rmination to suppress Nature, to kill the man within
man, with his appetites, passions, heart, and blood, could only result in
a disastrous defeat, in which, indeed, the Church found herself on the
very eve of sinking; and it was the Jesuits who came to extricate her
from this peril and reinvigorate her by deciding that it was she who now
ought to go to the world, since the world seemed unwilling to go any
longer to her. All lay in that; you find the Jesuits declaring that one
can enter into arrangements with heaven; they bend and adjust themselves
to the customs, prejudices, and even vices of the times; they smile, all
condescension, cast rigourism aside, and practice the diplomacy of
amiability, ever ready to turn the most awful abominations "to the
greater glory of God." That is their motto, their battle-cry, and thence
springs the moral principle which many regard as their crime: that all
means are good to attain one's end, especially when that end is the
furtherance of the Deity's interests as represented by those of the
Church. And what overwhelming success attends the efforts of the Jesuits!
they swarm and before long cover the earth, on all sides becoming
uncontested masters. They shrive kings, they acquire immense wealth, they
display such victorious power of invasion that, however humbly they may
set foot in any country, they soon wholly possess it: souls, bodies,
power, and fortune alike falling to them. And they are particularly
zealous in founding schools, they show themselves to be incomparable
moulders of the human brain, well understanding that power always belongs
to the morrow, to the generations which are growing up and whose master
one must be if one desire to reign eternally. So great is their power,
based on the necessity of compromise with sin, that, on the morrow of the
Council of Trent, they transform the very spirit of Catholicism,
penetrate it, identify it with themselves and become the indispensable
soldiers of the papacy which lives by them and for them. And from that
moment Rome is theirs, Rome where their general so long commands, whence
so long go forth the directions for the obscure tactics which are blindly
followed by their innumerable army, whose skilful organisation covers the
globe as with an iron network hidden by the velvet of hands expert in
dealing gently with poor suffering humanity. But, after all, the most
prodigious feature is the stupefying vitality of the Jesuits who are
inc