LETTER V.
Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet.
Horace.
SIR;
I might spare myself the trouble of answering your fifth, concluding Letter, because I believe it will be read by few, and credited by none. You seem afraid of being called an alarmist. Good Sir, be easy. No man of common information, or of common sense, will catch the alarm of danger from your pretended conclusions. Your impotent cries of danger to church and state are like the cries of a madman, who should scream out "Fire, Fire," in the midst of a deluge[[116]]. Thus, even if your
pretended conclusions descended in a right order of logic from your premises, the slightest view of the present state of things would convince every thinking man of the inutility of taking precautions, where no danger can possibly exist. But what must every thinking man conclude, when he knows, that your miserable inferences descend from a mass of forgeries, calumnies, imputations equally groundless and malicious; when he traces them up to a string of gratuitous suppositions, wantonly assumed and totally devoid of proof? If he has looked into my four Letters, he has recoiled with disgust from that sink of ribaldry, inconsistency, contradiction, and falsehood, which provoked them; and he has said, that though Clericus has swept away only a part of the dirt, which you have collected, he has sufficiently showed, that the rest, which he has left untouched, is equally odious and noisome. In fact, upon a slight review of your audacious criminations, I cannot discover even one, which is supported by truth; no, not one, which I would not undertake to brand with the stigma of falsehood.
And what then can engage me to meddle with your final observations and inferences? Certainly not the apprehension, that men of sense and knowledge will ever acquiesce in them; but because they are all intended to feed some of the worst passions, that canker the human heart, to gratify disappointed anger, fretful jealousy, and revengeful spite. That these sour passions are apt to rankle in narrow hearts is not a novelty. I have caught them, in late years, venting themselves against your enemies the Jesuits, through newspapers and other prints, in tales nearly as absurd and fictitious, as was the alarming story in the reign of Charles II, of thirty thousand pilgrims and lay brothers, embodied at St. Andero, ready to invade old England under the conduct of the general of the Jesuits. Now your monstrous stories coming upon the back of these fables, must lead every man of sense to conclude, that not the consideration of public security, but the accomplishment of some private view must have prompted this wantonness of slander. But
supposing for an instant, that all and each of your random accusations of ancient Jesuits were as true, as all and each are undeniably false; allowing that your columns in the Times could arrest a reader, unacquainted with continental history, in a state of hesitation and doubt; yet he must at least say: "These bad men, like the ancient giants, have been exterminated, they have long since disappeared, we have survived their criminal practices, why is the alarm bell sounded in the present times?"—"But," cries Laicus, "there once was a body of English Jesuits, and, during the whole term of their existence, 'our fathers spent restless nights and uneasy days. Dr. Sherlocke, living under dread of popery and arbitrary power, could enjoy no repose, when every morning threatened to usher in the last dawn of England's liberty.' I trust this quotation will not be without its use[[117]]." "Yes, these English Jesuits laid upon us 'a yoke, which was too heavy for
our fathers to bear,' and the pope is again trying to fasten it upon our shoulders." &c.[[118]]
I allow it, Sir; there formerly existed a body of English Jesuits. It was violently crushed and annihilated more than forty years ago. I look in vain for the yoke, which they imposed upon our fathers: I have read something of the yoke, which they themselves bore. It is described in letters of blood, in the penal statutes of Elizabeth and the first James. During a full century, half the gibbets of England witnessed the unrelenting severity of persecution, which these injured men quietly and meekly endured. They were a body of catholic priests, always esteemed and cherished by English catholics; and, at every period of their existence, they counted in their society many members of the best and most ancient families among the British gentry. They risked their lives by treading on their native soil. They devoted themselves to
administer the comforts of religion in secret to their suffering brethren; and they then slunk back to their hiding holes in the hollows of walls and roofs of houses. They never possessed a single house, school, or chapel, in which they could recommend themselves to their countrymen, by the peaceable functions of their profession: they were never otherwise known to the British public than when, surprised by priest-catchers, they were dragged to jail, and from jail to the gallows. Thus lived the Jesuits, in this their free country, from the twenty-second year of Elizabeth to the thirtieth of Charles II. This is all the progress that they made, in a full century, towards their own aggrandizement, which, says Laicus, "is the main object of all their labours[[119]]."
When the scene of blood was finally closed, in 1680, by the execution of eight innocent Jesuits in one year, not to mention a dozen
others, who died in jail, many of them under sentence of death, the Jesuits still remained an inoffensive body of catholic missionary priests. Their object was to assist their catholic brethren; and, having obtained some foundations from the liberality of foreign potentates, they applied themselves to give to the expatriated youth of their own country the education, which the partiality of the laws denied them at home. In these pacific occupations they persevered, without experiencing any jealousy on the part of government, even during the two rebellions of 1715 and 1745; because, since the accession of the House of Brunswick, it has been a principle with our monarchs never to persecute any man for conscience, never to harass inoffensive subjects.
At the present day, that royal principle, with all its consequences, and they extend far, is widely diffused throughout the empire. Every man in it acknowledges the impossibility of converting the millions of his majesty's catholic subjects to any other assignable mode of faith;
and every thinking man must feel the importance and, at the present day, the necessity, of attaching these millions to the common cause of the empire, and to the cordial support of one common government. Sound policy will always forbear to sour and to fret subjects, by jealous suspicions and invidious distinctions. It will always incline wise rulers of states to provide, for their subjects, ministers of religion, who are firmly attached to their government, and who may feel that they have nothing to fear from it, while they do not provoke its sword. Such was the conduct of continental governments in past times; and they everywhere judged it prudent to intrust, in a great measure, the national education of their youth to the active order of Jesuits, who, at the same time, were preachers, and catechists, and confessors, and visitors of hospitals and prisons; and who always had in reserve a surplus of apostles, armed with a cross and a breviary, ready to fly to every point of the heavens, to the extremities of the globe, to create in the wilds of America and Asia new
empires for the God of the Gospel, new nations of subjects for France, Portugal, and Spain. The political services rendered by Jesuits to those crowns have often been acknowledged; yet, alas! how have they been requited? When the venerable missioners of the society of Jesuits were dragooned out of Portuguese and Spanish America, the loss of millions of Indians, whom they had civilized, nay, the loss of the territorial possession was loudly predicted to those misguided courts. The first part of the prediction has long since been fulfilled. All the power of France, Spain, and Portugal, could not replace the old tried missioners of Canada, California, Cinaloa, Mexico, Maragnon, Peru, Chili, and Paraguay. The Jesuits were destroyed; the civilized natives, deprived of their protectors, disbanded, and relapsed into barbarism.
Equally impotent and unavailing was all the mighty power of France, Spain, Portugal, and Austria to fill the void, left by the discarded Jesuits, in the quiet ministry of schools at home.
Cast a retrospect on the former state of Europe. There were, in all considerable towns, colleges of Jesuits, now, alas! struck to ruins, in which gratuitous education was given. They were temples, in which the language of religion hallowed the language of the Muses. They were seminaries where future senators, magistrates and officers, prelates, priests, and cenobites, &c., received their first, that is, the most important part of education. Not even an attempt was made to supply the room of the ejected instructors, excepting, perhaps, for form sake, in a few great cities; and here what a woful substitution! The Jesuits of Clermont college, in Paris, had, for two hundred years, quietly instructed and trained the flower of the French nobility, to religion, patriotism, and letters. Within a few years after the expulsion of the old masters, Clermont college vomited forth, from its precincts into France, Robespierre, and Camille des Moulins, and Tallien, and Noel, and Freron, and Chenier des Bois, and Porion, and De Pin, and other
sanguinary demagogues of that execrable period; names of monsters, now consigned to everlasting infamy. The game was, indeed, by this time, carried rather farther than the Pombals, the Choiseuls, the Arandas, and others, who had planned the ruin of the Jesuits, had either designed or foreseen; but the mound was thrown down, and how could the torrent be withstood?
What thinking man shall now wonder, that the much tried pontiff, Pius VII, having, during his captivity, seriously pondered the connexion of causes and effects, should wish to retrieve the ancient order of things, should even hasten to second the wishes and requests of his fellow sufferers—I mean the surviving princes and prelates, who so sorely rue the mistakes of their immediate predecessors? It is very remarkable, that the false policy of these latter was first discerned and publicly disapproved by two acute sovereigns, who were not of the Roman communion, the magnanimous Catherine of
Russia, and the far famed Frederic III, of Prussia. These sovereigns were not ignorant of the various artifices, which had distorted the good sense of the catholic princes. They knew how to elude and disappoint them, when they were practised upon themselves. The empress Catherine especially, in despite of Rome, Versailles, Lisbon, and Madrid, maintained, with a resolute and strong hand, the several houses of Jesuits, which she found in her new Polish dominions; she would not suffer even the smallest alteration to be made, in any of their statutes or practices. Her two successors have settled them in their capital, and in other parts of their empire; and at this day, the glorious Alexander, far from mistrusting those fathers, openly cherishes and favours them, at once as blameless ministers of the catholic religion, and as trusty servants of government, earnestly labouring to endear the new sceptre of the czars to the catholic Poles, lately united to their empire[[120]].
Most undoubtedly, next to the purity of religion, the best and dearest interest of the Jesuits always was, and always must be, public tranquillity, order, and subordination of ranks. In tumults and confusion, they must unavoidably be sacrificed. To favour the daring projects of civil and religious innovators, their body was devoted to destruction; and the extinction of it was presently followed by the universal uproar of the Gallic revolution. Hence their name is odious to Buonaparte. In his progress through Germany, he drove them from Ausburg, and Friburg, and other towns, where the magistrates and inhabitants had succeeded to preserve a small remnant of their body, though without hope of perpetuating it by succession. In 1805 the court of Naples, convinced of its past error, reinstated the Jesuits, to the universal joy of the capital; and immediately Napoleon seized
the kingdom, and dismissed them. Other princes have equally regretted the rash deed of their destruction. Even the emperor Joseph II once assured me in private conversation, that he much lamented the suppression of the order of the Jesuits. He repeatedly said, that, in his mother's time, in which it was accomplished, he was never consulted upon the measure, and that he would never have acceded to it.
Our country has happily escaped the horrors of modern revolution; but our country has had its alarms. To prevent the recurrence of them, it must surely be sound policy to trust, favour, and protect all those persons, who, from a motive of self-preservation, as well as of duty, will always employ their influence among the lower orders of society, to maintain peace and tranquillity in the several religious classes, which form the bulk of the people, however denominated. With regard to the numerous body of catholics, this line of conduct has been uniformly pursued by their Irish bishops, by the
English apostolic vicars, and by all the missionary priests, Jesuits, and other regulars, who have appeared among us: and, I add, in finishing, that, in this respect, they would all be co-operators and steady allies of the bishops and clergy of the establishment, who can have no greater interest, at the present day, than to preserve general tranquillity. Protestant and catholic prelates, with their respective dependants, all equally professing zeal for purity of doctrine, though differing in their tenets, would thus be friends usque ad aras, and general peace would be the precious fruits of their agreement. Thus we have often seen catholic and protestant legions, Austrians and British, arrayed under the same banners, and successfully pursuing their warfare against a common enemy. This matter is susceptible of extension, but Laicus would not understand it. I finish this Letter, as I ended the first, seriously advising him to meddle no more with this subject.
CLERICUS.