ulture can be carried without risk of intellectual
emancipation. Enmity itself was compelled to own that, in the art of
managing and forming the tender mind, they had no equals. Meanwhile they
assiduously and successfully cultivated the eloquence of the pulpit.
With still greater assiduity and still greater success they applied
themselves to the ministry of the confessional. Throughout Catholic
Europe the secrets of every government and of almost every family of
note were in their keeping. They glided from one Protestant country
to another under innumerable disguises, as gay Cavaliers, as simple
rustics, as Puritan preachers. They wandered to countries which neither
mercantile avidity nor liberal curiosity had ever impelled any
stranger to explore. They were to be found in the garb of Mandarins,
superintending the observatory at Pekin. They were to be found, spade in
hand, teaching the rudiments of agriculture to the savages of Paraguay.
Yet, whatever might be their residence, whatever might be their
employment, their spirit was the same, entire devotion to the common
cause, implicit obedience to the central authority. None of them had
chosen his dwelling place or his vocation for himself. Whether the
Jesuit should live under the arctic circle or under the equator, whether
he should pass his life in arranging gems and collating manuscripts at
the Vatican or in persuading naked barbarians in the southern hemisphere
not to eat each other, were matters which he left with profound
submission to the decision of others. If he was wanted at Lima, he was
on the Atlantic in the next fleet. If he was wanted at Bagdad, he was
toiling through the desert with the next caravan. If his ministry was
needed in some country where his life was more insecure than that of a
wolf, where it was a crime to harbour him, where the heads and quarters
of his brethren, fixed in the public places, showed him what he had to
expect, he went without remonstrance or hesitation to his doom. Nor
is this heroic spirit yet extinct. When, in our own time, a new and
terrible pestilence passed round the globe, when, in some great cities,
fear had dissolved all the ties which hold society together, when the
secular clergy had deserted their flocks, when medical succour was
not to be purchased by gold, when the strongest natural affections
had yielded to the love of life, even then the Jesuit was found by the
pallet which bishop and curate, physician and nurse, fa