ultimate odium in which the Jesuits were held as
well as of their temporary successes, was their desire for speedy
results. [Sidenote: Efficiency] Every one has noticed the immense
versatility of the Jesuits and their superficiality. They produced
excellent scholars of a certain rank, men who could decipher Latin
inscriptions, observe the planets, publish libraries of historical
sources, of casuistry and apologetic, or write catechisms or epigrams.
They turned with equal facility to preaching to naked savages and to the
production of art for the most cultivated peoples in the world. And yet
they have rarely, if ever, produced a great scholar, a great scientist, a
great thinker, or even a great ascetic. They were not founded for such
purposes; they were founded to fight for the church and they did that
with extraordinary success.

[Sidenote: Failure]

But their very efficiency became, as pursued for its own sake it must
always become, soulless. In terms suggested by the Great War, the
Jesuits were the incarnation of religious militarism. To set up an ideal
of aggrandizement, to fill a body of men with a fanatical enthusiasm for
that ideal and then to provide an organization and discipline
marvellously adapted to conquest, that is what the Prussian schoolmaster
who {411} proverbially won Sadowa, and the Jesuits who beat back the
Reformation, have known how to do better than anyone else. Their methods
took account of everything except the conscience of mankind.

Moreover, there can be no doubt that in their eager pursuit of tangible
results they lowered the ethical standards of the church. Wishing to
open her doors as widely as possible to all men, and finding that they
could not make all men saints, they brought down the requirements for
admission to the average human level. One cannot take the denunciations
of Jesuitical "casuistry" and "probabilism" at their face value, but one
can find in Jesuit works on ethics, and in some of their early works,
very dangerous compromises with the world. [Sidenote: Jesuitical
compromises] One reads in their books how the bankrupt, without sinning
mortally, may defraud his creditors of his mortaged goods; how the
servant may be excused for pilfering from his master; how a rich man may
pardonably deceive the tax-collector; how the adulteress may rightfully
deny her sin to her husband, even on oath.[1] Doubtless these are
extreme instances, but that they should have been p