of the Catholic
Church. In one sense a General of the Jesuits resembled the prime
minister of an absolute monarch,--say such a man as Richelieu, with
unfettered power in the cause of absolutism; and he ruled like
Richelieu, through his spies, making his subordinates tools and
instruments. The General appointed the presidents of colleges and of the
religious houses; he admitted or dismissed, dispensed or punished, at
his pleasure. There was no complaint; all obeyed his orders, and saw in
him the representative of Divine Providence. Complaint was sin;
resistance was ruin. It is hard for us to understand how any man could
be brought voluntarily to submit to such a despotism. But the novice
entering the order had to go through terrible discipline,--to be a
servant, anything; to live according to rigid rules, so that his spirit
was broken by mechanical duties. He had to learn all the virtues of a
slave before he could be fully enrolled in the Society. He was drilled
for years by spiritual sergeants more rigorously than a soldier in
Napoleon's army: hence the efficiency of the body; it was a spiritual
army of the highest disciplined troops. Loyola had been a soldier; he
knew what military discipline could do,--how impotent an army is without
it, what an awful power it is with discipline, and the severer the
better. The best soldier of a modern army is he who has become an
unconscious piece of machinery; and it was this unreflecting,
unconditional obedience which made the Society so efficient, and the
General himself, who controlled it, such an awful power for good or for
evil. I am only speaking of the organization, the machinery, the
_regime,_ of the Jesuits, not of their character, not of their virtues
or vices. This organization is to be spoken of as we speak of the
discipline of an army,--wise or unwise, as it reached its end. The
original aim of the Jesuits was the restoration of the Papal Church to
its ancient power; and for one hundred years, as I think, the
restoration of morals, higher education, greater zeal in preaching: in
short, a reformation within the Church. Jesuitism was, of course,
opposed to Protestantism; it hated the Protestants; it hated their
religious creed and their emancipating and progressive spirit; it hated
religious liberty.

I need not dwell on other things which made this order of monks so
successful,--not merely their virtues and their mechanism, but their
adaptation to the changing spirit of