Their missions and explorations.
It was originally proposed that the number of persons admitted to the order should not exceed sixty, but this limit was speedily removed, and before the death of Loyola over a thousand persons had joined the society. Under his successor the number was trebled, and it went on increasing for two centuries. The founder of the order had been, as we have seen, attracted to missionary work from the first, and the Jesuits rapidly spread not only over Europe, but throughout the whole world. Francis Xavier, one of Loyola's original little band, went to Hindustan, the Moluccas, and Japan. Brazil, Florida, Mexico, and Peru were soon fields of active missionary work at a time when Protestants scarcely dreamed as yet of carrying Christianity to the heathen. We owe to the Jesuits' reports much of our knowledge of the condition of America when white men first began to explore Canada and the Mississippi valley, for the followers of Loyola boldly penetrated into regions unknown to Europeans, and settled among the natives with the purpose of bringing the Gospel to them.[312]
Their fight against the Protestants.
Dedicated as they were to the service of the pope, the Jesuits early directed their energies against Protestantism. They sent their members into Germany and the Netherlands, and even made strenuous efforts to reclaim England. Their success was most apparent in southern Germany and Austria, where they became the confessors and confidential advisers of the rulers. They not only succeeded in checking the progress of Protestantism, but were able to reconquer for the pope districts in which the old faith had been abandoned.
Accusations brought against the Jesuits.
Protestants soon realized that the new order was their most powerful and dangerous enemy. Their apprehensions produced a bitter hatred which blinded them to the high purposes of the founders of the order and led them to attribute an evil purpose to every act of the Jesuits. The Jesuits' air of humility the Protestants declared to be mere hypocrisy under which they carried on their intrigues. The Jesuits' readiness to adjust themselves to circumstances and the variety of the tasks that they undertook seemed to their enemies a willingness to resort to any means in order to reach their ends. They were popularly supposed to justify the most deceitful and immoral measures on the ground that the result would be "for the greater glory of God." The very obedience of which the Jesuits said so much was viewed by the hostile Protestant as one of their worst offenses, for he believed that the members of the order were the blind tools of their superiors and that they would not hesitate even to commit a crime if so ordered.
Decline and abolition of the Jesuits, 1773.
Reëstablishment of the order, 1814.
Doubtless there have been many unscrupulous Jesuits and some wicked ones, and as time went on the order degenerated just as the earlier ones had done. In the eighteenth century it was accused of undertaking great commercial enterprises, and for this and other reasons lost the confidence of even the Catholics. The king of Portugal was the first to banish the Jesuits, and then France, where they had long been very unpopular with an influential party of the Catholics, expelled them in 1764. Convinced that the order could no longer serve any useful purpose, the pope abolished it in 1773. It was, however, restored in 1814, and now again has thousands of members.
