services rendered by the Portuguese to the Emperor
they were allowed to preach their faith and made many
converts. A Jesuit at last became "Patriarch of
Abyssinia," and he involved the Emperor in a sanguinary
repression of the native Christian Church. On the
accession of a new Emperor, however, they were de-
nounced to him for a conspiracy to win the country for
Portugal, and were expelled once more. Letters of
theirs which were intercepted show that the charge was
not groundless. In the same period, finally, they
obtained, through France, permission to enter the
Turkish Empire, and they began the work of organising
the surviving Christians, and assailing the Nestorians,
in Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, Armenia and
Chaldaea.

CHAPTER V/III

UNDER THE STUARTS

WITH the exception of the English mission, which I
have reserved for continuous treatment in this chapter,
we have now surveyed the whole life of the Society of
Jesus during the first century of its history. The most
important conclusion that one can draw from this ex-
tensive and varied body of experiences is that every
attempt to impose a uniform character on the early
Jesuits must fail. The uniformity in virtue and heroism
which is ascribed to the Society in the florid pages of
the Imago Primi Saeculi is as far removed from the
truth as the uniformly dark features which are imposed
on the Jesuits by some writers of the opposing school.
The candid historian must follow the example of
Macaulay, and give contrasted pictures of the light and
the darkness, the heroic devotion and the demoralising
casuistry, which one equally discovers in that first
century of Jesuit history ; and his effort to do justice
will miscarry, as that of Macaulay did, because Catholic
writers will ingenuously detach the earlier and more
flattering half of his verdict and represent it as his full
conclusion.

This extreme variety of types is in itself an indica-
#on that the discipline of the Society had failed.
Ignatius had laid stress on two rules ; the novices were
to be chosen with a care which the older orders had

ceased to maintain, and the men were to be controlled

195

196 THE JESUITS

by a system of surveillance and abject submission to
authority which should have secured a large measure
of uniformity. We have seen that these rules were
very largely disregarded. The complaint is constant
and well founded that the Jesuits looked less to
character and devotion than to ability and social
position in examining the candidates for admission,
It is, perhaps, singular that this did not at least give
the Society a more imposing intellectual status.
Cr^tineau-Joly has industriously collected the names
of the chief writers and scholars who adorned the
annals of the Society during the first two centuries.
One need only say that, apart from theologians, there
are very few names in the list that will be found in any
impartial calendar of those who contributed to the
development of modern culture. This vast society of
leisured and comfortable bachelors offers us a singularly
meagre statement of results. Its prominent names are
generally the names of politicians and pamphleteers.
This comparative poverty, apart from theology, is not
surprising when we reflect that the purpose of the
Society was to combat heresy ; it is merely necessary
to note the fact because the contrary is so frequently
stated. In proportion to their numbers, their resources,
and their exceptional opportunities (through their
schools) of attracting eligible youths, the Jesuits are
not, and never were, a learned body.

This general mediocrity of intellect is accompanied
by a general mediocrity of character. Just as their
vaunted system of education is singularly unsuccessful
in developing higher ability, so their equally lauded
spiritual exercises leave the great body at a very
common level of character. When we have justly
admired the apostles who here and there exhibit heroic
self-sacrifice on the foreign missions, the communities

UNDER THE STUARTS 197

which here and there brave the horrors and dangers of
a plague-stricken town, the few whose integrity of life
wins the respect of people unattached to the Society,
we find ourselves confronting a general body of men of
no moral or spiritual distinction. During generation
after generation the largest provinces of the Society
persist in comfortable idleness, and the efforts of sup-
eriors to assert the despotic power they are supposed
to possess are met with resentment and intrigue, and
are nearly always foiled. The theoretical corpse-like
passivity of the Jesuit is a sheer mockery of the facts
of their history.

They stand out from the other religious congrega-
tions of the ] Roman world only in the attainment of
greater power and wealth, and the means by which they
attain them. Here alone is there a distinctive strand
in the story of the Jesuits, perceptible from the founda-
tion of the Society. Unquestionably they did far more
for their Church in the first century after the Reforma-
tion than any other religious body ; and they did this
specifically by seeking wealth and power. They
strained every nerve to secure the ear of popes,
princes, and wealthy people. That was the plain
direction of their founder. But we may be confident
that Ignatius would not have sanctioned the fraud,
hypocrisy, slander, intrigue, and approval of violence
which this eagerness for power brought into the Society.
In India and China, in England and Sweden, they
assumed a right to lie in the service of God ; and
in the same high cause they counselled or connived
at murder, slandered their fellow-priests, violated their
sacred obligations, fostered wars, and accommodated
the Christian ethic to the passions of wealthy or
influential sinners. It was never necessary for a Jesuit
theologian to declare that "the end justifies the

198 THE JESUITS

means." 1 If the phrase is regarded, not as a citation
from a written book of rules, but as an interpretation
of the conduct of the Jesuits, it expresses the most
distinctive feature of the character of the Society during
its first hundred years.

We have now to see how this characteristic will be
maintained during a second century, and will at length
bring a terrible catastrophe upon the Society. For
half a century the Jesuits will continue to enjoy and
augment their wealth and power, but the hatred which
they have provoked in the minds of their co-religionists
gathers thicker and darker about their splendid pros-
perity and at length extinguishes it. They die by the
hand of Catholics, suffering the just penalty of their
grave abuse of power. It will now be more convenient
to follow their history continuously in each province,
and we may begin with England.

We left the Jesuits struggling in disguise and
penury in England at the death of General Acquaviva
(1615). After the wave of anger which the Gunpowder
Plot had raised had partly subsided, dozens of Jesuits
stole bravely into their native land and ministered
stealthily to the persecuted Catholics. There were
sixty-eight of them in England in 1615; by 1619 the
number had increased to nearly two hundred, and
the Roman officials raised the mission to the status
of a vice-province; in 1623, when there were 284
members, they were formed into a Province of the Society,
with Father Blount as Provincial. The indisposition
of James i. to persecute emboldened them to act with
greater vigour. The fantastic picture of their activity

1 It may be well to state that no theologian ever said, in so many words :
"The end justifies the means." The nearest approach is, perhaps, the
saying of the Jesuit Busenbaum

"To him to whom the end is lawful, the means also is lawful"

UNDER THE STUARTS 199

in Cr&meau-Joly is, of course, wholly inaccurate. We
read of a Father Arrowsmith " issuing from his retreat "
to challenge and defeat the Bishop of Chester in a
debate, and expose himself to the prelate's vindictive-
ness. It was not in 1628, but some years before,
that Edmund Arrowsmith argued with the Bishop of
Chester; he was then not a Jesuit at all, and he did
not issue from any retreat to challenge the prelate
or suffer any vindictive punishment He was arrested
as a priest, happened to find the bishop eating meat
on a Friday and argued the point in passing, and
was released. 1

The truth is that from 1607 to 1618 there were
only sixteen persons executed on the ground of religion
in England, and none of them was a Jesuit, The
prisons, indeed, contained several hundred priests,
and several thousand Catholic laymen, but James was
disinclined to take extreme measures, and the priests
had much liberty even in jail. Father Percy, a
Durham man, converted 150 men and women of
rank, including the Countess of Buckingham, mother
of the famous minister, during his three years in the
New Prison on the Thames. James himself con-
descended to debate with him, and Father Percy
ended a long and adventurous career in bed. In
1622, in fact, when James began to negotiate with
Spain for a Catholic princess for his son, four thousand
Catholics were released from jail, and the execution
of the penal laws was greatly relaxed. Catholics
generally looked forward with eagerness to the marriage,
but the Jesuits opposed it at the Vatican. It is

1 He joined the Society afterwards, in 1624, and was arrested (on
a Catholic denunciation) and executed in 1628. This section of the French
historian's work is particularly inaccurate and fantastic. See Father Foley's
Records^ ii. p. 32* for Arrowsmith.

200 THE JESUITS

suggested that they dreaded the coming of a bishop
in the train of the princess, but it is not improbable
that they preferred an alliance with France. When
the Spanish negotiations failed and they would have
failed without any assistance from the Jesuits the
laws were enforced once more with some rigour. Still
it was only accident or imprudence that brought
punishment on the Jesuits. In 1623 one of them,
Father Drury, was preaching on a Sunday afternoon
to some two or three hundred Catholics in the house
of the French Ambassador at Blackfriars, when the
floor give way, and the preacher and a hundred others
were killed. The common folk of London made
ghastly merriment over " the doleful even-song/' Five
years later several Jesuits were caught in a house
belonging to the Earl of Shrewsbury at Clerkenwell.
We find that they had there a regular novitiate and the
residence of their Provincial. An imposing ceremony
was to take place, and the large intake of provisions
aroused the suspicion of the priest-hunters. Only one
Jesuit was executed. In 1622 forty of the fathers
had attended a provincial congregation of their Society
in London, and they had decided to found colleges
in Wales and Staffordshire.

There is, however, another aspect of the activity
of the Jesuits in England which the French historian
discreetly ignores. We saw in an earlier chapter how
Father Parsons had intrigued to get control of the
continental colleges and to prevent the sending of a
bishop to England. His successors continued to ex-
asperate the secular clergy by pursuing this selfish
policy. Of the twenty-seven French and Flemish
seminaries which supplied the large body of priests
in England, the Jesuits controlled five, besides their
colleges in Spain, and they made every effort to obtain

UNDER THE STUARTS 201

an ascendency over the priests. When the Archpriest
died in 1621, the secular clergy again appealed to
the Pope for a bishop, and the Jesuits again opposed
the appeal. When, after a long struggle, the Pope
inclined to make the appointment, the Jesuits induced
Tobie Matthews (a Catholic son of the Archbishop
of York) to have James informed. The King sent
word to the Pope, through Spain, that he would not
suffer the appointment, but he was later convinced
that he had been misled and the secular priests
obtained a " Bishop of Chalcedon." He died in the
following year, and his successor seems to have been
imprudent, as the Benedictine monks joined the Jesuits
against him. The inner history of this domestic
squabble is told us by Panzani, who was the Vatican
agent in England a few years afterwards. He tells
us that the Jesuits made an improper charge to the
King against the Bishop, and he was driven to the
Continent.

Since one of the chief problems of Jesuit history
is to account for the bitter hostility to them of priests
who were no less devoted than they in the service
of Catholicism, it is necessary to notice this unpleasant
wrangling and intrigue in the very heart of an heretical
land. I may, however, refer to Father Taunton's
History of the Jesuits in England for a longer account
of this domestic struggle and return to the larger
historical question.

The early years of the reign of Charles I. were not
marred by any enforcement of the more drastic penal
laws. The fining of lay Catholics of whom about
eleven thousand were known still provided the King
with a handsome addition to the privy purse, and indeed
it was necessary to disarm the sullen suspicion with
which the more zealous Protestants watched the foreign

202 THE JESUITS

queen and her spiritual court. No serious effort was

made, however, to enforce the laws against the Jesuits,

and they increased in numbers and resources. In 1628

they opened a second novitiate in London. In 1634

one of the secular clergy estimated that there were 360

Jesuits in England, and that they had 550 students

in their colleges. This is evidently an exaggeration, as

the Annual Letters report a total of 335 members of the

Province in the year 1645, and disclose the interesting

fact that they had a collective income of 17405 scudi

(about ^"35,000 in the value of modern money). It is

stated by their clerical opponents that part of their

income was derived from commerce. A certain soap

was genially known in London as "the papist soap,"

and it is said that the Jesuits had, through^their lay

friends, shares in the factory which produced it. They

were in a strong and comfortable position, and, had they

been disposed to lay aside their corporate selfishness

and co-operate generously with the other clergy, the

story of religion in England might have entered upon a

singular development.

In the reign of Charles what we now know as the
" High Church " held a strong position, under Arch-
bishop Laud, in the Church of England, and there were
indications of a disposition to return to the allegiance of
Rome. The head of the English Benedictine monks,
Dom Jones, was sent by the Vatican in 1634 to examine
and direct the situation, and he and his successor,
Panzani, did much to reconcile the secular and the
regular clergy. The Jesuits, however, would not be
reconciled, and Panzani' s reports to the Vatican are full
of bitter charges against them. In the Catholic England
which they foresaw they were determined to have a
dominant position. It was said that they induced
wealthy and influential penitents to make a special vow

UNDER THE STUARTS 203

of obedience to themselves, and they were even charged
by the clergy with impeding the general restoration of
Catholicism lest the new authorities should expel them
from the kingdom. They retorted with a bitter attack
on the papal agent. Virulent pamphlets were discharged
from camp to camp, and the Jesuits represented Panzani
as a secret agent of Richelieu, seeking to unite England
and France in opposition to Spain. In spite of this
intestine discord the Church of Rome continued to make
progress until the shadow of the Civil War fell upon the
land and the success of the Puritans once more stifled
the hopes of the Catholics.

The relation of the Jesuits to the Puritans has
never been fully elucidated perhaps can never be fully
elucidated but there is sufficient evidence that they
again proved their remarkable power of adaptation to
varying circumstances. We will not suppose that they
themselves offered the rebels the use of their theological
doctrine of the right to depose and execute kings, or
put into their hands Father Parsons's convenient Book
of the Succession, part of which was published by the
Parliament. But there is evidence that, under the
Commonwealth, they were in indirect relations with
Cromwell, and used their international connections to
provide him with information about France. In Ireland
they opposed the papal Nuncio, Pinuccini (as he bitterly
complains), and were on good terms with Cromwell. A
piquant picture is offered us of the Irish Jesuit, Father
Netterville, dining and playing chess with the great
leader of the Puritans. These manoeuvres are lightly
covered by their apologists with the pretext that Jesuits
knew no politics*

There is, however, another side to the story of the
Jesuits during the Civil War and under the Common-
wealth. While Father Taunton seems to see nothing

204 THE JESUITS

but their intrigues with Cromwell, their French apologist
sees nothing but a long series of bloody executions at
the hands of the Puritans. Certainly, whatever the
personal inclination of Cromwell was, and whatever use
he may have made of the Jesuits, they suffered heavily
in the Puritan reaction. Father Netterville himself, as
well as Father Boy ton, Father Corbie, and other Irish
Jesuits, were executed. Father Holland had been
executed in 1642, Father Corbie suffered the horrible
death of a traitor at Tyburn in 1644, and Father Morse
followed him in 1645. Morse was permitted to spend
the night before his execution in prayer with the
Portuguese ambassador, and representatives of the
French, Spanish, and German ambassadors, and the
French and Portuguese ambassadors accompanied him
devoutly to the scaffold. Father Harrison was executed
at Lancaster in 1650, and several other Jesuits perished
in consequence of their rigorous treatment in prison. It
will be noticed that these executions took place in the
early fury of the Puritans, and it must be remembered
that the Catholic laity were, in proportion to their
numbers, the most generous and ardent supporters of
the King. It is a fact that the executions cease when
Cromwell becomes Protector (1653), and it is not im-
possible that, as we are told, he used the Jesuits to give
a secret assurance to the Vatican in regard to religious
persecution.

The less savage penal laws were, however, severely
enforced, as one would expect in that Puritan atmo-
sphere, and the records of the Jesuits become meagre
and uninteresting. We know that in Ireland they
were reduced to eighteen fathers, who, living in the
marshes or on the bleak hillsides, ministered in great
danger and privation to the oppressed people. In
England they were confined to an obscure and dis-

UNDER THE STUARTS 205

creet attempt to hold together the persecuted Catholics.
The domestic quarrel was silenced by the fresh catas-
trophe that had fallen on them.

In 1660 Charles n. entered upon his reign, and
Catholics came out into the sunlight once more, It
is fairly established that during the first twelve years
of his reign Charles was disposed to see the country
return to its old faith. His personal inclination to
Catholicism was so little profound that he could lightly
abandon it the moment political events made it ex-
pedient to do so, but he was not insensible to the
great advantage which was enjoyed by the Catholic
autocrats of France and Spain. He therefore lent
an indulgent ear when, at the beginning of his reign,
the Catholics petitioned for relief. The body of the
nation was still strenuously Protestant, and the cry was
raised that at least the Jesuits must be exempted
from any measure of toleration. Many of the Catholics
pressed the Jesuits to sacrifice their province to the
general good of the Church, but we can hardly be
surprised to learn that they emphatically refused, and
a long wrangle ensued. When it was urged that their
teaching that the Pope could depose kings unfitted
them to remain in the country, they promptly repudiated
that doctrine. They remained and prospered After
a few years, in fact, they were brought into friendly
relations with Charles in a singular and secret way.

Their constitutions as well as stringent papal decrees
forbade them to receive men of irregular birth into the
Society, but we have often found them doing this, when
the sin of the parent was redeemed by the distinction
of his position, and we can imagine their joy when one
of the illegitimate children of Charles n. presented
himself at their Roman novitiate in 1668. James de
la Cloche, as the youth called himself, was known by

206 THE JESUITS

them to be in reality James Stuart, and it was not
unknown that Charles was attached to him and thought
his accession to the throne a not impossible dream.
Genial letters passed, in secret, between the English
monarch and the General of the Jesuits ; money was
sent to General Oliva from London, and after a time
the young Jesuit was stealthily conveyed to London and
permitted to enjoy the embrace of his father.

It is not surprising that the Society prospered. In
1669 there were 266 members of the English province.
In the same year their Provincial, Father Emmanuel
Lobb, converted the Duke of York to the Roman
faith, and, although the secret was carefully guarded
from Protestants for a time, the news gave great joy
and hope to the Catholics. A little later Charles
himself told some of the leading Catholic nobles that
he wished to embrace their creed, and would openly
declare it if he could be assured of defence against
Protestant anger. In the following year a secret
treaty was signed at Dover with Louis xiv. Charles
was to declare his adoption of the Roman faith, and
Louis was, in case of need, to supply French troops
for the subjection of the English Protestants and, in
any case, to provide large sums of money for the un-
scrupulous King of England. Whether Charles and
the Catholic nobles really believed that Louis xiv,
would consider the conversion of England a sufficient
reward of his generosity, it would be difficult to say.
The design was treasonable for all concerned.

The Jesuits were now at the summit of a wave
of hope. The King was a secret Catholic, and was
married to a Catholic, Catherine of Braganza, who was
under their control The marriage seemed to be
sterile, but the Duke of York, the next heir to the
throne, was more devoted to them than any other

UNDER THE STUARTS 207

prince in Europe. The alliance with France was con-
trolled by them, as Louis xiv. was at that time entirely
docile to his famous Jesuit confessor. To the in-
creasing horror of the Protestants, Jesuit fathers now
began to appear confidently in public. Two of them
ministered to the Queen; two guarded the conscience
of the Duke of York. At the same time war was
declared with Holland, and Charles issued his Declara-
tion of Indulgence. It seemed that at last the clouds
were being swept from the heavens, and, whatever
the political development was, the Jesuits were on
the way to attain power over the throne. With
English laws (or royal declarations) and French troops
they would soon make an end of Protestantism in
England, and, with the combined forces of England
and France, return to the attack on the northern
Protestants.

Then there occurred the " Popish Plot/' or the
imaginary plot of Titus Gates, and a furious storm
whistled about their ears. Charles had soon realised
the futility of the French alliance, made peace with the
Dutch, and appeased his Protestant subjects by revoking
the Declaration of Indulgence. On the whole, it paid
him better to remain a Protestant. The natural and
proper attitude for the Catholics was now to await in
silence the accession of the Duke of York, as Catherine
remained childless, but the Pjotestants were already
looking to William of Orange and not obscurely hinting
that the Catholic Duke of York was unfit to ascend the
throne. Dutch agents distributed mohey among nobles
and parliamentarians ; French and Catholic agents
distributed louis (for in the Interest of York and
Catholicism. Whatever we may say of the Dutch, a
secret and treasonable correspondence was maintained by
the Catholics with France, This correspondence was

208 THE JESUITS '

maintained on the English side by a zealous secretary of
the Duke of York, named Coleman, a pupil and friend of
the Jesuits. We shall see that Coleman was afterwards
arrested, and his papers seized, so that there is no
dispute about the fact that from 1675 to 1678 Coleman
was in treasonable correspondence with the French.
French money and, in emergency, French troops were
to be employed for the destruction of the Established
Church. The letters were generally in cipher, and at
times the secret message was written in lemon-juice
(which would become legible if held before the fire)
between the lines.

We are now asked to believe that this plot originated
in the exalted imagination of Coleman, and that the
Jesuits were not privy to his correspondence with
Versailles. Jesuits in London were on such a footing
at St. James's Palace that they were allowed to hold
their secret meetings in its chambers, and on the French
side the whole correspondence was conducted by the
famous Jesuit confessor of Louis xiv., P&re la Chaise ;
and the apologists would have us believe that this
correspondence, of such profound import to the future
of the Jesuit body in England, was carried on for several
years without their knowledge and connivance. We
should have to believe, in fact, that even the Duke of
York was ignorant of it, since he concealed nothing
from the Jesuits, and that Pere la Chaise did not
give the least inkling of it to his colleagues. One
would need an extraordinary measure of credulity
to imagine the Jesuits frequenting St James's
Palace week after week for years and being entirely
ignorant that their friend Coleman was receiving
important messages all the time from their French
colleague.

Hence Mr. Pollock concludes, in his recent and able

UNDER THE STUARTS 209

study of the " Popish Plot," 1 that we may adopt, or
adapt, the familiar verdict of Dryden on the plot :

' ' Some truth there was, but dashed and brewed with lies."
It is now universally admitted that Titus Gates and
his chief witnesses were little more than reckless
liars, playing upon the inflamed Protestant feeling of
the time, but it would be generally admitted that a
plot, such as I have described, was really afoot Since,
however, Mr. Pollock also concludes that the Jesuits
probably instigated and procured the murder of the
London magistrate, it is necessary to reopen the
question.

Titus Oates, a little full-bodied man with large
purple face and a complete lack of moral feeling, had
joined the Catholic Church and been admitted by the
Jesuits to their college at Valladolid. He was expelled,
but it seems likely that he had gleaned some informa-
tion about their hopes and designs in England, and,
when he returned to London, he entered into communi-
cation with a fanatical anti- Papist named Dr. Tonge,
though he continued to move amongst the Catholics.
It says little for the discrimination of the Jesuits that
they then admitted the man to the college at St. Omer's,
from which he was once more expelled. Tonge and he
then brewed the Popish Plot, and had the King informed
that the Jesuits sought his life. Charles smiled, and, in
September, the conspirators went before a well-known
magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey a Protestant,
but a personal friend of Coleman and well disposed
toward the Catholics and laid information of a ghastly
project of the Catholics to destroy the Protestants of
London. The situation a Catholic heir to the throne

1 J. Pollock, The Popish Plot^ 1903. For a desperate defence of the
Catholic position, in opposition to Mr. Pollock, see A. Marks, Who Killed
Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey f 1905,

210 THE JESUITS

awaiting the death of a Protestant king, with a Dutch
pretender gaining ground in London seemed so ripe
for a plot that London was seized with a dramatic terror,
and the Privy Council was compelled to listen seriously
to a story which was palpably false in many details
and ridiculous in others, Father Whitbread, the Jesuit
Provincial, and two of his colleagues were arrested ;
and, when the letters of Coleman were seized and found
to have references to "the mighty work on our hands,"
the story seemed to be con6rmed. Then Sir Edmund
Berry Godfrey was found dead in a ditch at the foot of
Primrose Hill, and the city was shaken with frenzy. For
months the trained bands were kept under arms at nights,
and citizens slept nervously with arms beside them,
ready to spring up at a cry that the firing of houses and
massacre of Protestants had begun.

In that period of rage and panic the character of the
witnesses who came forward to claim the offered reward
was not examined, their inconsistencies were ignored,
and several men of low character became passing rich
by swearing away the lives of others. Three men, who
were probably innocent, were hanged for murdering
Godfrey in Somerset House (then the Queen's Palace),
and three Jesuits Father Le Fevre (the Queen's
confessor), Father Walsh, and Father Pritchard were
accused of having hired the assassins. In the end seven
Jesuit priests and a lay-brother were executed, a large
number of Jesuits, secular priests, and laymen were im-
prisoned, and a reign of terror fell upon the Catholic
population. It seemed as if the great dream of the
conversion of England was once more ruthlessly
dissipated.

The witness Bedloe, who accused the Jesuits, was
so mean a character, and so well rewarded for making
a charge which people wanted, that we must ignore

UNDER THE STUARTS 211

his evidence. If we attach any importance to the
declarations of the Catholic witness Prance, as Sir
J. Fitzjames Stephen and others have done, it would
seem that Bedloe had really learned something about
the murder, and it may or may not be true that the
Jesuits were involved in it. We certainly cannot admit
this on the evidence of Bedloe. On the other hand,
few, except Roman Catholics, who read the evidence
will doubt that Godfrey had been murdered and his
body had been conveyed to the spot where it was
found. There was hardly any trace of blood at the
spot, and Godfrey's sword had been driven through his
body in a way which precludes the idea of suicide. It
was still clearer that he had not been murdered for
the purpose of robbery. The circumstances point to a
political assassination, and, as there is ample evidence
that Godfrey expected an attack on his life, it is natural
to suppose that he was removed lest he should betray
some secret of which he had become possessed.

The hypothesis of Mr. Pollock is that Coleman
had told Godfrey of the meeting of the Jesuits in St.
James's Palace. Gates had declared that the Jesuits
met to concert their plot, at the White Horse Tavern
in the Strand, on the 24th April 1678. James n.
admitted some years afterwards that the Jesuits met
on that date, but at St. James's Palace, and the Jesuit
Father Warner has left it on record that they did hold
their Provincial Congregation on that date in St. James's
Palace. If it were known at that time that forty
Jesuits had held a secret council in the Duke's Palace
the consequences might have been very serious, and
there is therefore some plausibility in the statement
of a later witness, Dugdale, that the Protestant magis-
trate was removed because he learned this fact from
Coleman. We know that Godfrey secretly consulted

212 THE JESUITS

Coleman after he had received the depositions of Gates
and Tonge; we have good reason to believe that
he laid those depositions before Coleman ; and it is
not improbable that Coleman refuted the testimony of
Gates by disclosing that the Jesuit meeting took place
in James's Palace, not in the White Horse. It would
assuredly be a grave matter for the Jesuits if this were
known, and it would almost be enough to prevent the
succession of James n.

This must remain a mere hypothesis, I may recall
that, according to the teaching of many Jesuit theo-
logians, the assassination of a man in order to prevent
grave harm to the Church was not a crime, but a
laudable act. But many others, besides the Jesuits,
would be interested in taking drastic measures to ensure
the position. of the Duke of York, nor is it more than
a conjecture that Godfrey learned of the meeting. It
is possible that this meeting was by no means an
innocent "congregation" of Jesuits to discuss their
affairs ; and it is just as possible that the real cause of
the murder has never yet occurred to us. It remains
one of the numerous unsolved problems in the story of
the Jesuits,

The remaining years of the reign of Charles n. were
years of suffering for the Jesuits. They continued to
enter the country in disguise and minister to the fiercely
persecuted Catholics. We learn that in 1682 the
Province counted 295 members, and that in 1685 they
had no less than 102 priests working in England. In
those harsh times they endured the worst rigours of an
apostolic life. Whether or no they were innocent of
murder, many Catholics felt that their presence in
England was inflammatory and their conduct indiscreet,
and familiar houses were closed against them* Several
of them died from the privations which they had to

UNDER THE STUARTS 213

suffer. But an ardent and steady hope fired them to
meet their perils and sufferings, and in the first week
of February 1685 the news rang through the stricken
and scattered ranks that Charles was dead and a
devoted Catholic about to ascend the throne of
England

The historian who realises that this was to be the
last chance which the fates would offer to the Catholic
Church of obtaining power and majority in England
reads the story of those three years of triumph and
ineptitude with strange reflections. Never was a
great opportunity more tragically wasted. The over-
whelming majority of the nation, the officials, and the
Parliament were not merely Protestant, but feverishly
vigilant and intensely suspicious of the Jesuits. It was
a time for infinite patience and restrained diplomacy,
and, so far as we can ascertain, the Vatican itself, and
Cardinal Howard who advised the Papacy at Rome,
fully realised the need. But the Jesuits were in com-
mand, and they gave the most flagrant exhibition in
their annals of the unwisdom and mischief of their dis-
tinctive methods. Although a Protestant prince grimly
smiled on their blunders in Holland, and his agents
in England eagerly magnified every indiscretion, they
proceeded with the most imprudent defiance of Protestant
feeling. Within two years they were spreading schools
and churches over London, talking of the speedy
capture of the universities and the magistracy, and
placing one of their own number among the Privy
Councillors. And in less than four years James n. was
flying ignominiously for France, with the Jesuits in his
train.

This romantic episode has inspired one of the
finest chapters of Macaulay's History of England,
and, whatever blame be laid on the shoulders of

2i 4 THE JESUITS

Sunderland, there is no question but that the Jesuits
were very largely responsible for the unhappy counsels
of James n. One of his first acts was to lodge Father
Edward Petre in the princely chambers of St. James's
Palace, and put the Chapel Royal under his charge ;
and in a short time he made Petre Clerk of the Closet
The prisons were opened, the recusants now emerged
boldly from their secluded homes, and the Jesuits sum-
moned their continental colleagues to come and share
the work of harvesting. New chapels were opened in
London ; and in more than one case, when other priests
proposed to open chapels, royal influence cut short their
design and secured the buildings for the Jesuits. Free
" undenominational" schools were opened, and hundreds
of Protestant, as well as Catholic, boys were attracted
to these insidious nurseries of the faith by the unwonted
absence of fees.

In all this we may see only undue haste and
indiscretion, but the policy developed rapidly. When
Parliament refused to carry out the wishes of the
monarch and his advisers, he proceeded by " dispensing
power," and tampered with the judges in order to
have his power ratified. Four Catholics were intro-
duced into the Privy Council, and the nobles and
officials gradually realised that baptism was the first
qualification for higher office. When the Bishop of
London refused to suspend a priest for attacking
Romanism, an ecclesiastical commission was created
to suspend the bishop and stifle the voices of the
Protestant clergy. On his own authority James sus-
pended the penal measures, issued a Declaration of
Indulgence, interfered with the rights of Protestants
in Ireland, solemnly received a papal Nuncio at Windsor,
and sent the Earl of Castlemaine as ambassador to the
Papacy. The civil and military offices were rapidly

UNDER THE STUARTS 215

transferred to Catholics, and before the end of 1686
Oxford and Cambridge began to feel the illegal pressure
of the royal authority in favour of the Catholic creed.

As these things coincided with the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes and persecution of the Protestants
in France (from which James, like his brother, received
royal alms) the Protestants saw before them a prospect
of violence and persecution. Yet James multiplied his
indiscreet and, in many cases, illegal acts with blind
fanaticism. When the inevitable catastrophe came, the
Jesuits deplored the injudiciousness of their patron and
cast all the blame on Sunderland. While, however,
Sunderland remained a Protestant until a few months
before the fall of James, the monarch was throughout
the three years surrounded by Jesuits and abjectly
devoted to them. A letter written by the Jesuits of
Li&ge to the Jesuits of Freiburg, and intercepted by
the Dutch, informs us of the influence they had on
James ii. 1 He is a devoted son of the Society; he
is determined to convert England by its means; he
refuses to allow any Jesuit to kiss his hand. And
the public action corresponds to the secret letter.
Father Warner, the Provincial of the Society, is the
King's confessor ; Father Petre, a vain and pompous
mediocrity, is so much esteemed by him that he besieges
the Vatican with a demand of a red hat for Petre.
Already courtiers pleasantly address the conceited Jesuit
as "Your Eminence/' But Innocent XL is stern and
will not countenance the blunders of the English monarch.
Castlemaine vainly seeks to impress the Pope with
his ambassadorial splendour, and is forced to return
with a curt reminder that Jesuits cannot receive dignities.
So James makes the Jesuit a Privy Councillor, and

1 As the letter is inconvenient, Cr&ineau-Joly suggests that it was forged.
But it is admitted by the Jesuit Father Foley, without demur, in his Records.

216 THE JESUITS

Father Petre takes the Oath of Allegiance (with its
supposed heresy) and sits in clerical garb in the supreme
council of the land, His Roman superiors have not a
word to say, either when Petre acquiesces in the demand
for a red hat or when he becomes a Privy Councillor.
M. Cretineau-Joly is shocked ; Father Taunton opines
that the whole policy is directed by the Jesuit authorities
at Rome.

In later years, when the Jesuits and courtiers gathered
about the fallen monarch in his pleasant exile, the entire
blame for the folly was naturally laid upon the wicked
Earl of Sunderland, and historians have, perhaps, paid
unnecessarily serious attention to this charge. We
need not stay to analyse the possible motives of
Sunderland, who assuredly had no sincere wish to see
England return to its old creed. Like Louis xiv.,
Pedro L, and Charles IL, who then ruled in France,
Portugal, and Spain, James n. was surrounded by a
junta of Jesuits, and he was even more docile than his
fellow-monarchs to their suggestions. Those who find
it possible may believe that these Jesuits were so re-
luctant to interfere in politics that they silently permitted
an unscrupulous minister to blast the prospects of their
Society and Church. We have, on the contrary, sufficient
documentary evidence that they applauded, if they did
not inspire, every rash step taken by the King, and we
recognise their familiar maxims in his whole policy.
They were, no doubt, well acquainted with the political
principles advocated by their colleague, Adam Contzen,
a Jesuit professor at Munich. In a work which he
published in 1620 (Politicorum libri decem\ Father
Contzen, incidentally, proposed some effective devices
by which a Catholic monarch might lead his heretical
country back to the faith. After very properly con-
demning "the impious doctrine of MachiavelH," Father

UNDER THE STUARTS 217

Contzen enumerates a number of measures that should
be taken, and he expressly mentions England fas a
field of experiment. Violence is recommended as an
obvious course ; the leaders of the heretics must be
expelled, and they must be forbidden to hold either
public or private meetings. But the distinctive sug-
gestions of the learned Jesuit are, that the prince must
cover his initial efforts with a profession of toleration,
he must first choose for attack those heresiarchs who
are unpopular, he must ingeniously set the rival sects
to rend each other and " take care that they often dispute
together," he must enact that no marriage shall take
place unless it be preceded by a profession of the true
faith, and he must transfer all the offices and dignities
of the State to Catholics.

On these principles, or maxims, James ir. was
proceeding in his zealous attempt to destroy the Church
of England in five years. All the Lord Lieutenants
and most of the judges were already Catholic, the Jesuits
boasted, and in a short time all the magistrates in
England would be Catholic. Trinity College, Dublin,
was already promised to the Jesuits, and Oxford was
not showing a very stern resistance to their advance.
Soon all education and civil and military government
would be in Catholic hands. The Queen had as yet
given no heir to the throne, it was true, but they had
ground to believe that, if he died childless, James would
leave the English crown at the disposal of Louis xiv,

Then James, besides sending Judge Jeffreys to deal
with insurgents in the provinces, made a bolder attack
upon the Church. He ordered the bishops to direct
the clergy to read from their pulpits his declaration of
liberty of conscience. It is well known how seven of
the bishops refused, were committed to the Tower,
and acquitted by the jury, to the frenzied delight of

218 THE JESUITS

the city. Just at this time the Queen was delivered of
a son, and the announcement was greeted with derision.
Another trick of the Jesuits, people said ; but, genuine
or not genuine, the child meant a continuance of the

O '

tyranny of the Catholic minority, and the Prince of
Orange was invited to come and seize the crown. He
set sail in four months ; and before Christmas, William
entered London, and James and his Jesuits were in
exile. Six of them shared his luxurious retreat at
St. Germains, and discussed with him the naughtiness
of Sunderland and the appalling wreck of their hasty
enterprise.

The English Province of the Society continued to
exist, and had a large number of members, until the
suppression. Although the penal laws were again
enforced., and it was decreed that any Jesuit who was
found in the kingdom after 25th March 1700 would
be imprisoned for life, the fathers still exhibited the
courage and devotion which do so much to redeem
their errors. In 1701 there were 340 members of the
Province, though most of these were in Belgium" or
with the Catholic colonists in Maryland. In 1708 we
find 158 members of the Society in England, generally
living in the houses of the Catholic nobility and gentry.
Their work was now almost confined to a ministra-
tion to the depressed Catholics. They reported only
3000 conversions to the faith between 1700 and
1708, and many of these were soldiers quartered in
Belgium. In 1711 they had 12,000 Catholics under
their spiritual charge. But even in this restricted
sphere they maintained the struggle against the secular
clergy, and published many pamphlets against them,
" Jansenism " was the latest heresy they had discovered,
and they denounced the secular clergy to Rome as
tainted with it. At last, as the eighteenth century

UNDER THE STUARTS 219

wore on, they realised that all these old conflicts were
yielding to a mighty struggle. The Society is fighting
for its life against Catholic opponents. In 1759 it is
suppressed, with great ignominy, in Portugal; in 1762
it is suppressed in France; in 1767 even Spain ruth-
lessly expels the body to which it had given birth.

The English Jesuits had already begun to suffer
from this terrible campaign. When Louis xv. ordered
the expulsion of the Jesuits from his kingdom, the
Paris Parlement saw to the closing of their college
at St. Omer. A long procession of waggons, con-
taining the teachers and pupils, trailed drearily across
the country, and deposited them, in great misery and
dejection, at Bruges. There, ten years later, they
suffer the supreme punishment of suppression by the
Papacy, and the Privy Council of Brussels carries out
the sentence with the harshness which in every country
teaches them how deeply they are hated. The 90
members of the English Province who are found in
Belgium, and the 184 fathers who are at work in
England, sadly divest themselves of the familiar
costume and face the bleak future. This is the tragic
culmination of two centuries of heroic struggle and
sacrifice ; it is the price of the blunders and crimes of
their politicians and the casuistic excesses of their
theologians.

CHAPTER IX
THE STRUGGLE WITH THE JANSENISTS

THE story of the Jesuits In France from the middle
of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth
century is rich in material for the interpretation of
their character. We find every conceivable type of
Jesuit rising to prominence at some period in the
long chronicle. While a Father Francois Regis or a
Julieti Manvir sustains the finest traditions of the
Society by a splendid expenditure of a noble char-
acter in the service of the squalid peasantry, his
colleagues smile indulgently upon the perfumed vices
of nobles and princes, enter into the most unscrupulous
intrigues for the destruction of their theological oppo-
nents, and encourage Louis xiv. in the belief that he
may do penance for his sins on the backs of the
Jansenists and Protestants. While, during a whole
generation, they direct the fingers of the Pope in virtue
of their supreme and peculiar zeal for his authority,
they, in the next generation, secure the praise of the
Parlement and the gratitude of the court by a most
extraordinary intrigue against the Papacy. In the
new-built palace of Versailles they obtain a paramount
influence over the greatest autocrat of modern history ;
they fill the Gallican Church with prelates who will
obey their commands; they crush Protestantism in
France; and they seem to have almost attained the
great ideal of their Society the control of the courts

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE JANSENISTS

which control the earth. And within another

tion their varied enemies unite and drive them ign<>

miniously from the country.

This singular history centres, for the greater p^ rt
of the time, on the struggle between the Jansenists a^d
the Jesuits, the origin of which may be briefly recalled.
I have in earlier chapters referred to the theological
victory of the Jesuits over Michel de Bay at Louvai nj
and to the fierce and protracted struggle they had wi^h
the Dominican theologians in Spain and Italy. It m^y
be remembered that this furious struggle as to the real
relations of divine grace and the human will had to k e
suppressed by the Papacy, and all further controversy
on the subject was forbidden. When therefore, in t}^ e
thirties of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits heard
that a certain brilliant and virtuous abb at Paris atid
a learned theologian of Belgium were plotting to
introduce a new work on the subject, they watched
them with care.

Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, or the abbg de
St. Cyran, was an energetic Basque who had finished
his theological studies at Louvain University. There
he had become intimate with a Belgian student named
Jansen, who had views, opposed to those of the
Jesuits, on the action of grace. St. Cyran, returning-
to France, became a secret apostle of these vlew$
and hinted that a learned defence of them was being-
written. It happened that at that time a Puritan
movement was arising within the French Church, a$
a protest against the extreme laxity of the age; an and Bd
80, pp. 356-458-

IN THE GERMANIC LANDS 331

more successful rising In 1675-1679 once more won
toleration for the Protestants and checked the Jesuits,
and they seem to have maintained this varying campaign
of intrigue and coercion and failure until the abolition
of the Society.

In the Catholic cantons of Switzerland we have,
naturally, the same story as in the Catholic States: a
control of education, a determination to cast into the shade
the remainder of the Catholic clergy, and a scandalous
and enervating material prosperity. Here again we
have obtained a very interesting glimpse of the real
condition of the Society by the publication of secret
documents which were confiscated at the suppression.
The chronicle of the Jesuit college at Colmar from 1698
to 1750 was fortunately discovered among their papers
and published in 1872.* It is a most remarkable ledger
or diary of business transactions, displaying on every
page that keen instinct for commerce and high profit which
the Jesuits are always so anxious to disavow. Vine-
yards and estates pass steadily into the possession of
the college, indignant and disinherited relatives are
fought in the law-courts or met by compromise, and
the liveliest satisfaction is expressed when some good
bargain has been made with the property or the vines
have proved fertile, A Lutheran in 1727 has been, in
the words of the secret Jesuit chronicler, "simple
enough " to pay a substantial rent for a disused cellar
belonging to the college ; in the same year a pious lady's
executors are not In a position to pay a legacy to the
Jesuits in cash and they take saleable goods; in 1730
three fields of small value are let on terms which suggest
that some simple Catholic tenant was duped. The
whole story tells of keenness in securing legacies, astute-
ness in the profitable handling of the property they

1 Mtmoires des R. R* P. P. Jtmites du College de Colmar.

332 THE JESUITS

inherit or buy, and a somewhat hypocritical readiness to
appeal to public bodies for the free grants which they
make to poor individuals or communities. The college
of Colmar was a business concern of the sharpest
character.

These fragmentary notices of the life of the Jesuits
in the Germanic countries suffice to explain that growth
of hostility which culminates in the destruction of the
Society. There is a sharp contrast between the picture
suggested by these secret Jesuit documents and the
picture offered to us by writers like Cr6tineau-Joly and
Father Duhr. Few, of course, would be so naive as
not to understand that the Jesuit writers carefully select
from their "unpublished documents" the occasional
letters which some really religious Jesuit writes to his
fellows or his superiors. None but an entirely pre-
judiced opponent of the Jesuits would imagine that all
the members of any province of the Society were lacking
in moral delicacy and deep religious feeling. In every
age and clime there were Jesuits of lofty purpose, great
sincerity, and unselfish activity for what they regarded
as the good of man. There were many such in the
long calendar of the Germanic provinces. But the
fortunate accident of the confiscation of their papers in
many places enables us to obtain a fuller and truer
knowledge of the body than we get from this one-sided
admiration of its more religious members and its public
professions. As a body the Society, in Germany as
well as in France, Spain, Portugal, and on the missions,
was deeply tainted with casuistry, covetousness, intrigue
for wealth and for power, commercial activity, duplicity
in political matters, and a lamentable attitude toward
rival priests. They maintained their power, not so
much by the affection of the people as by the hard- won
favour of princes and prelates ; and, the moment these

IN THE GERMANIC LANDS 33;

princes became sensible of their defects, their seeminglj
unassailable prosperity fell with a crash, to the delighl
of half of Catholic Europe. It remains only for us tc
glance at their fortunes in Italy until the year when the
Pope, whose select regiment they affected to be, ratifiec
the action of kings and abolished the Society of Jesu<
"for ever."

CHAPTER XIII
THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY

THE blows which were inflicted on the Jesuits by the
Catholic monarchs of Portugal, Spain, and France
during the eighteenth century are historically insig-
nificant in comparison with the suppression of the Society
by the papacy. It is easy to suggest for the con-
duct of the rulers reasons which conceal the misdeeds
of the Jesuits, Was not Louis xv. an immoral and
unscrupulous ruler, and had not liberalism pervaded
every stratum of higher French society? Was not
Joseph I. of Portugal an unprincipled voluptuary, an
irresolute pupil of a minister who could stoop to forgery ?
Was not Charles of Spain deluded by a sceptical
minister in collusion with Pombal and Choiseul ? Did
they not force the King of Naples to follow their
example, and win the Austrian Emperor with the
prospect of appropriating the vast wealth of the Society ?
So the excuses run; and it is added that these com-
bined monarchs at length brought such pressure to bear
upon a Pope, whose election they had secured, that,
solely for the sake of peace, without blaming the Jesuits,
he reluctantly penned the famous brief of abolition.

We have seen that this version of the destruction of
the Society, as far as the Catholic monarchs are con-
cerned, may have some ingenuity in the pages of an
apologist, but could not without absurdity be put
forward as history. Definite, grave, and irremediable

?UE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY 335

grievances were proved against the Jesuits in each
country in which they were suppressed. We have now
to see that the last part of the apologetic version is
equally untrue. It is not true that the Powers secured
the election of Clement xiv. ; it is not true that he was
pledged to destroy the Society ; and it is not true that
he destroyed it for the sake of peace, without pronounc-
ing on the merit of the charges against it. We shall
find rather that the action of Clement xiv. was the
natural culmination of the attitude of the best Popes
toward the Society, that it was represented by him as
such, and that, in condemning the Society, he collected
all the grave charges which were urged against it, and
endorsed them with the papal authority.

The general fortunes of the Society in Italy until the
middle of the eighteenth century do not merit detailed
examination. One undistinguished General succeeded
another in the nominal autocracy of the supreme office,
but the policy of the Society was, at least after the time
of Acquaviva, dictated by the assistants and abler men
at Rome. The Society of Jesus is an aristocracy, not
an autocracy. The charge of despotism is not unjust,
if we do not forget how frequently this despotism has
been checked by rebellious "subjects," but it is the
despotism of a few, whose decisions are published by
the General. An incident that occurred toward the
close of the seventeenth century will illustrate this.

By that time, as we saw, Pascal's Letters had
drawn the disdainful eyes of Europe to the teaching of
Jesuit casuists. It makes little difference that the laxer
of these moralists were but a few among the countless
theologians of the Society, because nearly the whole of
the Jesuits taught that, in case of a moral dilemma, a
man might act on the opinion of a single casuist against
the opinion of the remainder. It is true that they added

33<5 THE JESUITS

that the one theologian must have a " grave authority,"
but, in view of the censorship and approval of the
Society in each case, any Jesuit theologian would be
regarded by admirers of the Society as a grave
authority. This famous principle of Probabilism the
theory that one might follow a " probable" opinion in
matters of moral guilt against " more probable " opinions
which had been adopted and almost appropriated by
the Jesuits, gave great scandal, in view of the laxity of
some of their prominent casuists, and at length a number
of fathers assailed it and tried to remove the stigma from
the Society.

The most notable of these reformers was Father
Thyrsus Gonzalez de Santalla, an able professor at
Salamanca University. About the year 1670 he
composed a Latin treatise on "The right use of
probable opinions," and sent it to Rome for examination
and approval The authorities refused to sanction
publication, but in 1676 Innocent XL, who frowned on
the laxity of the Jesuit casuists, heard of the rejected
manuscript and sent for it. Through the Inquisition the
Pope then (in 1680) urged Gonzalez to publish the book,
and communicated to General Oliva a decree to the
effect that no father was to be prevented from- teaching
Probabiliorism, and that, on the contrary, none was to
be allowed to defend Probabilism. General Oliva drew
up a circular embodying the Pope's commands, which he
was ordered to convey to his subjects, respectfully
submitted it to the cardinals of the Inquisition, and
then suppressed it. Oliva died in 1681,, his successor,
Father de Noyelle, died in 1686, and Gonzalez himself
was sent to Rome to take part in the election of 1687.
The Pope welcomed him and intimated that he ought to
be raised to the generalship, to save the Society from
the " abyss " into which it was plunging. In spite of the

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY 337

fierce opposition of the Probabilists, he was elected by
a narrow majority, and in 1691 he sent to the press his
Latin treatise.

The Assistants or Councillors of the General now
asserted their power. They threatened their General
that, if he did not withdraw the work, they would warn
the heads of all the Provinces of the Society of the
danger he would bring on them. Father Gonzalez
offered to omit his name from the title-page and cut out
a particularly obnoxious section of the work, but they
sternly refused the compromise. He published, and
they denounced their General to the Pope for issuing a
theological work without papal authorisation. There
was now so fierce a controversy in the Society that the
Pope suspended the sale of the book, and remitted the
affair to the triennial Congregation of Jesuit Procurators
in 1693. A feverish intrigue and a number of heated
pamphlets from experienced Jesuit pens prepared the
way for the Congregation, and, when it assembled, it
voted for the calling of an extraordinary General Con-
gregation. Numbers of them were threatening to have
Gonzalez deposed. The Pope, however, declared their
vote invalid, and the book was published; but his
"subjects" whom so many regard as corpses in the
foands of a despotic General persecuted and assailed
Gonzalez until his death. 1

The interest of the Italian Jesuits is almost confined
to Rome during this period. They were now so
wealthy and powerful throughout Italy that they held
ift check the opposing elements, and we find few of those
Interesting episodes which saved their earlier career from
iftjscmotony. In 1656 they secured permission to return
tq> Venice, the last stronghold of their enemies. The

, ' * See a full account in Ddllinger and Reusch's Gesckichte der Moral*
der Romisch-Kafholischen Kirche (1889), i. 120-273.

338 THE JESUITS

dwindling commerce of Venice was now gravely
menaced by the Turks, and the Jesuits did not scruple
to fan the zeal of the Turks. By the middle of the
seventeenth century, Venice was hard pressed, and
compelled to look for assistance. It is said that the
Jesuits paid a handsome sum to the impoverished
Republic ; it is at least true, and is the same thing in
principle, that the Pope promised assistance on condition
that the doors were opened to the Jesuits. The dire
oaths never to readmit them were reluctantly erased,
and the fathers soon restored their old prosperity.
Although wholesome jets of criticism were constantly
directed against them, especially at Rome, they flourished
throughout Italy much as they did in Spain and Portugal.
Hardly a year elapsed without some dying noble be-
queathing them a palace or a country house, or some
small town being induced to invite them to found a
college ; and when plague or earthquake or famine deso-
lated the land, and they recovered their heroic mood,
a shower of blessings and benefactions fell upon them.

Only one serious calamity overtook them during the
period we are surveying. Toward the close of the
seventeenth century there was a violent quarrel between
the King of the Two Sicilies and the Pope ; always one
of the most painful dilemmas for the Society. The King
claimed a high spiritual authority, and the bishops,
supported by the Papacy, placed an interdict on large
areas of Sicily. The civil power retorted with a decree
of banishment against the clergy who obeyed the Pope,
and part of the Jesuits incurred the sentence. Later,
when Victor Amadeo received the island and promised
conciliatory conduct, the Jesuits reopened their churches ;
but they were directed from Rome to close them, and
were again exiled, Spain then resumed control of Sicily,
and reinstated them.

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY 339

In the year 1705, Gonzalez died, and the learned
Tamburini succeeded him. At that time the scandal of
the Jesuit concessions in India and China was added, in
the literature of their opponents, to the scandals of the
American missions, and the Papacy was being forced to
act In 1710 and 1715, Clement xi. sternly condemned
their practices, and the Roman Jesuits could do no more
than represent, inaccurately, that their missionaries had
submitted. The next Pope, Innocent XIIL, found that
this was untrue, and again severely condemned them ;
but he was followed by several complaisant Pontiffs, and
the Society continued its irregular ways in all parts of
the globe. Edifying utterances on the part of the
Roman authorities were not wanting. Tamburini died
in 1730, and at the Congregation which followed one of
the decrees severely enacted that the fathers of the
Society must, in every part of the world, avoid " even
the appearance of commerce/' and refrain from violence
in attacking their opponents. No one knew better than
these rulers of the Society the industrial and commercial
system which was then followed everywhere by the
fathers, and the devices by which they silenced their
critics ; yet no effort whatever was made to enforce the
decree.

Benedict xiv. came to the papal throne in 1740, and
put an end to the intrigues of the Society in the Roman
courts for a time. His bulls of 1742 and 1744, sternly
condemning their contumacious conduct in India and
China, struck a heavy blow at two of their most profit-
able missions ; but their American missions were veiled
by the optimist assurances of France, Spain, and Portugal ;
and, when Lawrence Ricci became General of the Society
in 1758, there was little ground for serious anxiety.
Indeed, Benedict xiv. died in that year, and a friendly
Pope, Clement XIIL, an Italian noble of conciliatory

340 THE JESUITS

temper, received the tiara. By that time (according to
a list published in 1750) the Society had 22,589 members,
of whom 11,293 were priests, These were distributed
in 669 colleges and 945 residences of less importance ;
it is singular, and characteristic of the Society, that there
were only 24 " houses of the professed" to 22,000 mem-
bers, and that one half these members were not priests.

One cloud rested on the horizon when Lawrence
Ricci became General ; but even the most timid and
despondent observer could not have ventured to suggest
that he was destined to be the last successor of Ignatius.
It had been proved to the satisfaction of the Spanish and
Portuguese courts that the Jesuits had inspired the revolt
in Paraguay, and Pombal had begun his campaign against
the Society. The accession of Clement xra. in July
reassured the Jesuits, but in September of that year the
news came of the attempt to assassinate the King of
Portugal, and a few months later a number of the leading
Portuguese Jesuits were in jail. From that moment the
doom of the fathers was sealed in Portugal, and their
efforts were chiefly directed to restricting the contagious
area. Clement was encouraged to resist the Portuguese,
and the Spanish court was induced to regard Pombal as
a slanderer. In France, however, the famous Lavalette
case had recently occurred, and a very ominous wave of
indignation against the Jesuits was rising. Choiseul
was now known to be leagued with Pombal in hostility
to the Society.

Ricci, a Florentine noble by birth, a man of quiet and
cultivated taste, was not an ideal ruler for such a period,
but as the clouds gathered thicker he threw all his energy
into the combat. Before the end of the year 1759 he
had to make provision for the thousands of Portuguese
Jesuits whom Pombal cynically flung upon the shores of
Italy* In the following year the French courts began

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY 341

to condemn the Society to pay the debts of Lavalette,
and in 1761 the Parlement of Paris condemned the
Society and began the work of repression. In the fiery
controversy which now filled all the Catholic countries of
Europe every questionable episode in the history of the
Society, and probably much that had been added to the
historical facts, was discussed and advertised. Myriads
of pamphlets fed the sensations of the people, and for
the first time since the early years of Ignatius the Jesuits
cowered before the storm of obloquy. In 1764, Louis xv.
signed the decree for the abolition of the Society in
France, and by 1767 the Italian provinces were once
more swamped with crowds of fugitives.

Charles in. of Spain had so far firmly resisted the
arguments of Pombal, but in the spring of 1766 the
Jesuits of Madrid had drawn on themselves the suspicion
of having inspired a revolt against the royal authority,
and it would be reported to Ricci that the monarch was
sombre and inaccessible. As the year proceeded (and,
as we now know, Aranda completed his case against the
order), increasingly gloomy messages would come from
the Spanish court, and in the early days of April 1767
the news came from the coast that 6000 Spanish Jesuits
were tossing homeless on the waters. Taking the
colonies into account, the Society had now been destroyed
in by far the greater part of the Christian world, and a
stupendous amount of its property had been confiscated.
Moreover, it was now known that the French, Spanish,
and Portuguese were pressing the Pope to abolish the
Society; and, at least from the middle of 1767, the
prospect of that terrible contingency was discussed
throughout the clerical world at Rome.

Before the end of 1767 the work began on Italian
soil. Charles m. had passed from Naples to the throne
of Spain, and he had left that kingdom in the charge of

342 THE JESUITS

a liberal minister, Tanucci, under the rule of his son
Ferdinand iv. Little pressure was needed by the
Neapolitans. On the 3rd of November 1767 the Jesuit
houses were surrounded, the papers seized, and the
fathers banished from Southern Italy. A few months
later it was the turn of Parma, and in April the fathers
were driven from Malta, as the Grand Master was a
feudatory of the King of Naples. Whether the idea
came from the Jesuits or no we cannot say, but the Pope
concluded that, in the case of Parma, he might retaliate.
He revived an old pontifical claim to the duchy, annulled
the sentence against the Jesuits, and excommunicated
those who had banished them. The allies promptly
replied ; France seized Avignon, and Naples occupied
Benevento and Ponte Corvo, of the Papal States.

It was at this juncture that, on the 2nd of February
1769, Clement xm. found relief in death, and the historic
struggle over the succession to the papal throne began.
On the result of that election the fate of the Society would
depend, and Jesuits and anti- Jesuits hurried to the arena
and used every means in their power to influence the
issue. But the Jesuits and their friends have, not un-
naturally, published as fact every faint echo of gossip
in connection with the election, in order to weaken the
significance of their suppression by the Pope elected ;
and it must be examined with great care. 1

1 Two works will give the reader ample material for forming an idea on
the subject. From the Jesuit side there is Cretineau-Joly's work, CUment
xiv. etlesjdsuites (1847), though the work is little more that a reproduction
of the fifth volume of the same writer's Histoire . . . de la Compagnie de
J/sus, and is quite unprincipled in many of its statements. The other work
(Histoire du fontificat de CUment xw., 1852) is a reply to the preceding,
written by the learned and conscientious Prefect of the Vatican Secret
Archives, Father Theiner. Both contain copious extracts from contemporary
documents, especially the correspondence of the ambassadors. The work of
St. Priest, Histoire de la chute des Jesuites, is interesting and lively, but
gossipy and unreliable.

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY 343

Clement xm, died on 2nd February, and the Italian
cardinals, especially those of the Papal States, tried to
elect a new Pope before the distant and anti-Jesuit
Powers could send their cardinals and assert their in-
fluence. They opened the conclave on 1 5th February,
and nearly succeeded in electing Cardinal Chigi. It is
natural to suspect, and is emphatically affirmed, that the
Jesuits induced them to take this irregular step, and we
know that General Ricci was at the time hastening
feverishly from one prelate to another. We may be
quite sure that the Jesuits used what influence they had
to secure a premature election, but there is another
element to be considered. The cardinals were, in the
phrase of the hour, divided into zelanti and antizelanti
cardinals who resented the interference of lay Powers
in the affairs of Rome, and cardinals who thought r
politic to consult the wishes of the Catholic monarchs
Besides these two schools, however, there were man;;
cardinals who did not adopt a decisive attitude, and wen
disposed to be guided by the course of events, or at leas
indisposed to meet the violent anger of France, Spain
Portugal, and Naples.

When, therefore, the Marquis d'Aubeterre, th
French ambassador, and Mgr. Azpuru, the representa
tive of Spain the Portuguese ambassador did nc
arrive until a later date protested in the names c
their sovereigns, and demanded that the conclave shoul
be postponed until the French and Spanish cardina
arrived, the majority of the cardinals were intimidate*
and the zelanti were forced sullenly to quit their eel
in the Vatican. Cardinal Rezzonico, a nephew of tt
late Pope, was one of the leaders of the zelanti. In tt
course of March, Cardinal Luynes and Cardinal Bern
arrived from France. The former was a mere vote
but Bernis a suave, conceited, ambitious prelate, wl

344 THE JESUITS

sought the place of French ambassador at Rome had
been flattered by the French authorities into the belief
that the issue of the election and the fate of the Jesuits
depended mainly on him, and he applied his small
powers to the intrigue with great zeal. Before the end
of April the Portuguese ambassador, Mendoza, and the
two Spanish cardinals arrived, and Rome throbbed
with discussion and intrigue. The anti-Jesuits had a
nucleus of six Neapolitan, two Spanish, and two French
cardinals, and the problem was to secure a majority for
their cause among the forty voters.

It is sometimes said that they won the indifferent
cardinals, partly by bribery and partly by intimidation ;
but Father Theiner denies both charges. We have, in
fact, the private assurance of Bernis to his government,
which seems to have contemplated bribery, that the
cardinals of that particular conclave were all religious
men and incorruptible. At the most, we may be dis-
posed to admit that the fact that some of the cardinals
had property in the Provinces seized by France and
Naples inclined them to gratify the Powers. As to
intimidation, it seems clear that the ambassadors urged
upon individual voters the grave danger of opposing
the wishes of the Catholic monarchs ; but Father Theiner
denies that such arguments were used in the conclave
itself. One would imagine that they were superfluous.
Every cardinal knew that the four Catholic kings sternly
insisted on the relief of Parma and the suppression of
the Society, and could not but reflect on the possible
consequences of electing a pro- Jesuit Pope.

Cr6tineau~Joly represents that the Society and the
cardinals in favour of it had the support of Maria
Theresa, and that she sent Count Kaunitz to Rome to
express his support. He maintains that it was only
after the other Catholic monarchs had tempted Joseph

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY 345

IL, her son and Emperor, to covet the property of the
Society, that she reluctantly yielded. This is so demon-
strably false as to incur the suspicion of untruth.
Cardinal Bernis wrote to his court on 28th March 1769,
long before the conclave, that Maria Theresa refused to
support the demand for the suppression of the Jesuits,
but " could not oppose, and would even be glad to see
it"; so the Emperior Joseph IL stated In September
of the same year the Nuncio at Vienna gave the same
report. Joseph u. himself came to Rome in March (1769),
and the Jesuits clearly learned his attitude. When he
visited their famous church, the Gesu, General Ricci
hastened to greet him, and was jocularly asked "when
he was going to change his coat." Later, when they
stood before the solid silver statue of Ignatius, and Ricci
explained that it was due to gifts of friends of the
Society, Joseph observed : " Say, rather, to the profits
on your Indian missions." And the Jesuits would
further learn that, when the Emperor visited the Vatican,
he urged the cardinals to elect another Benedict xiv.
On the other hand, the visit of Count Kaunitz was in
the following year, long after the attitude of Maria
Theresa was known. She never wavered in her
position, as she expressed it to Clement xiv. after the
suppression ; she had no idea of opposing or disapprov-
ing what the Pope thought necessary. Austria was
lost to the Jesuits. Only a few small and unimportant
rulers could be induced to plead for them.

The more difficult problem of the opponents of the
Jesuits was to discover a cardinal who might be trusted
to destroy the Society, yet would have some chance of
election. The Spanish ambassador proposed that a
cardinal should be induced to engage himself to abolish
the Society if he were elected. For a time the French
ambassador favoured the idea, but Cardinal Bernis

346 THE JESUITS

strongly opposed it ; and there is ample proof that it was
abandoned before the end of April There is, therefore,
no serious ground whatever for the charge that Cardinal
Ganganelli promised to destroy the Society if he were
elected, as the French historian is compelled to admit.
The only question is whether Ganganelli gave a written
assurance to the Spaniards that in his opinion a Pope
had the power to destroy the Society. General Ricci
had issued a pamphlet in which he contended that the
Pope had no power to abolish the Society, and it would
assuredly not be a serious matter for a cardinal to ex-
press his opinion on that point. But it seems that
Ganganelli made no statement to the Spaniards. Some
jealousy had arisen between the representatives of Spain
and France, and the Spaniards vaguely boasted to
Bernis of having had some communication with Gan-
ganelli. Bernis reported that they had some written
assurance from him, but in later letters (ignored by the
French historian) he retracts. On igth July he wrote
that he may have been mistaken : on 3oth November
he acknowledged that he was wholly mistaken, and
there had been no " arrangement " between the
Spaniards and Ganganelli. The results of the voting,
which are given by Theiner, confirm this. The sup-
posed arrangement or assurance would have to be dated
1 5th or 1 6th May, yet Ganganelli received just the same
number of votes (10) on I4th, i5th, i6th, ijMth May.

The truth is that no one knew what Ganganelli
would do if he became Pope. Formerly a Franciscan
monk, he was a man of sincere piety and unquestioned
integrity. It is said that he was ambitious, and attempted
to secure the votes of both parties by remarking to one
group that it was dangerous to offend the Catholic
monarchs, and to the other that it was impossible to
sacrifice the Society, This is mere gossip, He was an

SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY 347

elderly man in his sixty-fifth year of high character
and great ability. The Jesuit Cordara tells us that
Ricci had urged Clement xm. to give him the purple,
and he had always been on friendly terms with the
Jesuits. There is not the least serious ground for
charging him with acting improperly, and we know
that, on i gth May, he was elected by a unanimous vote.

Both parties now assailed the Vatican, and engaged
officials in its service to report to them the movements
of their opponents and the moods of the Pope. It is
difficult to conceive an elderly friar as having sought
with deliberate ambition the position in which the new
Pope would find himself. The ambassadors of the
Powers at once renewed their demand for the abolition
of the Society, while the Jesuits and their friends and
spies maintained a sombre vigilance. Whichever way
the Pope acted he would incur a fierce and dangerous
resentment. Clement xiv. was not the man to sell his
conscience for the restoration of Avignon, Benevento,
and Ponte Corvo ; but the retention of these places would
not be the only, or the most serious, consequence of
disappointing the Powers. On the other hand, he knew
the history and principles of the Jesuits. It is said that
he put his kitchen in the charge of a friar of the
Franciscan order. Whether or no it is true that he
feared poison, he would know that the Jesuits would not
meekly submit to a sentence of death, and the last years
of his life would be full of trouble.

To the representatives of the Powers the Pope replied
that he would take no step, and would give no encourage-
ment to either side, until he had made a thorough inquiry
into the matter. The Jesuits, however, soon perceived,
or imagined, that Clement favoured the Powers. Twice
in the two months after the election, General Ricci
presented himself at the Vatican, as it was customary

348 THE JESUITS

for the heads of religious orders to do on the chief
festivals of the order, and twice had he to depart with-
out seeing the Pope. He increased his vigilance and
activity, and the ambassadors had to adopt various ruses
to conceal their intercourse with the Pope; Bernis had
now become ambassador, and was eager to justify his
appointment. In July the spirits of the Jesuits re-
vived, and it was the turn of the courts to fret and fume.
Clement had issued a brief giving certain sacerdotal
powers for seven years to the Jesuit missionaries who
were just starting for the foreign missions. The Jesuits
printed the brief and triumphantly scattered copies over
Europe ; the ambassadors angrily protested that this was
to flout the wishes of their monarchs. In point of fact,
there was not the least reason to attach importance to
the brief. It was merely the observance of a form that
was customary at the departure of missionaries, and to
have omitted it on this occasion would have been a very
grave and premature indication of an intention to abolish
the Society.

However, the impolitic rejoicing of the Jesuits com-
pelled the Pope to make some concession to their
opponents. It was customary to republish every year
the bull In Cosna Domini which a friendly predecessor
had issued in favour of the Society. Clement declined
to sanction its republication in 1769, and another ripple
of excitement ran over Europe. In some places the
Jesuits printed and published the bull themselves, and
added another indiscretion to the account against them.
A third and more serious error was committed by them.
The ambassadors pressed more eagerly, and, as Bernis
reports to his court, the Pope replied with dignity that
he must consult his honour and his conscience, and
make a prolonged inquiry before deciding. Choiseul
threatened that the ambassadors would be withdrawn if

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY 349

the Pope did not give them a written assurance within
two months, and Clement again sternly refused. France
offered to restore Avignon if he would give the assur-
ance, and only excited his indignation. This is the
Pope whom the Jesuits and their apologists represent
as morally and intellectually perverse; yet they them-
selves betrayed, and betray, a considerable degree of
unscrupulousness in the matter. Cr a nd the Congregation of our Lady now included
half the nobility and higher clergy, and numbers of
writers, lawyers, politicians, and officials. Their French
apologist, who was himself a member of the Congrega-
tion and lived in Paris at this time, admits that the secret
influence of the Congregation was such that many made
a profession of religion and joined it in order to promote
their material interests. Charles x., who succeeded Louis
in 1824, renewed their confidence. He opened his
career with Liberal measures ; but he was more
reactionary at heart than Louis xvni., and less prudent,
and the Jesuits silently organised their forces for a
restoration of the Society.

The educated Frenchman now commonly united the
scepticism of Voltaire with the moderate democracy of
Lafayette, and an angry storm broke out in the Liberal
press. The open activity of the " Paccanarists " was
an affront to the Constitution, and the secret manoeuvres
of the Congregation, notoriously led by Father Rons*fn,
alarmed them. The authorities discreetly removed
Father Ronsin from Paris, but the work of the
Congregation proceeded. Charles x. was suspected of
favouring the Jesuits. In 1828 the Nuncio openly
proposed that the Society should be restored, We may
take the word of Cr&ineau-Joly that the ground had
been so well prepared that a measure could have been
passed safely through the two Houses. But Villele, the
French historian says, was so misguided as to appeal
to the country first, and he lost. The question of the
Jesuits was not the least of the issues at stake. Showers
of pamphlets fell upon the public, and the popular feeling
was such that when the King was one day reviewing
the National Guard, the cry, " Down with the Jesuits/*
rang out from the ranks, and the review was abandoned.

The more moderate ministry of Martignac had now

THE NEW JESUITS 403

to be formed, and, as ft needed the co-operation of the
Liberals, the plan to restore the Jesuits was abandoned.
The Liberals were now encouraged, and they made a
fiery assault The " little seminaries," as the French
called the preparatory colleges for the clergy, had been
left under the control of the bishops, and several of
them were notoriously controlled by the thinly disguised
Jesuits. A commission of bishops, with the Archbishop
of Paris at their head, was appointed to examine the
charge, and it was determined that eight of the
seminaries were really Jesuit colleges, and must be
closed ; it was further enacted that the seminaries were
to be taken from the bishops and put under the control
of the universities, that the number of pupils was to be
restricted, and that no priest should henceforth he
allowed to teach in them who did not take oath that he
did not belong to a non-authorised Congregation. The
bishops, many of whom had won their seats by Jesuit
iffluence, protested in vain against this violation of their
rights. Their protest made matters worse, since they
stipulated that it should remain secret]; but the Liberal
press secured the text and published it

This was a very severe blow to the French Jesuits,
who had used the seminaries for training lay pupils in
their spirit as well as teaching the secular priests to rely
on them. While the French press was discussing the
question whether they existed in the country, they had
grown to the number of 436, and had two novitiates and
several residences, besides the seminaries. They now
determined to take bolder measures against the enemy.
As I said, the question of the Jesuits was by no means
the only serious issue under discussion ; Martignac
received only a moderate and uncertain support from his
Liberal allies because his measures were not sufficiently
advanced It is, however, clear that the Jesuits,

404 THE JESUITS

through the Nuncio, had their share in inducing the
King to replace the moderate Martignac with the
thoroughly conservative Polignac. This was in July
1829. The reply of the people, when the ministry
returned to the old coercive measures, was the July
Revolution of 1830. The chief Jesuit houses, at
Montrouge and St. Acheul, were sacked by the mob,
and the fathers scattered in every direction. Once more
they had suffered a heavy defeat on what they believed
to be the eve of victory.

The revolutionary wave spread, with devastating
force, to Italy, as we saw; and there also the fathers
were for a time driven contemptuously from their
colleges. Their recovery in France was naturally
slower than in Italy. They moved in fear of their lives
for the first year or two of the reign of Louis Philippe,
and generally concealed themselves in devoted Catholic
houses. In 1832 the cholera swept France, and they
recollected how frequently heroic conduct in such
epidemics had disarmed their critics. But France was
not so easily reconciled in the nineteenth century, and
the few who ventured to appear during the following
years were arrested. In the course of time, however,
the resentment was confined to the more ardent Liberals,
and they resumed the semi-public existence of the
previous decade. Catholicism made great progress in
the thirties, chiefly through the agency of a brilliant
group of laymen, and some of the Jesuits took an open
part in the revival. Father de Ravignan, their finest
orator, occupied the pulpit of Ndtre Dame for several
seasons, and they were assiduous in giving retreats to
the clergy.

As they no longer ventured to teach, though it was
known that they had opened a college for French pupils
just over the Belgian frontier, and betrayed their

THE NEW JESUITS 405

character in no external action, they were legally un-
assailable ; but it was not long before they again drew
on themselves the ire of the Liberals. From 1840
onwards the clergy made a vehement attack on the
professors of the university. Since these included
philosophers like Cousin and Jouffroy, historians like
Michelet, and men of letters like Jules Simon, we can
easily believe that their lectures were at times incon-
sistent with orthodox ideas ; but the attack was gross and
exaggerated, and the professors felt that the Jesuits
secretly guided it ; Father do Ravignan, in fact, joined
in the spirited conflict of pens. The chief result was to
draw on the Jesuits the sardonic humour of Michelet,
the weighty censures of Cousin, the poisonous raillery
of Simon, and the unrestrained diatribes of the popular
Liberal press. It was during this agitation that Eugene
Sue lashed them with \&$ Juif ISrrantt and George Sand
wrote Consuelo* Against this fierce and brilliant on-
slaught the publication of Cnkineau-Joly's Histoire was
a feeble defence ; it could carry no conviction except to
the already convinced and uncritical Catholic. Indeed,
its treatment of Clement xiv. scandalised many Catholics,
and, as we saw, Pius ix directed the Vatican Archivist
to refute it* 1

Louis Philippe was at length compelled to take
action. Catholic writers treated it as an amusing scare
that there were Jesuits in France, and were not a little
mortified when the fathers betrayed their existence in a

1 It seems to have been on account of this slanderous attack on the
Pope, m well as to give it an air of impartiality, that General Roothaan
publicly denied that the Jesuits had assisted the author. The learned Abb<$
httett^e, in the Histoire des J Suites ^ which he published soon afterwards,
tells us that, not yet knowing his hostility to them, some of the Jesuits o
l*am freely acknowledged to him their share in the work, In any case, the
JesuitK were obviously in close co-operation with the writer, since he speaks
constantly of having before his eyes unpublished documents which belonged
to the Society*

406 THE JESUITS

way which entertained the Liberal pamphleteers. In
1845 one of their treasurers embezzled the funds entrusted
to him, and they imprudently prosecuted. In the con-
troversy which followed it was made plain that there
were two hundred members of the forbidden Society in
France, and their expulsion was stormily demanded.
The King knew that if he suppressed the " Fathers of
the Faith " they would do no more than change their
name, and he adopted a shrewder policy. He sent
Rossi to Rome to submit to the Pope that the relations
of France and the Vatican would be much improved if
the Jesuits were removed by ecclesiastical authority.
The dignity of the Holy See was saved by a pleasant
little comedy. The Congregation of Extraordinary
Ecclesiastical Affairs reported that the request could
not be granted, and the Pope firmly replied to the
French envoy in that sense. But a private intimation
was made to General Roothaan that it was desirable
to meet the wishes of the King, and Rossi was in-
structed to see him. Whatever the precise nature of
the intimation was, Roothaan submitted to his French
subjects that it was expedient to dissolve their chic k f
communities, at Paris, St. Acheul, Lyons, and Avignon,
and they once more retreated sullenly from the field,
We shall see later how they found a fitting patron in
Napoleon in., and how the third Republic put a
definitive? close to their activity in France,

Their fortunes in Spain during the nineteenth century
have been more chequered than their present prosperity
would suggest On i$th May 1815, Ferdinand VIL
repealed the drastic sentence of his great predecessor,
and ordered that their former property should be restored
to the Jesuits. A hundred and fifty of the old members
of the Society returned to their native land; colleges
and novitiates were opened by means of the restored

THE NEW JESUITS 407

property and the royal bounty ; and, we are told, town
after town demanded, and enthusiastically welcomed, its
former teachers. We can well believe that the mobs
which saluted the perjured Ferdinand with the cry,
" Down with Liberty," would welcome the Jesuits. In
the recoil due to their hatred of the French, and of the
new ideas which the French had brought into Spain,
the densely ignorant mass of the people fell at the feet
of a brutal monarch and a corrupt clergy. The educated
middle class, however, remained substantially Liberal.
They had admitted Ferdinand only on condition that he
promised to maintain their Liberal Constitution, and, as
soon as he had attained the crown, he tore his promise
and the Constitution to shreds and fell with terrible cruelty
on the Liberals, Known Liberals were at once executed,
imprisoned for life, or banished; the Inquisition was
restored ; and a network of spies spread over the king-
dom. Men, women, and children were savagely punished,
and a " Society of the Exterminating Angel" arose to
strengthen and direct the bloody hands of the King and
the Inquisitors.

Those five years of Spanish history constitute one of
the most repulsive chapters in the chronicle of modern
Europe. Unfortunately, it is not possible to determine
what part the restored Jesuits had in this reign of terror.
All the clergy and monks of Spain were allied with their
monarch in prosecuting what they regarded as a holy
war. It is enough that the Jesuits did not dissent from
the barbaric proceedings of Ferdinand, and that they
flourished and were more than doubled in number within
five years. The year 1820 found them increased to 397,
with several novitiates and a large number of colleges.

And the year 1820 gives us some measure of their
guilt in connection with the preceding years. The middle
class was still strong enough, or humane enough, to put

408 THE JESUITS

an end to the disgraceful horrors, and reaffirm the liberal
constitution of 1810. The Cortes was summoned, and,
although its members were still predominantly Catholic,
it was determined, with only one dissentient, to expel the
Jesuits. The terrified King yielded to the deputies, and
in August the four hundred Jesuits were pensioned and
ordered to quit the country. Unfortunately, the French
King espoused the cause of his " cousin," and his troops
restored the savage autocracy of Ferdinand and the
power of the Jesuits. The reign of terror returned, and
even the other Catholic monarchs of Europe were
shocked by the outrages committed and permitted by
Ferdinand. Again it is impossible to disentangle the
share of the Jesuits in this comprehensive guilt Their
chief task was to educate the young in " better " senti-
ments. The College of Nobles and a large military
college at Segura were entrusted to them, and they
reoccupied their former colleges. But neither priests
nor ruler put confidence in educational methods. It is
enough to note that a conservative authority on Spain,
Major Hume, says of the renewed reign of terror :
" Modern civilsation has seen no such instance of brutal,
blind ferocity."

This appalling condition lasted, almost continuously,
until the death of Ferdinand in 1833. Then the country
entered upon the long Carlist war, and the Jesuits were
soon expelled for the third time. While Queen Christina
allied herself with the Liberals, Don Carlos rallied to his
standard the absolutists and Ultramontanes, and the
great majority of the clergy supported him. It is usually
and confidently said that the Jesuits, like the rest of the
clergy, supported Don Carlos; but when we recollect
their maxim of not taking sides openly in an ambiguous
conflict, or taking both sides, we shall not expect to find
any proof of this in the early stages. Not only the

THE NEW JESUITS 409

Liberals but the mass of the people in Madrid were
persuaded that they were on the side of Don Carlos, and
they saw hatred gathering on every side of them. In
1834 the cholera descended on the capital. Such occa-
sions had generally served the Jesuits, but this fresh
affliction only further irritated the people against them.
The cry was raised that the Jesuits and the Carlists had
poisoned the water-supply, and it seems that, by some
strange accident or plot, children were found on the
street with small quantities of arsenic. In the afternoon
of 1 7th July the citizens flung themselves upon the
houses of the Jesuits and other religious, and a fierce
riot ensued. Fourteen Jesuits, forty-four Franciscans,
and fifteen Dominicans and others were slain in the
struggle. Some of their provincial houses also were
sacked or closed, and the inmates had to fly for their
lives*

In the following year, 1835, the Society was again
proscribed, by the Regent Christina, and the Jesuits were
scattered. They now sided openly with Don Carlos.
Alleging, as usual, that they were indifferent to politics
and must discharge the spiritual services demanded of
them under any banner, they followed in the rear of the
advancing Carlists and opened colleges in the districts
conquered by them. One Jesuit guarded the conscience
of Don Carlos, another was tutor to his children, and
others ministered in his camps. At length an abler
Christinist General, Espartero, cleared the Carlists from
the Basque Provinces and closed the Jesuit houses. By
the time of the revolution of 1 848 there were none but
a few disguised and timid survivors of the Society in
Spain.

From Portugal the Jesuits were rigorously excluded
during fifteen years after the restoration of the Society.
John VL, a constitutional and sober monarch, refused to

4 io THE JESUITS

irritate his subjects by admitting them, and had no need
of their stifling influence on education in Portugal. He
resisted all the pressure of Rome in their interest, and
observed the Liberal Constitution which he had accepted.
His granddaughter Maria succeeded to his throne and
policy in 1826, under the regency of her uncle, Dom
Miguel. Here again the Jesuits were admitted in virtue
of an act of treachery and throve in an atmosphere of
savagery. Dom Miguel intrigued for the throne, and,
when he took an oath to respect the Liberal Constitution,
was permitted to occupy it. " His Jesuit training/' says
the Cambridge Modern History (x. 321)., " would make
it easy for him to rest content with the absolution of the
Church for a breach of faith committed on behalf of the
good cause." He at once violated his oath and turned
with ferocity upon the Liberals. It is estimated by some
of the Portuguese writers that more than 60,000 were
executed, deported, or imprisoned in the next four-
years.

Such was the second of the leading Catholic
monarchs to seek the aid of the Jesuits. None of the
members of the old Portuguese Province could be dis-
covered, or induced to resume work in a bitterly hostile
world, and eight Jesuits had to be sent from France, in
1829, to begin the work of restoration. They make
little pretence of an enthusiastic reception in this case.
None of their former property was restored, and for
a time they had to take refuge in the houses of rival
orders. They had, however, their usual good fortune to
attract the sympathy of noble ladies, and were enabled
to secure their old house at Lisbon in the following
year. When the King saw that no violent upheaval
followed their arrival, he began to patronise them, and
secured for them their famous college at Coimbra. In
the same year they had the satisfaction of establishing

THE NEW JESUITS 411

a house at Pombal, where their old antagonist had died,
and their superior describes, in an edifying letter, how
he at once " ran to say a prayer over the tomb of the
Marquis " ; he was deeply pained, it seems, to find that
the remains of Pombal had not even yet been interred,
while the children of Ignatius were received with honour
in his name-place.

But the ferocity of Miguel had already deeply stirred
the population, and in the following year the defrauded
young Queen's father, Don Pedro, Emperor of Brazil,
crossed the ocean to secure her rights and the Con-
stitution. The Jesuits were painfully perplexed. Don
Pedro seems to have felt that he could not hope for a
lasting triumph without the aid of the Jesuits, and he
made a secret offer to them, in an autograph letter (in
March), of his protection and favour if they would desert
Miguel. The issue was uncertain, and, when Don
P^dro entered Lisbon in July, the Jesuits assured him
that his letter had reached their hands too late for them
to consider his offer. They had remained ideally neutral
in the war, and had nursed the cholera victims in both
camps with religious impartiality.

The people of Lisbon saved Don Pedro from the
dilemma which this excellent or prudent conduct im-
posed on him. On 29th July a mixed throng of soldiers
and citizens assaulted and sacked the Jesuit residence.
It would have gone very hard with the fathers them-
selves had not certain English naval officers chivalrously
saved them. In the following May (1834) Don Pedro
renewed the sentence of suppression. From their hand-
some college at Coirnbra they were conveyed to Lisbon,
to, face the hoots and taunts of a rejoicing mob, and
then to be deposited in prison. The French afterwards
secured their release from prison, but they have never
since had a legal existence in the land of Pombal.

4 i2 THE JESUITS

We turn next to England, to study the fortunes of
the followers of Ignatius up to the middle of the nine-
teenth century. In the latter part of the eighteenth
century the Jesuits had availed themselves of the more
tolerant spirit of the age of the Georges, and again
increased to a considerable body. Their colleges in
Spain, France, and Belgium received numbers of young
Catholic aspirants, and we find that at the time of the
suppression of the Society the English Province boasted
274 members, of whom 143 were actually in England.
The suppression in Spain and France reduced their
colleges; the two colleges at Bruges were violently
closed by the authorities in 1773 ; there remained only a
house at Liege and the English missions at Liverpool,
Preston, Bristol, and a few other towns.

They continued to live in community in these resi-
dences after the abolition of the Society, and minister
as secular priests. In 1794 their situation was again
altered by the French invasion of Belgium, when me
English fathers were expelled from their last continental
seat, at Liege. The disaster proved, however, to be
the starting-point of their more prosperous modern
development in England. One of their old pupils,
Thomas Weld, offered them a house and estate at
Stonyhurst, near Preston, and on 2pth August the
refugees reached what was destined to be one of their
most important centres. They opened a school to be
directed by certain " gentlemen from Li&ge " and quietly
awaited the future.

In the meantime the ex- Jesuits who had remained in
England bore their disgrace very impatiently. One of
their number, Father Thorpe, wrote in 1785 so scurril-
ous a Sketch of the Life and Government of Pope
Clement xiv. that his colleagues had to withdraw it
from publication at the demand of their own admirers.

THE NEW JESUITS 413

In the following year the English ex-Jesuits opened a
correspondence with their rebellious colleagues in Russia,
and, although they could devise no pretext whatever for
disobeying the Pope in England, they offered to unite
with the Russians. Their proposal was declined or
postponed, and they waited until the Pope officially
recognised the Russian Society in 1801. By that time
the Abb^ de Broglie had led his little colony of Fathers
of the Faith from Austria to London and opened a
college at Kensington, Some of the ex-Jesuits and
many emigrant French priests were attracted to this
authorised Congregation, but Paccanari was now an
object of suspicion to most of them, and, on the other
hand, there was increasing hope of a restoration of the
Society.

The proposal to enlist under the Russian General
was now revived, and both ex- Jesuits and Fathers of
the Faith made their way, secretly and individually, to
Russia and renewed their vows. By the year 1804
there were between eighty and ninety Jesuits in England.
The general and violent hatred of the French had led
to much sympathy with the clerical victims of the
Revolution, but England was not yet prepared for this
substantial resurrection of the Jesuits. Stonyhurst was
growing into a large and busy colony, owing to the
continued bounty of Weld and the return of surviving
members of the old province, and in 1804, and more
peremptorily in 1807, the Government ordered the
dissolution of their communities.

Such an order was a feeble check on their growth,
and they took advantage of the successive movements
which aided the restoration of Catholicism. The stream
of French emigrants, the Act of Toleration of 1791, the
beginning of Irish immigration, and the advocacy of
Catholic Emancipation by Pitt enabled the Catholics to

4U THE JESUITS

enter the nineteenth century in increased numbers.
The Catholic Relief Act of 1829 so inflated them that
they then estimated their numbers in London alone as
146,000, or nearly a tenth of the population; to-day
they number about one-fiftieth of the population of
London. The Jesuits shared the growth with the rest
of the clergy. Between 1826 and 1835 they built eleven
new churches, and in 1830 the Roman authorities made
a formal province of the English group. The Irish
fathers had been detached from the English in 1829,
and formed a vice-province. Ten years later began the
Catholic movement within the Church of England, to

O '

the considerable profit of Rome.

The early history of the Jesuits in the United States
is one of the most interesting chapters in their modern
story. When the Society was abolished and its mem-
bers momentarily discouraged, John Carroll, a member
of the suppressed English Province, led a small group
of fathers to the North American Colony. He becarfle
friendly with Washington and other leaders of the
insurrection, and is said to have had some influence
in shaping the Liberal clauses of the new Constitution,
In 1789 he became Bishop of Baltimore, and another
ex-Jesuit, Father Neale, was afterwards made his
coadjutor. This transferred the American mission from
the control of the English Vicar Apostolic, and made
Carroll head of the Church in the United States. In
1803 we find Carroll writing to General Grubcr that
there are a dozen aged ex-Jesuits in Maryland and
Pennsylvania, with sufficient property (of the older
Maryland mission) to support thirty ; they wish to join
Gruber's authorised Society and receive an accession
of strength. The Russian Jesuits had justified their
rebellion on the ground that the secular monarch had
forbidden them to lay aside their habits ; the Americans

THE NEW JESUITS 415

said it was enough that there was in America no secular
monarch to forbid them to wear it. The Papacy counted
for little with any of them.

Gruber complied, and the foundations were laid of
the prosperity of the Jesuits in the United States. In
the early years little progress was made. The new-
comers were young foreigners, and the population was
scattered and generally hostile. One of the German
fathers was actually arrested and tried for not betraying
the confession of a thief, but the controversy which
followed rather promoted their interest. They shrewdly
established their chief college and centre at George-
town, near Washington, and gradually won the regard
of American statesmen, who visited and granted privileges
to the college. By the year 1818 there were 86 Jesuits
in the ^United States, and recruits were arriving from
Europe. A novitiate had been opened at White Marsh
in 1815, but few novices could be secured in America.
fa fact, as they followed their usual custom of making
no charge for education, they had a severe struggle
with poverty everywhere. In 1822 the authorities at
Rome ordered them to close the school at Washington,
as it could no longer maintain itself without charging.
The rector, Father Kelly, defied his superiors for a
time, and maintained the school on the fees of pupils ;
but Americanism was not yet sufficiently developed to
sustain this, and Father Kelly was expelled from the
Society.

Memories of the " black robes" lingered among the
Indians, and it was suggested, time after time, that the
fathers should return to their work among them, and
amongst the blacks of the south and the islands. Their
historian makes a lengthy and very earnest apology for
their refusal, during ten or twenty years, to listen to this
suggestion. They remembered how their work amongst

416 THE JESUITS

the Indians had been " misinterpreted " ; they were too
few in number to spare men for distant fields ; in fine,
they foresaw the greatness of the United States and
" preferred the certain to the uncertain." The truth
seems to be that commerce in blankets and beaver-skins
was not possible in the nineteenth century. After 1 840,
however, they sent missionaries among the Indians, and
won a great affection among them. By that time the
Missouri Province alone had 148 Jesuits, and the Mary-
land Province 103.

It is clear that the early Jesuits laboured devotedly
to arrest the enormous lapse from the Church of Rome
in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth
century. We need pay little attention to their boasts of
conversions. Catholic immigrants were now arriving in
millions, and were passing out into the lonely districts
and small towns, where their faith was quickly forgotten.
In 1636 the Bishop of Charlestown estimated the loss at
nearly four millions in his diocese alone. Many of thte
Jesuits went out among the struggling pioneers and led
lives of great self-sacrifice. Their energies were, how-
ever, mainly concentrated on the aggrandisement of
their schools and conciliation of politicians in cities like
Washington. They made sure of power in the great
Republic they foresaw. It may be added that the
Society was at the same time spreading in Mexico,
Restored under Ferdinand, they undertook, as in Spain,
to check or destroy the Liberal principles which had
taken root in Mexico. For this they were banished in
1821, when the news came of the Liberal triumph
in Spain, and did not return to open activity until
1843.

In the Germanic lands, except Belgium, the restored
Jesuits had a severe struggle throughout the nineteenth
century. Austria and Bavaria refused to publish the

THE NEW JESUITS 417

bull of restoration or comply with it, to the great
mortification, of the Jesuits, Metternich, at least, re-
tained the spirit of Joseph IL, and Ferdinand n. was
not yet disposed to tempt his subjects by readmitting
them. Prussia was, of course, still closed against the
Jesuits as Jesuits. The first serious attempt to gain a
footing in Germany was made in 1820, when the fathers
who had been driven from Russia appeared on the
Austrian frontier and humbly asked permission to cross
the Emperor's territory. They might "cross," he drily
answered ; and when they secured the customary inter-
vention of noble dames, he permitted them to go and
teach loyalty among his poor subjects in Galicia and his
restless subjects in Hungary. He granted funds for this
purpose, and they soon had a flourishing Province in
Galicia, and a general control of education. Even here
they were subject to the bishops, and the imperial
decrees intimate that there was much suspicion and
hostility. In 1829, Styria and other provinces were
opened to them, though the opposition was so violent
that at Gratz we find them complaining of having to
lodge in some kind of inn, with an actress for neighbour.
Ferdinand n. died in 1836, but his successor could
do little for them in face of the prevailing hostility.
Father Beckx, the future General, was in Vienna at the
time. A Jesuit had at last brought a ray of hope into
the German camp by converting the Duke and Duchess
of Anhalt-Kothen, and Father Beckx was confessor, to
the Duchess at Vienna and secret agent of the Society.
He writes in 1837 that their enemies are very powerful,
and Josephite principles triumphant; the Jesuits have
only one public institution in Austria, and are forbidden
to teach. Ferdinand, however, was not indisposed to
enlist their aid in fighting Liberalism, and they quietly
spread in the outlying provinces. The Tyrol was opened
27

4i 8 THE JESUITS

to them in 1838, and from their old college at Innspruck
they proceeded to capture its schools. We shall see
presently how the revolutionary storm of 1848 drove
them from their new acquisitions.

In Switzerland the fortunes of the Jesuits were more
romantic. During the suppression they continued to
live in communities, and carefully concealed the offensive
title from the eyes of Protestant citizens. After 1814
they began to induce their lay followers to petition
the authorities to sanction their return to life, and
the long and bitter struggle over the Society began.
The canton of Solothurn was then more than eighty
per cent. Catholic, and in 1816 the Grand Council was
urged to restore the Society. It refused, and they then
made cautious efforts in Valais and Freiburg, I am
aware that in all these cases the Jesuits do not appear
in connection with the petition; a few influential
Catholics appeal for the return, and the Jesuits are
depicted as serenely aloof from the negotiations. "We
are accustomed to pretences of this character. In 1818
the Grand Council of Freiburg (which also was nearly
ninety per cent. Catholic) decided by sixty-nine votes to
forty-two to readmit the Jesuits and entrust its schools
to them. At the same time they recovered their old
house at Brigue, and began to spread in Catholic Valais,
From the beginning of the third decade of the
nineteenth century the Radicals began their attacks on
the growing Jesuits. In 1823 the fathers secured their
old college at Freiburg, which they had long coveted
Since their settlement in Freiburg this college had been
in the hands of the Franciscan monks, who had adopted
the ideas of Pestalozzi, the great Swiss educationist,
and were doing admirable work The bishop com-
plained to the authorities of the friars' innovations, and
they were replaced by the Jesuits. The Radicals of the

THE NEW JESUITS 419

town were malicious enough to suggest that the Jesuits
had intrigued to bring about this result, of which, of
course, there is no proof, and on the night of 9- roth
March they attacked the college, and were with difficulty
prevented from burning it In the following year the
Jesuits were expelled from the Netherlands (which
formed one Province with Switzerland and Saxony) and
came to swell the number of their colleagues in Valais
and Freiburg.

In 1836, however, when the second revolutionary
wave was passing over Europe, the Radicals won power
in the majority of the cantons (including Lucerne, Frei-
burg, and Solothurn). They were not yet in a position
to dislodge the Jesuits, but there was constant friction,
and a serious struggle for the federal authority began.
The aim of the Radicals was to capture and strengthen
the federal government, and expel the Jesuits (and other
religions) from the whole of Switzerland. They and the
(r young Swiss" were part of the international Liberal
movement, which was everywhere anti-clerical. 1 In 1844
the struggle became more violent. The Jesuits of
Valais refusing to admit government control of their
schools, a band of armed Radicals marched upon Sion
and had to be defeated by the armed inhabitants. In
the same year the Jesuits entered Lucerne for the first
time. A wealthy Catholic farmer named Leu threw all
his energy into their cause, and the Jesuits aided by
sending a preacher occasionally to show, by suave
and conciliatory sermons, that the suspicion of them
was wholly unfounded. In face of a storm of Protestant

1 There were, of course, more important issues at stake in the Swiss
struggle. The franchise was narrow, and the government aristocratic in
the cantons, and the central or federal power was weak. The Radicals
mainly aimed at reforming these features, but they were hardly less in-
flamed at the privileges given to the Jesuites. In Valais the fathers
travelled free on the public services.

420 THE JESUITS

and Radical threats the Council decided to admit the
Jesuits.

There now spread through the country a struggle
of passion which was soon to culminate in a deadly
civil war. Leu was murdered, and Catholics and
Radicals faced each other with intense hatred.
Opinions may differ as to the conduct of the Jesuits in
pressing their ministry, since it is clear that the purely
political differences would not have stained the hills and
valleys of Switzerland with blood. The war that
followed was a religious war, and mainly a war over the
Jesuits. In the spring of 1845 it was announced that
an army of ii, ooo Radicals was marching on Lucerne.
The Catholic Confederation sent round the fiery cross,
and gathered an army sufficiently strong to defeat and
scatter the Radicals. It was over the corpses of these
opponents that the Jesuits entered Lucerne and began
to teach, with passion still seething on every side, A
graver struggle impended, and both sides haSftly
organised. The seven Catholic cantons (to whose
enterprise the French Jesuits contributed 98,000 francs)
formed a Sonderbund [Separate Alliance], and aimed at
setting up a Catholic Republic. The Federal Diet at
Berne ordered them to dissolve, and when they refused,
pitted the federal army against the Catholic troops. A
bloody and disastrous war ended in a victory for the
federal troops in 1847, the Sonderbund was destroyed,
and the Jesuits (with the other religious orders) were
excluded from Switzerland by the Constitution of 1848.
The Jesuits had not waited for the troops to enter
Freiburg and Lucerne ; they had fled to the Tyrol and
Austria.

In the Netherlands the story of the Jesuits during
the nineteenth century has been one of great prosperity,
checked only by a few early reverses. No sooner had

THE NEW JESUITS 421

the Pope issued the bull of restoration, and the French
rule been destroyed, than the ex- Jesuits who lingered in
the country as secular priests and the Fathers of the
Faith (who had at last entered the Society) proceeded
to organise their body. A novitiate was opened at
Rumbeke and another at Destelbergen, in Belgium.
The Congress of Vienna, however, placed the united
Netherlands under the control of William of Nassau,
and he watched the progress of the Jesuits with un-
easiness. The former father of the Faith, the Count
de Broglie, was now bishop of Ghent, and he and other
prelates and nobles sedulously assisted the Jesuits.
The controversies which were bound to arise after the
union of Protestant Holland and Catholic Belgium
under one crown soon raged furiously, and William, in
the summer of 1816, ordered the Jesuits to close their
novitiate at Destelbergen. They were forced to retire,
buk de Broglie encouraged them to resist the King,
and lent them his palace for the maintenance of their
community. De Broglie himself was afterwards
banished for assailing the Constitution, and the fathers
were put out of the palace at the point of the bayonet
in 1818. As William threatened to expel them from
the country, they removed the novitiate to Switzerland,
and assumed an appearance of submission. As, however,
they continued to stir the Catholics, William ordered
the bishops in 1824 to forbid them to give retreats to
the clergy, and in the following year he closed two of
their residences.

This succinct account will suffice to introduce the
Catholic revolution of 1830, in which ^Belgium won its
independence. We are again asked to regard the
Jesuits as idle spectators of the fierce Catholic agitation
which ended in the rebellion; but, in view of their
experience under William, it seems wiser to accept the

422 THE JESUITS

Dutch assurance that they played a large, if secret, part
in it. The revolution was just, however, and there were
other grounds than religion in the dissatisfaction of the
Belgians. 1 From that date Belgium has been a golden
land for the Jesuits, and Protestant Holland has suffered
them to prosper in peace. After 1830 they literally
overran Belgium; they numbered 117 in 1834, and 454
in 1845. After that date came the great revolutionary
storm of 1848, and Belgium was almost the one land in
which the hunted Jesuits could find refuge. Leopold of
Saxe-Coburg was too prudent a Protestant to interfere
with them, and from the Belgian frontier they maintained
the strength of their struggling colleagues in France.
In Holland they were treated with leniency by the
successor of William ; and, when the storm broke upon
their German colleagues in 1872, they were able to
receive the refugees and maintain houses on the frontier
for the invasion of Germany, as they do to-day. jm

It is needless to show, in fine, how the restored
Jesuits spread again over the foreign missions. After
1830 especially, when their number had increased, they
began to regain their lost Provinces. In 1834 six
fathers landed at Calcutta to restore the Indian Province,
and when the Portuguese missionaries and authorities
tried to expel them, they succeeded in getting the
protection of the English authorities. Madaura, the
richest of their old fields, was restored to them in 1837,
Here again the existing missionaries protested so
violently that for many years the few Jesuits led a hard
and almost fruitless existence. In 1842 some of the

x Historians usually include among the causes the enforcement of a
system of secular education only in the schools. But as Sir Robert Stout
kindly pointed out to methe Catholic prelates in their letter to the French
Minister of the Interior, dated $oth May 1806, had previously " willingly "
accepted this arrangement. They agreed that It was enough to teach
religion in the churches.

THE NEW JESUITS 423

Jesuit missionaries secured the charge of a native college
in Bengal, but the prince was compelled to evict them
after a few years. There was an angry feeling and
great outcry against them in India well into the middle
of the century. In 1854 they received charge of the
vicariate of Bombay, in 1858 of Poonah, and in 1859 of
Bengal.

China was re-entered, very modestly, in 1841, and
the various Republics of South America admitted them
whenever the Catholics alternated in power with the
Liberals. They entered Argentina in 1836, but were
banished again in 1843 ; they were permitted to settle
in Guatemala in 1853, and expelled when the Liberals
came to power in 1871. But it would be little more
than a calendar of dates to record their appearances and
disappearances in the South American States, and on
the foreign missions generally. In 1845, of 5000 Jesuits,
518 were missionaries: in 1855 there were mo on the
fnTssions ; in 1884 they counted 2575 on the missions.
They no longer presented to the historian the interesting
features of their early years; Jesuits no longer flaunted
the silk robes of a mandarin or the mythological vesture
of a Saniassi, no vast estates or commerce sent gold to
their European brethren, no troops of soldiers marched
at their command, no quaint rites or rebellions against
bishops engaged the Roman Congregations. They had
entered the age of prose.

CHAPTER XVI
THE LAST PHASE

IF we attempt to sum up in few words the story of the
Jesuits during the first few decades after their sup-
pression, we must say that there was little change in
their spirit, and that they were wholly bent on returning
to their former position. In actual conduct there is a
material change. The industrial and commercial system,
which had formed one of the most irregular roots of
their power in the earlier centuries, has disappeared ;
they no longer haunt the courts of kings as they had
done ; they, as a rule, show less arrogance to the nolv
Jesuit clergy and the bishops ; they are less lax in their
casuistry; they shrink from regicide. Much of this
change is, however, plainly attributable to their new
situation. There is, for instance, hardly a single country
where they enjoy an unbroken prosperity for even thirty
years during the first half of the nineteenth century, so
that we could hardly look for large estates or traffic ; and
their foreign missions are only slowly and laboriously
constructed. As to regicide, the new age has a more
humane way of dealing with superfluous kings. If they
do not counsel kings, it is clearly not from lack of desire
to do so. On the whole, let us say that the dreadful
age, as they conceive it, into which they are reborn has
improved their conduct in spite of themselves.

We have now to see how, as the age increases in
wickedness, to use their phrase, the Jesuits continue to

434

THE LAST PHASE 425

improve : how they retain their worst features only in
lands which they pronounce godly and just, and are so
innocent as to cast suspicion on the dark legends about
them where heresy and unbelief abound. This last
phase of Jesuit activity is very important, yet too close
to us for proper historical study. Enough can be said,
however, to show that what may be called the inter-
mediate view of Jesuit degeneration is disputable.
There are those (i.e. all Jesuits and their admirers) who
hold that the Jesuits were never open to grave censure
as a body ; and there are those who maintain that the
Jesuit of the nineteenth or twentieth century is as bad
as the Jesuit of the seventeenth, and would poison a
pope or forge a cheque complacently in the interest of
the Society, A third view is that their heavy and
repeated chastisements have made their evil features a
thing of history. During the first half of the nineteenth
century, however, we have seen that they had no idea
of Uurying their past ; they were to co-operate with
kings in restoring the old order, and we have not the
least ground to think that, had they restored it, they
would have used their power otherwise than they did in
the seventeenth century. It remains to see if they
become wiser in the next half-century.

We left them on the eve of the revolution of 1848.
Except in Switzerland, where their obstinacy in asserting
their rights had been one of the chief causes of a civil
war and made their prospects worse than ever, they still
dreamed of erasing the revolution from the chronicle of
Europe and beginning again at 1750. Hence the
fearful storm of 1848 broke on them almost unex-
pectedly. They had only recently been forced to retire
from France, so that the outbreak in that country
affected them little. But the storm passed on to Austria
and Italy, even Rome, and drove the Jesuits before it

426 THE JESUITS

A Jesuit writer observes sadly that " the first attack of
the revolutionaries everywhere was on the Jesuits."
Naturally ; there were no more vehement opponents in
Europe of the new age which the revolutionary move-
ment represented. They had themselves traced the
revolutionary spirit to their temporary absence from the
schools of Europe, and the revolutionaries 1 concluded
that the reign of terror had had their support. So from
Rhineland, Austria, Galicia, Venice, Turin, Rome,
Naples, and Sicily the only Provinces of the Society
which seemed secure the Jesuits were driven by armed
and angry crowds, and a vast colony of bewildered
refugees shuddered in Belgium.

The Emperor of Austria was forced on 7th May to
sign their expulsion from the whole of his empire, but
it was in Italy that they suffered most. Since 1840
the authorities of the Society had received a succession
of painful shocks. The Carlists had lost and the fathers
had been driven from Spain: in 1845 they had Been
forced to dissolve the communities in France: in 1847
the Swiss Catholics had lost, and the Jesuit houses had
been wrecked They had attached themselves every-
where to losing causes. Manning was in Rome in the
winter 1847-48, and his diary records the coming of the
revolution to Rome, and flight of the Jesuits. Pius ix.
had exhausted his Liberalism, and the Romans were
uneasy and suspicious. Then, in January and February
1848, news came that the revolutionaries had triumphed
in Sicily and Naples, and the Jesuits were flying north.
By March the Jesuits at Rome were ready to fly at a
moment's notice, as Manning found when he visited
them. On agth March they were expelled ; and in the

1 I use the phrase of historians, but may observe that this was, in the
main, a middle-class movement to secure liberty of opinion and other
elementary political rights.

THE LAST PHASE 427

same month the Viennese conquered their Emperor, the
Venetians rebelled and drove out the Jesuits, and the
Piedmontese won a Liberal Constitution from Charles
Albert. Manning speculates on the causes of the
intense hostility to the Jesuits, and traces it to their
alliance with ultramontanism and political reaction.

As the historian tells, the revolution of 1848 had in
most countries only a temporary triumph, and in the
course of 1849 and 1850 the Jesuits returned to their
provinces. In very many places they returned to find
their comfortable home a heap of ruins, but the storm
had had one consoling effect It had proved that the
Jesuits were the chief enemies of Liberalism, and to the
Jesuits must be entrusted the task of extinguishing such
sparks as remained of the revolutionary fire. Pius ix.
had been driven to Gaeta, while the Romans set up
their short-lived Triumvirate and declared papal rule
at an end He returned to Rome in the spring of 1850,
when French troops had cleared out his opponents, and
from that moment he became the closest ally of the
Jesuits, His first act was to cannonise several members
of the Society. He took a Jesuit confessor, and, with
the aid of Cardinal Antonelli and the Society, set up
the selfish and repressive system which the English
ambassador described as " the opprobrium of Europe."

At last, it seemed, the spectre of revolution was
definitively laid, and a prospect of real restoration lay
before the Society. At Rome the Jesuits had enormous
power. Their influence is seen in the declaration of
the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the appalling
Encyclical against modern culture and aspirations of
1864. To them in 1866 the Pope entrusted his chief
organ, the Civiltk Cattolica, and they had a large part
in agitating for, and ultimately passing, the declaration
that the Pope is infallible in 1870. During all this

428 THE JESUITS

period they controlled Catholic culture, if not the
Papacy. Their power was at the same time restored
in Sicily, Naples, and Venice, so that Italy (except
Piedmont) was covered with their colleges and residences.
In Austria the Emperor, embittered by his hour of
humiliation, now opened the whole of his dominions to
them, and they collected fathers from all parts of the
world to come and restore the prosperity of the Austrian
Province. In Belgium they prospered luxuriantly ;
and they made quiet and stealthy progress in Holland,
Bavaria, Switzerland, Saxony, and 'Prussia, where they
were not authorised. In France Napoleon m. cancelled
the decrees against them, and cherished them as one
of the supports of his throne. In England they found
a friend in Wiseman and made rapid progress ; in the
United States they were growing with the phenomenal
growth of the population. The age of trouble was over.
The sage old fathers at the Gesii and the Roman
College saw chaos returning to order.

In 1853, at the beginning of this happier turn of
their fortunes, Roothaan died, and Beckx, the. son of a
Belgian shoemaker, was elected General The one
cloud on the horizon was Piedmont, where the earlier
affection for the Jesuits had died, but it had been proved,
apparently, that France and Austria would check the
ambition of that State. But France was drawn to
Sardinia, and in 1859 Victor Emmanuel began to ex-
tend his rule over Italy. From that time until 1870
the Society heard of nothing but disaster. In 1860
Victor Emmanuel annexed Tuscany, Emilia, and
Romagna, and the Jesuits were driven from their homes
into the Papal States. In the same year Garibaldi
landed in Sicily, put an end to the brutal rule of the
Catholic King, and ejected the 300 Jesuits from their
palatial college at Palermo and other residences. In

THE LAST PHASE 429

the autumn he entered Naples, and swept further
hundreds of the Jesuits before him. We learn from a
letter of protest which Father Beckx addressed to
Victor Emmanuel, that in the two years the Society
had lost 3 institutions in Lombardy, 6 In Modena,
ii in the Papal States, 19 in .Naples, and 15 in
Sicily. Of 308 Jesuits in their most prosperous
Province of Sicily only 8 aged and ailing fathers
were allowed to remain on the island. Of 5500
members of the Society no less than 1500 were home-
less, and were not even allowed to find shelter in
Catholic houses in their native Provinces. In 1866
the Austrians were ejected from Venice, and further
scores of Jesuits were driven from their homes. In
1868, it may be added, the Jesuits were again banished
from Spain, to which they had returned under Isabella 11.

There was a great concentration of Jesuits in Rome
and the remaining Papal States, and desperate efforts
werfe made to secure that at least this remnant of earthly
principality should remain loyal to the Pope. To the
great joy of the Jesuits an (Ecumenical Council gathered
at the Vatican, and the design of declaring the Pope
personally infallible in matters of faith or morals was
eagerly pressed. In the long and heated conflict of
affirming bishops and denying bishops, and bishops who
thought a declaration inexpedient, the Jesuits were very
active, scorning the idea that it could be imprudent to
enhance the power of the Pope. Then came the Franco-
German War, the withdrawal of the one Catholic force
which could save Rome from Victor Emmanuel, and the
plouds gathered more thickly than ever. The Jesuits
d declared their opinion of the " usurper" too freely

bave any illusion as to the issue.

When the Piedmontese troops entered by the breach

the Porta Pia on 20th September, the Jesuits knew

430 THE JESUITS

that they were doomed. A detachment of soldiers at
once proceeded to the house attached to the Gesu and
took up quarters there. Whatever the reason was, the
new Italian Government proceeded very slowly in the
work of expelling the Jesuits. For some weeks soldiers
and fathers lived together at the Gesu the fathers after-
wards said that the soldiers chose the General's room for
practising the drum and trumpet and the various resi-
dences were confiscated "in the public interest" at wide
intervals. In October the novitiate at St. Andreas, with
its large estates*, was taken and the novices' forced to
enlist. In January 1772 one of their smaller churches
was handed over to the secular clergy ; in January 1873
a second church and the Roman College (which was
used by the Ministry of War) were annexed.

At last, in June 1873, a l aw was published enacting
that the monks and religious of all orders must quit Italy.
One house was to be reserved at Rome for each order,
so that they might communicate with the Vatican, butThis
privilege was refused to the Jesuits. They were hated
by the great majority of the educated Italians, who re-
called with anger their support of the bloody reigns of
Ferdinand of Naples, Ferdinand vn. of Spain, Miguel
of Portugal, and Gregory xvi. and Pius rx. They had
sided with reaction and lost. There was no general
sympathy when, in October, Father Beckx, now a
feeble old man of seventy-eight, went sorrowfully to his
exile in Florence, and the remaining Italian Jesuits were
pensioned and scattered, The novitiate at Sant Andreas
was rented by the American Seminary (and Father
Beckx was allowed to die there some years later). The
Gesu was entrusted to other priests, and the sacred
rooms of Ignatius and the other saints of the Society were
.respectfully preserved. The Roman College became
a State school : I remember seeing a vast Congress

THE LAST PHASE 431

of Freethinkers hold their fiery meetings in its dark
chambers and airy quadrangle thirty years afterwards,
at the invitation of the civic authorities of Rome.

It was just one hundred years since the Roman
Jesuits had been scattered by Clement xiv. But the
catastrophe in Italy was not the only affliction to mark
that dark centenary. They had in the previous year,
when they were awaiting the sentence of Victor
Emmanuel, heard that their fathers were expelled
from the new German Empire. For some years they
had made quiet, but considerable, progress in Prussia,
Bavaria, and Saxony, as well as Austria. They had
opened a number of colleges at Cologne and in the
Rhine Province, always a rich field for their work, and
had institutions at Posen, Miinster, Metz, Mayence,
Bonn, Strassburg, Essen, Aix-la-Chapelle, Marienthal,
Ratisbon, and many other places. From the Rhine
Province and Bavaria and Baden they sent so many
recftdts to the German College at Rome, who would
return to work in Germany and further the influence of
the Jesuits in seminaries and bishoprics and universities,
that Frederick William in. was compelled to forbid any
of his subjects to go to the German College or any other
Jesuit institution. Frederick William iv. genially over-
looked their progress, and they spread over the States
which were presently to form the German Empire.

But the birth of the German Empire coincided with
the declaration of papal infallibility, and a strong agita-
tion for the expulsion of the Jesuits arose. The pro-
longed check on Jesuit activity in Germany had permitted
the growth of a more virile and honest culture among
the secular clergy, and many of the best Catholic
scholars were amazed at the papal claim. Politicians
and Protestants generally were concerned about this
victory of ultramontanism, and attributed it largely to

432 THE JESUITS

the intrigues of the Jesuits. Even before 1870 the
Catholic statesmen of Bavaria were in conflict with the
Church over its extreme pretensions. When, in 1870,
two more Catholic Provinces were added to Germany,
bringing its Catholic population up to fifteen millions,
Bismarck watched attentively every step in the growth
of ultramontanism. The dissenters at the Vatican
Council had very serious ground indeed for their plea of
inexpediency, as far as Germany was concerned. Even
Austria threatened to break its Concordat with the
Papacy when the news of the declaration of infallibility
arrived. Over Protestant Germany a feeling of intense
hostility spread, and the Old Catholics joined in the
outcry.

Petitions for the expulsion of the Jesuits began to
reach the Reichstag, and the Government proceeded to
act. A measure was debated in the Reichstag in June
1872, and on the 4th of July it was signed artel;
promulgated. Six months were allowed for the settle-
ment of their affairs, and in the course of that time the
whole of their communities were dissolved. As com-
munities they retired upon Switzerland, Austria,
Holland, and Belgium, but the law permitted them to
enter the Empire as individual citizens, and Bismarck
knew that it availed little to expel Jesuits with a fork.
Dr. Falk, a strenuous Liberal, was made Minister of
Public Instruction, and he framed a series of measures
(the " May Laws ") for the complete control of education
by the State and for determining the qualifications of
teachers in such a way that no disguised Jesuit could
return to his desk. The control of schools had hitherto
been left generally to the bishops, on whose indulgence
or zeal, as far as the Catholic schools were concerned,
the Jesuits could generally rely.

A stormy controversy ended in the passing of the

THE LAST PHASE 433

Laws, and Germany entered upon that long and bitter
struggle of the Catholics against the Government which
is known as the Kulturkampf. To this day the Jesuits
have been unable, in spite of the most industrious
intrigue, to secure readmission into the German
Empire. They still hover about the frontiers, in
Holland, Austria, and Belgium, and maintain large
colleges in which hundreds of the sons of the wealthier
Catholics are educated in orthodox principles. Individ-
ually, they live frequently in Berlin and control the
incessant demand of the Centre Party for their re-
habilitation. " Exile" has no effect on their growth
and prosperity, for the 755 expelled Jesuits of 1872
now number 1186. It is not impossible that they will
secure return by some such bargain as that which
contributed to the ending of the Kulturk&mpf.
Bismarck saw a "red terror" growing more rapidly
and threateningly than the " black terror," and he
macte peace with the Catholic clergy and Rome on the
understanding that they would combat Socialism in
Germany. Socialism continues to grow, and it would
not be surprising if the Emperor at length enlists the
sons of Ignatius in his desperate struggle against it.
If he does, the Society will find a luxuriant field for
growth among the 22,000,000 Catholics of the Empire,
until the last deadly struggle with Social Democracy
sets in.

For the inner spirit and character of the modern
German Jesuits I must refer the reader to Count von
Hoensbroech's invaluable Fourteen Years a Jesuit
(2 vols., Engl. transl., 1911). The whole story from
beginning to end is a sober but pitiful indictment of the
Jesuits, and shows how little change there is below
their accommodating expressions. We find the Jesuits
hovering about the houses of the wealthy, using their
28

434 THE JESUITS

influence with the women, extorting money by the
most questionable means, practising and teaching
mental reservation at every turn, and intriguing for
political power through the Catholic laity, as they had
done through three centuries. When Father Anderledy
(a future General of the Society) was convicted, in the
'forties, of maintaining studies in the Cologne residence,
contrary to Prussian law, he flatly denied the charge,
making the mental reservation that from that moment
the school should cease to exist. The Jesuit historian
who records the fact says : " What presence of mind ! "
When Hoensbroech, intending to enter the German
service, asked the learned Jesuit Franzelin whether he
might take an oath to observe the laws (which then
included the May Laws), he was told that he might,
with the mental reserve that he did not respect any
laws denounced by the Church. Numbers of instances
of deliberate lying (with mental reserve) are given, and
the work exhibits the character, the training, and* the
educational activity of the Jesuits in .an extremely
unattractive light. It is an indispensable document
for the study of modern Jesuit character.

The German Jesuits were, as I said, expelled in
1872 ; the Italian Jesuits followed in 1873. At that
time the Jesuits of France were enjoying the reaction
of public opinion which followed the attempts of the
Communists, Under Napoleon in. they had quickly
recovered, and as early as 1855 there had once more
been appeals for their expulsion. They returned to
their schools and colleges after the disturbances of
1871, and the Conservative Government permitted them
to prosper. A reaction set in in the later 'seventies,
when Gambetta vigorously led the anti-clerical forces
and began to denounce the Society, The Catholics
had almost succeeded in overthrowing the Republic

THE LAST PHASE 435

and enthroning the Due de Chambord. When (in 1877)
they went on to demand the employment of French
troops for the re-establishment of the Pope in his
temporal power, they lost the cause of their Church.
From that year Catholicism has decreased in France,
shrinking from 30,000,000 to about 5,000,000 followers
in thirty years,

Within two years there was an enormous growth
of the anti-clerical feeling, especially against the Jesuits.
They, and the great majority of the religious orders, had
no legal right to existence in France. Only three or
four Congregations, of a philanthropic character, were
authorised by French law. Yet these useful bodies made
no progress, while the unauthorised Congregations held
property of the value of 400,000,000 francs. Jules Ferry
now became Minister of Education, and framed a law to
prevent any member of an unauthorised Society from
teaching. When the Catholic Senate rejected it, the
unauthorised Congregations were dissolved by decree
(1880). Once more the Jesuits were banished from
France, and 2904 members of the Society were added
to the number of exiles. In 1880 more than half the
Jesuits or 7400 Jesuits were excluded from their
respective countries.

As France was still overwhelmingly Catholic, the
successive Governments were unable to enforce the law,
and the Jesuits quietly returned to their work. It is
enough to say that during the next twenty years, until
France had become predominantly non-Catholic and
disposed to insist on their exclusion, the 2900 Jesuits
actually increased their number ; the property of the un-
authorised Congregations rose in value from 400,000,000
to 1,000,000,000 francs; the higher education was con-
trolled to a great extent by the Jesuits, whose pupils
passed largely into the army and navy. It is hardly

436 THE JESUITS

necessary to recall the successive blunders by which the
Jesuits (and other religious) brought on themselves the
sentence of expulsion in 1901. In 1886 Boulanger
became Minister of War and popular idol His Radical
friends soon distrusted him, and the Monarchists and
Catholics fanned the popular agitation to have him made
Dictator. In this case we have positive and sufficient
information of the complicity of the Jesuits. Count von
Hoensbroech, then a young Jesuit, heard from the lips
of Father du Lac, the most prominent of the French
Jesuits, that he had collected large sums of money for the
*' Deliverer of France " and the overthrow of the " dirty
and impious Republic." 1 We can hardly doubt that they
had been equally zealous for the Due de Chambord, and
were later as zealous for the cause of the Due d'Orleans.
Boulanger fled, to escape arrest, in 1889, and the
Republicans added to the reckoning against the Jesuits.
-In 1897-99 occurred the famous agitation for the retrial
of Dreyfus, and once more the Jesuits ranged themselves
on the losing side of tyranny and prejudice. By the end
of the century France had become overwhelmingly non-
Catholic, and was not disposed to tolerate further the
intrigues and wealth of bodies which had no legal exist-
ence in the country. The Jesuits, in particular, were a
menace to the Republic. The new century opened there-
fore with an anti-clerical campaign which is still fresh in
our memories. Waldeck- Rousseau passed his Associa-
tions' Bill in 1901, and the Jesuits now were once more
expelled. Combes and Rouvier completed the work in
subsequent years. There is, however, no very drastic
action taken against invading religious, and the Jesuits
frequent Paris as they do Berlin. The number of
members of the French Provinces of the Society has
risen to 307 1 (many of whom are on the foreign missions),

1 Fourteen Years > ii. 164,

THE LAST PHASE 437

and from comfortable homes in England (where we
have 226) and other countries, with their funds safely
invested, they await the day of recall. But the general
collapse of the Church in France makes it certain that
they will never be readmitted.

Apart from the Latin-American Republics, in con-
nection with which it would be tedious to enumerate the
various expulsions and recalls of the Jesuits, and Portugal
the Society has made great progress in other countries.
Of Portugal little need be said ; the situation is similar
to that in France. The Jesuits had no authorised
existence in the country, and, when Portugal was at
length enabled to assert its will (after the revolution of
1910), it sharply dismissed them. Here again the
country is predominantly non-Catholic, if we confine
our attention to voters, and the Jesuits are never likely
to return.

^Spain has become the refuge, and almost the lafct
hope in the Latin world, of the expatriated Jesuits. In
the corrupt and worthless reign of Isabella n. they had
been suffered to return to their posts and prosper.
Properly speaking, they have had no legal right to exist
in Spain since they were abolished by Christina in 1835.
The Concordat of 1852 stipulates for the admission of
the Qratorians and Vincentians and " one other" Congre-
gation ; but casuistic skill has interpreted this to mean
"one for each diocese," and all have been admitted.
The abominable rule of their patroness Isabella ended
in revolution in 1868 ; the frivolous Queen was deposed,
and the Jesuits shared the fate of her other strange
favourites. With the accession of Alfonso xn., however,
they returned to Spain, and obtained the wealth and
power which they enjoy to-day.

The secrecy of the Society emboldens its apologists
to make the most audacious denials of these constant

438 THE JESUITS

charges of wealth, power, and intrigue, but it constantly
happens that some confiscated document or disaffected
admirer betrays them. Such an instance may be quoted
in connection with the Spanish Jesuits. In 1896 a devout
Catholic, a former pupil and employee of the Jesuits,
Sefior Ceballos y Cruzada, quarrelled with and turned
against them. In the little work in which he expounds
his grievances (El Lnperio del Jesuitismd) he tells us
some interesting facts about their wealth and activity.
There is in Spain a vast Catholic Society known as the
Association of Fathers of Families, which is quite as
much concerned with sound politics as sound morals.
Sefior Ceballos shows how the Jesuits secretly use and
direct it for their political aims, and for thwarting rival
ecclesiastical bodies. As to their wealth, he says that
they have n colleges worth from 1,000,000 to 12,000,000
reales each, while their chief house at Loyola has
property of incalculable value. At his own college^ at
Deusto, there were about 300 pupils paying 1 500 pesetas
a year each ; in none of them is education gratuitous.
The schooling is very poor and antiquated, and few of
their scholars later rise to any distinction. It is curious
to know that these wealthy Jesuit institutions have
the British flag ready to be hoisted in case of revolution
(which they yearly expect).

There is, however, little need for proof of the wealth
and political influence of the Jesuits in Spain. In the
struggle which is proceeding between the reformers, of
all parties, and the supporters of the deeply corrupt
political system, the Jesuits use their whole strength as
educators, and intrigue far beyond their schools, in the
interest of corruption; and, true to their maxim of
educating and capturing the sons of the wealthier
classes, they have permitted the mass of the people to
remain at an appalling level of illiteracy. The great

THE LAST PHASE 439

majority of the men of Spain, in the large towns, hate
them intensely, and await with impatience the day when,
like their Portuguese neighbours, they will expel their
insidious enemies. A few years ago a drama entitled
Paternidad was put upon the stage of one of the chief
theatres at Barcelona, and received with the wildest
enthusiasm. It was written by a Catholic priest,
Segismondo Pey-Ordeix, and represented the Jesuits
of modern Spain as practising the most corrupt devices
known in the history of the Society. The sternly
critical works of the great Spanish writer, Perez Galdos,
are just as enthusiastically received at Madrid and in
all the cities, Spaniards watch with indignation the
concentration of exiled Jesuits on their territory. To
the exiled French communities of 1880 were added
the 147 Jesuits of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898,
and these are now reinforced by the Portuguese. They
now number 3859. In 1901, 1906, and recently, the
Liberals have attempted or threatened to deal with
them ; but there is too much collusion in the Cortes
between the opposing parties, and the Jesuits have too
strong an influence at the Palace : I am informed that
the present Queen has surrendered entirely to the
pressure of the Queen-m other and the Jesuits. Unless
the King has the courage to lighten the labouring vessel
of royalty by sacrificing the Jesuits, which would give
him immense popularity, Spain will, within ten years,
follow the example of Portugal.

Several of the South American Republics, and
Mexico, have already reached a state of permanent
triumph of the Liberal elements, and expelled the
Jesuits for ever. As this work proceeds with the
growth of education, it is natural to presume that they
will all in time exclude the Jesuits. Italy also will
return to its strict law, when the Government discovers

440 THE JESUITS

that the shrinking influence of the Papacy is no longer
a valuable ally against advanced schools. At
present the law is not enforced, and there are large
numbers of Jesuits in the country ; the Italian Province
numbers more than a thousand members. At Rome
they control the Gregorian University, the German and
Latin- American Colleges, the Biblical Institute, and
other papal establishments. Restrained in some
measure by Leo XIIL, they have recovered all their
influence at the Vatican under the present mediaeval
Pontiff, and they are amongst the most ardent
supporters of the reactionary policy with which he is
paralysing higher culture in the Church of Rome. The
higher secular clergy are little less anxious than the
Socialists and Freemasons to see them suppressed.
The same forces are at work against them in Belgium,
where they number 1200 (including foreign missionaries),
and Austria. A coalition of Liberals and Socialists in
Belgium would at any time put an end to the CathcTlic
power, as the anti-clerical voters are in the majority, and
the Jesuits would not long survive the change.

Yet one of the most singular features of the whole
singular story of the Jesuits is that they have increased
enormously during this half-century of afflictions. The
growth of the Society during the last hundred years is
seen in the following table :

^838 . 3,067 members.

1844 . 4,133

1853 , 5,209

1861 . 7,144

1884 . 1 1, 840 members.
1906 . 15,661
1912 . 16,545!

Of the present members, 3531 are on the foreign
missions ; and the reopening of these fields, under less

1 It must be borne in mind always that " members " does not necessarily
mean priests. Rather less than half are priests ; the remainder are
scholastics or lay coadjutors.

THE LAST PHASE 441

adventurous conditions, accounts for much of the growth
of the Society. The advance of the United States and
the British Colonies, with their large percentage of Irish
and Italian immigrants, accounts for a good deal of
the remainder. The Jesuits of the United States now
number 2300; and there are 373 in Canada and 100 in
Australasia. It is most probable that the future of
the Jesuits lies in the Protestant countries. Probably
the Jesuits will, in twenty years' time, be excluded from
every " Catholic" kingdom, yet number more than
20,000.

Their progess and activity in England may be more
closely described in illustration of this tendency. We
saw how the survivors of the old English mission joined
with the Fathers of the Faith in 1814 and 1815 tore-
establish the Society. They then numbered 73, and
had several chapels, besides the estate and house at
Stonyhurst. They advanced with the general body of
the* Roman Catholics, especially when the stronger
current of immigration from Ireland began in the forties.
The secular clergy were still very much opposed to them,
however, and Dr. Griffiths, the Vicar Apostolic of the
London district, refused to allow them to set up a com-
munity in the metropolis. After years of pressure at
Rome they secured the interest of Dr. (later Cardinal)
Wiseman, and were admitted to settle in Farm St., among
the wealthiest Catholics. When Wiseman succeeded
Griffiths in 1847 (and the hierarchy was established in
1850) they were cordially patronised and made greater
progress. They then numbered 554. With the acces-
sion of Manning the patronage ceased and their work
was restricted. They were eager to found schools for
middle-class boys ; but Manning sternly refused, In
defiance of the favour of Pius ix., and they were com-
pelled to establish their schools at such places as Beau-

442 THE JESUITS

mont and Wimbledon, outside his jurisdiction. When
they pressed for a school of higher studies, a kind of
Catholic university, Manning hastily founded his ill-
fated school at Kensington and refused their co-opera-
tion, with the natural result that the weathier Catholics,
under the influence of the Jesuits, would not support
it Bishop Vaughan of Salford was not much more
indulgent to them.

The secret of Manning's opposition is said by his
biographer to have been his wish to raise the dignity of
the secular priesthood, which Catholics are too apt to
think lower than the monastic state. This was, how-
ever, not merely a mystic theory on the part of the
Cardinal. He despised the comparative indolence and
petty hypocrisies of the religious orders generally, and
had a particular dislike of the intrigue, the secrecy, the
insubordination, and the pursuit of wealthy people, of
the Jesuits, 1 Manning refused sacerdotal faculties to
his nephew, Father Anderdon, and forced the JesuitS to
surrender a site in West London for which they had
paid more than ^30,000. Cardinal Vaughan, however,
relaxed his coercive policy when he was transferred to
Westminster.

The English Province has now (1912) 729 members,
and about fifty churches ; though the Catholic Directory
gives only 285 English Jesuit priests, and 226 French
refugees, in this country. The feeling against them
amongst the secular clergy and the other religious Con-
gregations is almost as strong as ever. Their obvious
preference for the wealthier quarters of cities is sneer-

1 I am speaking here on what I heard, in clerical days, from men who
were intimate with Manning. PurcelPs Life ,is misleading. The author
intended to be candid, but the Jesuits and others made such threats, when it
became known what disclosures the book would contain, that he was com-
pelled to omit much. The suppression of truth has greatly injured its
historical value*

THE LAST PHASE 443

ingly discussed in clerical circles, and it is said that they
intrigue incessantly to draw the more comfortable
Catholics from other parishes. The poverty of their
literary and scholastic output, mainly, a number of
slight and superficial controversial works, more intent
on making small points than on substantial and accurate
erudition, and their remarkable failure to produce men
of distinction, are regarded as a grave reflection on their
body, in view of their wealth, numbers, and leisure. It
is not, however, believed that they indulge any other
intrigue than an amiable zeal among the Catholic laity
to add to their own comfort and prestige. 1

Returning, in conclusion, to the question at the J
beginning of this chapter, we find it impossible to give
a general answer and embrace all the existing Jesuits
in a formula. The Jesuits of Spain, with their political
machinations, their sordid legacy-hunting, and their
eagerness to support the Spanish Government in the
judicial murder of their enemies, are a very different
body from the Jesuits of England or Germany or the
United States. The Jesuits of Cuba and the Philippines
were, until 1898, little Different from the more parasitical
Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth or eighteenth
century. The modern age has affected the Jesuits much
as some ancient revolution in the climate of the earth
modified its living inhabitants. Where the old tropical
conditions more or less linger (say, in Chile or Peru) the
Jesuits are hardly changed; and we find the alteration
in exact proportion to the environment. There is no
change in the inner principles and ideals. " All for the
Glory of the Society," as Mgr. Talbot sardonically trans-
lated their Latin motto, is still the ruling principle ; the

1 There are in Count von Hoensbroech's book some scathing reflections
on the character and culture of the English Jesuits. The Count underwent
part of his Jesuit training in England,

444 THE JESUITS

Society remains the Esau of the Roman clerical world.
It still chiefly seeks the wealthy and powerful ; it is
the arch-enemy of progress and liberalism in Catholic
theology ; its scholarship is singularly undistinguished in
proportion to its resources ; x it embarks on political in-
trigue, even for the destruction of State-forms, whenever
its interest seems to require ; it is hated by a very large
proportion of the Catholic clergy and laity in every
country. Let a liberal Pope again come to power
and Modernism prevail, and it is not impossible that
Catholicism itself will again angrily suppress the per-
verse and irregular construction of the Spanish soldier-
diplomatist, and insist that religious ideals shall be
pursued only by scrupulously clean and unselfish
exertions.

1 Let me recall that I do not personally expect the Society to produce
anything but theologians, and of these it has produced many in the
nineteenth century. In controversial theology, however, the work of the
Jesuits is grossly unscholarly and casuistic ; truth seems to be a secondary
consideration. But it is so often claimed that the Jesuits are a learned body
in the more general sense, that it is necessary to invite reflection on their
record. Of the fifteen thousand living Jesuits, and their predecessors for a
century, who has won even secondary rank in letters, history, or philosophy ?
In science there are only Father Secchi, the single distinguished product of
their science-schools, and Father Wasmann, whose philosophy (apart from
his observations) is the laughing-stock of biology.

INDEX

Abyssinia, the Jesuits in, 52, 78, 140,

296.

Acosta, Father, 114, 115.
Acquaviva, General, 106-140.
Adorno, Father, 96,
Aiguillon, the Due d', 350.
Alberoni, Cardinal, 270, 271.
Alcalh,, the Jesuits at, 10, 42, 44,

85.

Alessandrini, Cardinal, 84, 87.
Alexander i., 377, 37B, 380, 381.
Allen, Cardinal, 144, 152.
Almeida, Father, 136.
Alphonso VL, 256-7.

xn., 437-

Alva, Duke of, 88, 91.
Anderledy, General, 434,
Anna, Queen, 266, 297.
Annat, Father, 238.
Ant<8ielli, Cardinal, 427.
Aranda, 275, 276, 277.
Araojs, Father, 38, 42, 72, 84.
Armada, the, 152, 153.
Arnauld, Angelique, 222, 223, 236.
Antoine, 223, 225, 227, 231,

237, 243-

Arrowsmith, Father E., 199.
Aubeterre, Marquis d', 343-
Auger, Father, 89, 90, 99* 117, n 8.
Augustine the, 224, 230.
Austria, the Jesuits in, 92, 93, 101,

i32, 324-7, 36o, 417, 426, 428.
Azpeitia, 3, 17.
Azpuru, Mgr., 343-

Banez, 135.
Barricre, 123.
Barry, Mme du, 350.
Bathori, Stephen, 101, 131.
Bavaria, the Jesuits in, 327, 3283
Bay, Michel de, 100, 13-
Bayle, 176, 238.

Bayonne, the Conference ot, 00.
Beaumont, Archbishop de, 360.
Beckx, General, 4*7> 428, 429-

Bedlpe, 210, 211.

Belgium, the Jesuits in, 48-9, 75,

91-2, loo, 128, 130, 180,421-2.
Bellarmine, Cardinal, 100, 113.
Benedict xiv., 262, 287, 295, 339.
Benislawski, Bishop, 373.
Bermudez, Father, 271, 272.
Bernis, Cardinal, 343, 344, 346, 350.
B6rulle, Cardinal de, 177, 178.
Bismarck, 432, 433.
Blackwell, G., 158, 159.
Bobadilla, 14, 20, 40, 49, 50, 56-8,

94, 106.

Bodler, Father, 316.
Borgia, Francis, 43, 71-2, 80-94.
Borromeo, Charles, 67, 68, 69,

96-9.

Frederic, 69.
Bosgrave, Father, 149.
Bossuet, 236, 241.
Boulanger, General, and the Jesuits,

436.

Bourbon, Cardinal de, 88, 99.
Bourg Fontaine, the Plot of, 230.
Brazil, the Jesuits in, 52, 78, 104,

139, 304.

Briant, Father, 151.
Britto, Father, 291.
Broglie, Abb6 Count de, 382, 413.
Brouet, Paschase, 16, 20, 36, 41, 47,

58.

Buckingham, Countess of, 199.
Burnet, 38, 39.
Bzrozowski, General, 378, 381.

California, the Jesuits in, 308.
Camara, Gonzales da, 70, 71, 86.
Campion, Father E., 143? i44-9j 15-.
Campmuller, Father, 351.
Canada, the Jesuits in, 193? 38~9-
Canisius, Peter, 49, 50, 75, 92.
Cano, Melchior, 42, 43.
Caraffa, Cardinal, 17, 53-
Caravita, Father, 383.
Cardenas, Bishop, 299-302.

445

446

THE JESUITS

Carlists, the, and the Jesuits 408, 409,

426.

Carroll, John, 414.
Catesby, 157, 159, 160, 161-4.
Catherine de Medici, 73? 74? 88-91.
Catherine of Portugal, 71, 86.
Catherine the Great and the Jesuits,

370-4.

Catholic League, the, 117, n8, 119.
Caussin, Father, 176.
Chambord, the Due de, 435.
Charles L, 201, 202.

II,, 205, 206, 209, 212, 268. '

m., 274-7, 349, 351.

iv., of Lorraine, 179.

x.. 402-4.
Charles Albert, 393.

Felix, 393.
Chastel, Jean, 123.
Chateaubriand, 234.
Cheminot, Father, 179, 180.
China, the Jesuits in, 78, 104, 138-40.

190-1, 281-8, 423-
" Chinese Rites," the, 281-8.
Choir, 29, 31.
Choiseul, 348, 349, 350.
Christina of Spain, 408, 409.
Christina of Sweden, 312-4.
Cisneros, 8.

Cistercians, the, and the Jesuits, 187.

Civilta, Cattolica, the, 427.

Clarke, Father, 272,

Claver, Father, 297.

Clavius, Father, 107, 133.

Clement vm., 114, 115, 155.

XL, 284, 286, 339.

xii., 295.

XIIL, 262, 264, 277, 339,

340, 342.
xiv., 345, 346, 347, 348, 350,

352-7, 358, 3^8.
Cle*ment, Jacques, 119, 126.
Clenock, Dr., 144.
Clermont College, the, 75.
Cochin China, the Jesuits in, 289-90.
Cock, Archbishop, 322.
Codacio, 21, 25.
Codde, Archbishop, 321-2.
Codure, 16, 20, 36.
Cogardan, 58, 73-
Coimbra, the Jesuits at, 46, 70.
Coleman, 208, 209, 211.
Colleges, 31.

Colmar, the Jesuit college at, 331.
Cologne, the Jesuits at, 49, 361.
Conde", 73, 74-

Congo, the Jesuits in the, 52, 78, 296.
Congregation of the Holy Virgin, 398,

402. -'*-$>

Congregation of the Sacred Heart,

382, 384.

Consalvi, Cardinal, 391, 392.
Constitutions, the Jesuit, 24, 28-31,

59-

Contarini, Cardinal, 24, 25.

Contzen, Adam, 216.

Copts, Mission to the, 296.

Cordara, Father, 168, 274, 347.

Coster, Father, 129.

Coton, Father, 125, 127, 128, 178.

Cottam, Father, 149, 150.

Coxe, 269, 273, 275.

Cracow, the Jesuits at, 185.

Cre'tineau-Joly, vi, 4, 23, 38, 50, 56,
69, 77, 85, 96, 98, 120, 165, 168,
171, 178, 183, 215, 225, 228, 238,
285, 305, 344, 349, 353, 3^o, 373,
391, 402, 405.

Crichton, Father, 64, 149, 151.

Cromwell and the Jesuits, 203, 204.

D'Alembert, 351, 365, 366.
Damiens, 248.
D'Andilly, Arnauld, 225.
Darbyshire, Thomas, 142.
Daubentpn, Father, 268, 269, 2i.
Declaration of the Gallican Clergy,

241, 250.

Democracy, the Jesuits and, 400, 401.
Despotism of the Jesuit general, 335.
Destelbergen, 421.
Dillingen, the University of, 76, 92.
" Doleful even-song," the, 200.
Dominus ac Redemptor Noster^ the

bull, 353-8.
Douai fraud, the, 243,
Drury, Father, 200.
Dubois, Cardinal, 246.

Edict of Nantes, Revocation of the,

242, 321.

" Edifying Letters," the, 279, 299,
Eguia, 17.

Elizabeth, Queen, 145, 148, 152,
Emerson, Ralph, 144, 151.
England, the Jesuits in, 38-9, 64,

142-66, 198-219, 412-4^441-3.
Epernon, the Due d', 127.
Espartero, 409.

Falk, Dr., 432.
Farnese, Cardinal A., 33.

INDEX

447

Farnese, Elizabeth, 270, 271.
Fathers of the Faith, 383-5, 397, 399,

406.
Favre, Peter, 13, 20, 22, 25, 32, 43,

46.

Fawkes, Guy, 158.

Ferdinand IL, 182, 186, 324, 325, 417.
iv., (Naples), 342, 378.
vi., 272-4, 302.
VIL, 389, 406-8.
Fernandez, Father, 254-6.
Ferry, Jules, 435.
Figueroa, Gomez de, 39.
Florida Blanca, Count, 350.
Fortis, General, 392, 394, 400.
Fourth vow, the, 24, 29.
France, the Jesuits in, 47-8, 72-5,

87-91,99, H7-28, 174-9, 220-252,

397-407, 434-7-
Franco, Father, 254.
Frederic Agustus L, 317, 318.
Frederic the Great and the Jesuits,

351, 364-70.
Freiburg, the Jesuits at, 361, 418,

420.
Franzelin, Father, 434.

Gaeta, flight of the Pope to, 427,

Galitzin, Prince, 379, 380, 381.

Galftcia, the Jesuits in, 417.

Gambar, Father, 66.

Gambetta, 434.

Ganga, Cardinal della, 391, 392, 393,

Garibaldi, 428.

Garnet, Father H., 152, 153, 157, 158 3

159-64,

General, authority of the Jesuit, 30.
Gerard, Father J., 153, 158.
Gerbillon, Father, 283.
Germany, the Jesuits in, 49, 50, 75-6.

92, 101, 130-3, 184-7, 364-7:

416-7, 431-4.
Gesu, the, 33, 107.
Gilbert, George, 146, 147-
Gioberti, 397.
Giussano, 96, 97.
Godfrey, Sir E. Berry, 209-12.
Gonzalez, General, 335-6, 339.
Good, William, 64, 103, 143.
Gouda, Nicholas, 64, 65.
Greenway, Father, 154, 157, 162-4.
Gregorian Calendar, the, 107, 133.
Gregory xin., 94, 95, 107.

xvi., 353, 394, 395, 39&
Griffiths, Dr., 441.
Gruber, Father, 374* 376, 377> 37&

}uret, Father, 123, 124.
juerrero. Archbishop, 289.
juiddiccioni, Cardinal, 24, 25, 26.
juignard, Father, 124.
Mse, the Due de, 117, 118.
Gunpowder Plot, the, 158-64.

ftagenbrunn, 382, 384.

Eiay, Father Edmund, 64, 118, 142,

ftenriquez, Leo, 70.

Henry in., 117-9.

iv. 5 117, 119, 121, 122-5.
Fernandez, Father, 109.
cley wood, Father, 149, 151.
Hoensbroech, Count von, 120, 433,

436, 443-
Holland, the Jesuits in, 1 28-30, 180-1,

320-3, 422.

Holt, Father, 149, 151,154.
Hozes, 17, 20.
Hume, Major, 266, 408.
Hungary, the Jesuits in, 330-1, 417.

Ignatius, St., birth of, i.

at Barcelona, 9.

canonisation of, 169.

and Cardinal Pole, 38,

39-
character of, 5, 27, 28,

33, 34, 53-

conversion of, 4, 6.

daily life of, 34, 35.

death of, 54.

diplomacy of, 28, 45.

early disciples of, 9, 10,

n, 14-

early morals of, 5.

election of, 32,

founds his Society, 15.

and the Inquisition, 10,

n, 22, 40.

at London, 12.

at Manresa, 7? 8.

in Palestine, 9.

at Paris, 11-16.

at Rome, 9, 20-35.

secrecy of, 14, 16, 28, 43,

at Venice, 9, 17.

at Vicenza, 19.

and women, 21.

wounding of, 2.

Imago Primi Saculi, the, 180.
Immaculate Conception, the, 100.
In C&na Domini, the bull, 348.
India, the Jesuits in, 51, 77-&, *o3-4i
188-90, 291-5, 422-$.

44$

THE JESUITS

Infallibility, papal, and the Jesuits,

429.

Innocent x., 305, 307, 3 8 -
xi., 240, 241,336.
XIIL, 287.
Inquisition, Jesuits and the, 10, u,

22,40,45, 110,258.
Interim^ the, 50.

Ireland, the Jesuits in, 35-7, 64, 149-
Italy, the Jesuits in, 40-2, 65-76, 93-4,

96-9, 169-70, 334-60, 383-9, 390-7,

426-31.

James I., 157,198, 199-
n., 206, 211, 213-8.
v., 35, 36.
Jansen, Bishop, "221, 222, 223, 224,

229.

Jansenists, character of the, 225-6.
Japan, the Jesuits in, 51, 78, 136-8,

191, 280.

Jessopp, Dr., 143, 153.
Jesuits, the, and the Papacy, 24, 35,
50, 57, 60, 61, 82-4, 95,
110-4,240,277, 285, 286-8,
289, 295, 307, 339, 353-63,
367, 371-3, 412.

casuistry of the, 43, 61, 75,
81, 100, 119, 129, 136, 179,
183, 205, 232-4, 280, 281,
284-95, 3i6, 319, 335-7 ;
411.

and the Catholic clergy, 39,
44, 85, 97, no, 154, 177,
178, 181,201,202,237,244,
283,285,289,290,299-302,
305-8, 321-2, 323,442, 443-
and church -dignities, 44, 45,
93, 215, 254, 267, 272, 330.
commerce of the, 52, 8 1, 137,
172, 192-3,202,248-9, 255,
269, 283, 288, 290, 294,
298-9, 307, 308, 309, 319

328,33i,339,373-
learning of the, 140-1, 196,

281, 326-7, 366, 395-

morality of the, 46, 65, 66
68, 69, 109, no, 171, 177
226, 238, 246, 272, 274, 280

282, 285, 289, 290, 300-2
306,327,329,351,359,362.

and national decay, 314-5-
obedience of the, 58, 72, 1 10,

169, 336-7-

political activity of the, 70, 71,

86-7,89, 103, 117-21, 134,

149, 153-7, 176, 182, 203,
215, 256-7, 267-72, 316,
317,325,328,330,376,436,
438.

Jesuits, quarrels of the, 58-9, 72, 106,
107,110, 114-7,167,336-7,
362, 391-2.

untruthfulness of the, 75, 102,
153-4, 157, 161, 164, 171,
179, 1 80, 186-7, 188-9,
229, 230, 240, 243, 260,
272,273,291,292,305,316,
339, 349, 353-4, 360, 368,
372, 373, 38o, 434-
wealth of the, 41, 81, 85, 86,
92, 109, 122, 132, 136, 1 86,

269, 283, 290, 294, 298,
304, 307, 325, 326, 328,
331, 362, 436, 438.

John in., 45, 59-

iv., 254, 255.

,, vi., 389, 409.
John Casimir, 316.
Jones, Dom, 202.
Joseph II. (Austria), 345, 350.
Joseph of Portugal, 259, 260, 261-5,
Jouvency, Father, 116, 245.
Julius in., 53.
July Revolution, the, 394, 404.

Kaempfer, 138.
Kang Hi, 282, 287.
Kaunitz, Count, 344, 350.
Keene, Sir B., 273.
Kelly, Father, 415.
King, Thomas, 64.
Kulturkampf, the, 433.

La Chaise, Father, 208, 238, 243.
Lainez, Diego, 14, 20, 22, 25, 41,

49, 53, 56-65, 72, 76-9.
Lammennais, Abbe' de, 400, 401.
Lamormaini, Father, 186, 324, 325,
Lang, K. von, 325.
Lavalette, bankruptcy of, 248-9,

251.

Law, T., 143, 154.
Le Jay, 16, 20, 49-
Leo XIL, 393.

Letellier, Father, 243, 244, 245.
Leu, 419, 420.
Lippomani, 41.

Lisbon, the earthquake at, 261.
Louis Xlll., 174, 176, 183.

xiv., 206, 207, 208, 236, 238,
239, 242, 245.

INDEX

449

Louis xv., 247, 248, 251.

xvni., 389, 398.
Louis Philippe, 402, 403, 404.
Louvain, the Jesuits at, 48, 75, 100.

130.

Loyola, the house at, i, 2, 3, 16.
Lucerne, the Jesuits at, 360, 419-20.
Luisa, Queen, 254, 255, 270.
Luynes, Cardinal, 343.

Macedo, Father, 313.
Maggio, Father, 124.
Maintenon, Mme de, 242.
Maistre, Joseph de, 377, 379.
Malabar Rites, the, 293-4.
Malagrida, Father, 265.
Maldonat, Father, 100.
Malta, Jesuits expelled from, 170,

342,

Malvezzi, Cardinal, 352.
Manares, Oliver, 88, 89, 91, 95, 106.
Manning, Cardinal, 426, 441, 442.
Manresa, 7, 8.
Marcenius, Father, no.
Margaret of Parma, 76.
Maria Theresa, 326, 344, 350, 351,

360.
Mariana, Father, 108, 114, 119, 120,

126.
Marianne, Archduchess, 382, 384,

38.5.

Marie Isabelle, Queen, 256, 257.

Marie de Medici, 125, 128, 175,

Mary Queen of Scots and the
Jesuits, 64, 142, 151, 153.

Maryland, the Jesuits in, 218, 308.

Martignac, 402, 403.

Martin ? Commandant, 280, 294.

Martini, the Jesuit Mandarin, 283.

Matthieu, Father Claude, 117.

Maurice of Nassau, 128.

May Laws, the, 432, 434.

Mayenne, the Due de, 121.

Mazzarino, Father, 97.

Mendoza, 148, 149, 151, 344.

Mental reservation (see Untruthful-
ness of the Jesuits), 164.

Mercurian, General, 94-104.

Metternich, 417.

Mexico, the Jesuits in, 139, 305-8,
416.

Mezzabarba, Mgr,, 286, 287.

Michael Angelo, 33,

Michelet, 405.

Miguel, King, 410, 411.

Milan, the Jesuits at, 67-70, 96-9.
29

Missions, the Jesuit, 51-2, 77, 103-4,
135-40, 187-94, 279-3io 5 422-3.

Molinism, 135.

Monita Privata, the, 184,

Monod, Father, 176.

Montepulciano, the Jesuits expelled
from, 65.

Montespan, Mme de, 236, 238.

Montmartre, the vows on, 15.

Montserrat, 6.

Morality, Catholic, in the seventeenth
century, 49.

More, Father, 143.

Miiller, H., 8.

Naples, the Jesuits at, 66.

Jesuits expelled from, 342.
Napoleon and the Jesuits, 376.
Natalis, Father, 56, 72.
Navarro, 275.
Neale, Bishop, 414.
Neercassel, Archbishop, 321.
Netteryille, Father, 203, 204.
Nicolai, Father, 102, 103.
Nicolini, 46.

Nidhard, Father, 267, 268.
Noailles, Cardinal, 244, 245, 246,
Nobili, Robert de, 188-90.
Nouet, Father, 226.

Gates, Titus, 207, 209, 211.
Obedience, Jesuit [see Jesuits], 29,

34-.

Ogilvie, Father, 149.
Oldcorne, Father E., 153, 164.
Oliva, General, 257, 336.
Oratorians, the, 177-8.
Orlandini, 25, 37, 38.
Orsini, Princess, 268, 269, 270.
Ortiz, 1 8, 21, 25.
Otho, Cardinal, 62.

Paccanari, 383-5-

Paccanarists, the, 383-5, 397, 398,

402.

Pacheco, Cardinal, 59.
Palafox, Bishop, 172, 274, 305-8, 351.
Palermo, the Jesuits at, 93.
Palmio, Father, 95.
Pamiers, Bishop of, 237, 240.
Panne, Peter, 128, 129.
Panzani, 201, 202, 203.
Paraquay, the Jesuits in, 140, 191-3,

260, 273, 297~34'
Pardo, Archbishop, 289.
Pariahs, Jesuit, 293.

450

Parsons, Father Robert, 112, 143-

53, 155-7* l6 5-
Pascal, Blaise, 231-5.
Pasquier, 86.
Paul L, 374, 376.

IIL, 18, 20, 23, 24, 53.

iv., 53, 57, 58, 60, 62.
Pedro L, 256, 257.

THE JESUITS

Percy, Father, 199.

Persia, Jesuits penetrate, 296.

Petre, Father E., 214, 215, 216.

Petrucci, Father, 390, 39 1 , 39 2 -

Phaulcon, 291.

Philip II., 96, no, 121, 152, 153-

iv., 266.

v.,268, 270, 271.
Philippines, the Jesuits in the, 288-9
Piazza Margana, house in the, 22, 23

33-
Piedmont, the Jesuits in, 388, 393.

Pigenat, Fr. Odon, 118.
Puis iv., 63, 70, 82.

" vi., 369, 372, 373, 374, 382, 383

VIL, 375, 376, 386, 387, 392.

ix., 396, 397, 426, 427-
Poissy, colloquy at, 74-
Polanco, 38,94 3 95- Q

Poland, the Jesuits in, 101, 131, 1^5,

314-20, 361, 370-1.
Pole, Cardinal, 38, 39.
Polignac, 404.
Pollock, J., 208, 209, 211.
Polotzk, College at, 377, 378, 380.
Pombal, Marquis de, 259-65.
Pompadour, Mme de, 247.
Popish Plot, the, 207, 208, 209-12.
Port Royal, 222-4,229, 231, 236,237,

243-
Portugal, the Jesuits in, 45-7, 7-*,

86-7, 174, 254-65, 409-11, 437-
Possevin, Father, 87, 88, 90, 103, 122,

131, 132.
Postel, 48.
Privileges of the Jesuits, 31, 48,

63.

Probabilism, 235 (note), 336-7*
Professed houses, 31.
Provincial Letter^ the, 231-5.
Prussia, the Jesuits in, 364-70.
Purgatory, Jesuit view of, 100*
Puritans, the, and the Jesuits, 203.
Puteo, Cardinal, 61.

Quesnel, 244, 245,

Rabago, Father, 272, 273, 303.
Ratio Studiorum^ the, 140, 395-
Ravaillac, 125, 126.
Ravignan, Father de, 404, 405
Reductions, the, 192, 193, 297~9-
Reformation, the, i, 16, 20.

legale controversy, the, 239-42.

legicide, Jesuit doctrine of, 120,
126.

Rhodes, Father de, 289.

Ribadeneira, Father, 33, 38, 39, 4

75, ^9-

Ribera, Father, 68.
Ricci, Father, 138, 139-
Ricci, General, 251, 262, 275, 339,

340, 34i, 343, 345, 357, 359-
Richelieu, 174, *75, 176, 177, I 8 3,

224.

Ripperda", 271,272.
Robinet, Father, 269, 270, 271*
Rodriguez, Simon, 14, 20, 25, 45, 4&

Rohan, Anne de, 224, 225.

Rome, Jesuits expelled from, 43,

440.
Roothaan, General, 294, 400, 45>

406.

Rossi, Count, 396, 4o6. .
Royal confessor, instructions to, 324.
Rozaven, Father, 391, 392. *
Russia, the Jesuits in, 370-81.

Sacchini, Father, 47, 55, 57, 59>6i,

65. ,

Saint Simon, 244, 245, 269.
Salamanca, the Jesuits at, 11, 42.
Saldanha, Cardinal, 262, 264.
Salerno, Father, 330.
Salmeron, Alfonso, 14, 20, 36, 37,

41,49,67,94. .
Sammier, Fr. Henri, 118.
Saniassi, the Jesuit, 188-90, 291-2.
Saragossa, the Jesuits at, 44.
Sasbold, Archbishop, 181.
Savclli, Cardinal, 68.
Saxony, the Jesuits in, 329.
Schall, Adam, 190, 281-2.
Schoppe, Caspar, 69.
Scotland, the Jesuits in, 35-7, 64, oj,

142, 149-
Sebastian I., 87.
Secular education, the Dutch clergy

and, 422.

Sens, the Archbishop of, 237.
Seville, Jesuit bankruptcy at, 171-4-
Siam, the Jesuits in, 290-1.

INDEX

451

Sicily, the Jesuits in, 338, 342, 378,

1 386, 395,428.
Sigismtmd m., 132.
Simpson, R., 143, 148.
Sixtus v., 107, 110-3, 121.
Sobieski, 317.

Socialism and the Jesuits, 433.
Society of the Faith of Jesus, 383-5.
Society of Jesus, establishment of

the, 15, 22, 25.
Society of Jesus, origin of the name,

20.

Sollicitudo, the bull, 387.
Sonderbund, the, 420.
Southwell, Father R., 152, 153.
Spain, the Jesuits in, 42-5, 71-2, 84-

6, 96, 107-12, 170-4, 265-78, 389,

406-9,437-9.

Spiritual Coadjutors, 29, 30.
" Spiritual Exercises," the, 7.
Spying in Jesuit houses, 30,
Sta. Maria della Strada, 33.
St. Bartholomew Massacre, the, 89-

91-
St Cyran, the Abbe' de, 221, 222,

224, 225, 227.
St. Omer, the college of, 145, 209,

219.
St. Petersburg, the Jesuits at, 377-

o 9 :
Stemmetz, 92.

Stonyhurst, 412, 413.
Sunderland, the Earl of, 215, 216.
Suppression of the Society, 353-63.
Sweden, the Jesuits in, 101-3, 3 I2 -4-
Switzerland, the Jesuits in, 321-2,
360-1, 418-20.

.Taicosama, 137, 138.
Talbot, Mgr., 443-
Talleyrand, 398.
Taly, the, 293.
Tamburini, General, 339-
Taunton, E. L., 143, 201, 203.
Tavora plot, the, 263.
Teatrojesuitico., the, 171.
Theatine order, the, 18.
Theiner, Father, 327, 342, 344, 353,

396.

Thibet, Jesuits penetrate, 295.
Thirty Years' War, the, 182-3, 325.
Thompson, Francis, 13, 37.
Thorn, Edward, 92.
Thorn, the massacre of, 318-20.
Thorpe, Father, 412.
Tilly, the Jesuits and, 182, 183.

Toledo, Cardinal, 101, 115, 122.
Tonge, Dr., 209.
Torres, Miguel de, 70, 71.
Tournon, Cardinal de, 284, 285, 294.
Transylvania, the Jesuits in, 131,

132.

Trent, the Council of, 49, 50, 77.
Trevisani, Archbishop, 66.
Turks, Ignatius and the, 4, 7, 9, 15,

18.

Unigenittts^ the bull, 244, ^245, 246.
United States, the Jesuits in the,

414-6, 441.
Urban VIIL, 224, 227.

Valais, the Jesuits in, 418, 419.
Valignani, Father, 137.
Valliere, Mile de la, 236, 238.
Valtellina, the Jesuits expelled from

the, 65.

Vatican Council, the, 429.
Venice, the Jesuits at, 18, 41-2, 66,

133-4, 337-8.
Verbiest, Father, 282.
Vermi, Onufrio de, 169.
Victor Emmanuel I., 388.

II., 428, 429.

Vieira, Father, 255, 256, 304.
Villalon, Friar, 299, 300.
Villanueva, Father, 42.
Villele, 402.

Vincent de Paul, St., 178, 226.
Vitelleschi, Mutio, 167, 168, 179.
Viterbo, the prophetess of, 359.
Vota, Father, 317, 318.
Vows, the Jesuit, 24, 30, 82.
Vrilliere, Father de la, 360.

Waldeck- Rousseau, 436.
Walpole, Father H., 154.
Warner, Father, 211, 215.
Warsevicz, Father, 102, 103.
Weld, Thomas, 412, 413.
Weston, Father, 151, 152, 153, 154.
Whitbread, Father, 210.
William of Orange, 129.
Wisbeach, the quarrels at, 154-6.
Wiseman, Cardinal, 441.
Woulfe, David, 64.

Xavier, Francis, 13, 16, 20, 25, 45

Zahorowski^Jerome, 184.
Zapata, 34, 36.

Printed ly

MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED
Edinburgh

MR. EVELEIGH NASH'S
LIST OF NEW BOOKS

"MY PAST"

MR. EVELEIGH NASH has ac-
quired the 'world-rights of a sensational
autobiography written by a relative of
one of the reigning monarchs of Europe.
The memoirs, which are now in active
preparation , will be published under the
'above title during the London season , but^
owing to the terms of his agreement with
the personage in question^ Mr. Nash is
unable to gfye particulars at present.
The identity of the author and full details
regarding the book will be announced in
April.


Search: Advanced Search	UploadAnonymous User (login or join us)