[252]. It is very sad to see Pascal reduced to the necessity of saluting the founder of the sect which he held up to the scorn of the world, as Saint Ignatius! Ignatius Loyola was a native of Spain, and born in 1491. At first a soldier of fortune, he was disabled from service by a wound in the leg at the siege of Pampeluna, and his brain having become heated by reading romances and legendary tales, he took it into his head to become the Don Quixote of the Virgin, and wage war against all heretics and infidels. By indomitable perseverance he succeeded in establishing the sect calling itself “the Society of Jesus.” This ignorant fanatic, who, in more enlightened times, would have been consigned to a mad-house, was beatified by one pope, and canonized, or put into the list of saints, by another! Jansenius, in his correspondence with St. Cyran, indignantly complains of pope Gregory XV. for having canonized Ignatius and Xavier. (Leydecker, Hist. Jansen. 23.)
[253]. This is rather a singular fact, and applies only to one of the Society’s generals, viz., Vitelleschi, who, in a circular letter, addressed, January 1617, to the Company, much to his own honor, strongly recommended a purer morality, and denounced probabilism. But, says Nicole, the Jesuits did not profit by his good advice. (Nicole, iv., p. 33.) It is true, however, that the Jesuits, during this century, had lost sight of the original design of their order, and of all the ascetic rules of their founders, Ignatius and Aquaviva. “The spirit which once animated them had fallen before the temptations of the world, and their sole endeavor now was to make themselves necessary to mankind, let the means be what they might.” (Ranke’s Hist. of the Popes, iii. 139.)
[254]. Ecclesiasticus (Apocrypha), ii. 12.
[255]. City of God, book i. ch. 28.
[256]. See Cujas, tit. dig. de just. et jur. ad l. 3.
[257]. L. 2, c. 9, n. 66, 72.
[258]. L. ii., c. 9, n. 74.
[259]. Treat. i., examp. 7, n. 44.
[260]. In casuistical divinity, a distinction is drawn between the internal and the external tribunal, or forum, as it is called. The internal tribunal, or the forum poli, is that of conscience or the judgment formed of actions according to the law of God. The external tribunal, or the forum soli, is that of human society, or the judgment of actions in the estimation of men, and according to civil law. (Voet. Disp. Theol., iv. 62.)
[261]. Part. 5, tr. 19, misc. 2, resol. 99.