It would be easy to think that these books are mere compilations and that they were probably scarcely more than small hand-books of the imperfect knowledge of the time. On the contrary, they are magnificent large volumes beautifully printed, finely illustrated, bibliographic treasures full of original observation. They are some of the best text-books ever issued. Father Kircher's originality is demonstrated by the fact that he is the perfecter of the projecting stereoscope or magic lantern, which he was led to invent in his desire to be able to make demonstrations to his classes. He also founded the Kircherian Museum, by which the teaching of anthropology and ethnology were greatly furthered through the curiosities sent to Rome by the Jesuit missionaries all over the world. His book, "On the Pest," is full of observations of great value and contains the first suggestions that infectious diseases are carried by insects. There was no subject that he touched that he did not illuminate.
Since that time there have been many distinguished Jesuit scientists, and they have continued their work down to our own day. At the present time, one of the best known of biologists in the special field of entomology is Father Wasmann, S.J., who has published some seven hundred papers on ants, their hosts and guests, and who, taking advantage of the help of his brethren all over the world, has described many hundreds of new species. How successful the Jesuits have been in their pursuit of science will perhaps be best realized from the fact that, while in Poggendorff's "Biographical Dictionary of Science" out of something less than nine thousand names nearly one thousand are Catholic clergymen, about five hundred of these are Jesuits. Their occupations first of all as priests often left them but little leisure [{220}] for scientific investigations, and yet they succeeded in stamping their names upon the history of science.
Two departments of modern science owe much to them. Father Secchi's wonderful inventions of instruments for meteorology were awarded prizes by the French Academy of Sciences, and other members of the order made successful investigations in the science. The Jesuits in the Philippines and the West Indies have done more to study out the conditions which precede cyclones and hurricanes so as to give warning with regard to them than any others. Their work was fully recognized by the United States Government. Many of the Jesuit colleges and universities throughout the world now have seismological observatories for the study of earthquakes, and undoubtedly their intimate connection and wide distribution will bring important details of information into this department of knowledge from which significant conclusions may be reached.
The work of the Jesuits has come to be better appreciated in English-speaking countries, where old religious prejudices hampered its proper recognition, until comparatively recent times. Macaulay, in his essay on Ranke's "History of the Popes," has summed up the achievements of the Jesuits in his own striking way. When he wrote the Jesuits were unknown personally in England, and so it is not surprising that there are passages in his panegyric that are full of the old prejudices which had accumulated in English history and by which the term Jesuitic has become a word of the worst reproach. Macaulay's wide reading, however, had brought to him a very extensive knowledge of the wonderful work accomplished by Loyola and his sons during the two centuries after their foundation. The passage is too well known to be more than referred to here.
His tribute to their successful work as missionaries all over the world, which undoubtedly set the fashion after which Protestant historians in English-speaking countries have come to acknowledge the marvellous work of the Jesuits among the savages, is not so well known: "The old world was not wide enough for this strange activity. The Jesuits invaded all the countries which the great marine discoveries of the preceding [{221}] age had laid open to European enterprise. In the depths of the Peruvian mines, at the marts of the African slave-caravans, on the shores of the Spice Islands, in the observatories of China, they were to be found. They made converts in regions which neither avarice nor curiosity had tempted any of their countrymen to enter, and preached and disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West understood a word."
No wonder that Parkman, who in some ways has helped to make us Americans understand them better but who in many ways is utterly lacking in proper sympathy for them probably because he failed to know them well personally, said of them:
"The Jesuit was, and is, everywhere--in the schoolroom, in the library, in the cabinets of princes and ministers, in the huts of savages, in the tropics, in the frozen north, in India, in China, in Japan, in Africa, in America; now as a Christian priest, now as a soldier, a mathematician, an astrologer, a Brahmin, a mandarin, under countless disguises, by a thousand arts, luring, persuading, or compelling souls into the fold of Rome."
He feels sure that there must be much to condemn in them, since they have been the subject of so much criticism and persecution. Like many another, he cannot bring himself to think that their founder's last wish for them, that they should be persecuted even as their Lord and Master was, should be the symbol of their fate. Where he knows them best, however, as in Canada, he has unmixed praise for them, though he declares that it is not for him to eulogize them, but to portray them as they were.
At once the keynote for the proper appreciation of the Jesuits and the summary of what Loyola accomplished through them is to be found in the closing paragraphs of Francis Thompson's "Life of St. Ignatius" (Benzigers': New York, 1909, pp. 318):
"Issuing from this Manresan cave, forgotten by the world which he had forgotten, and rejected in the land which bore him, single and unaided he constructed and set in motion a force that stemmed and rolled back the reformation which had engulfed the North and threatened to conquer [{222}] Christendom. He cast the foundations of his Order deep; and, satisfied that his work was good, died--leaving it for legacy only the God-required gift that all men should speak ill of it.
"Most singular bequest that Founder ever transmitted, it has singularly been fulfilled. The union of energy and patience, sagacity and a self-devotion which held nothing impossible that was bidden it, were the leading qualities of St. Ignatius; and so far as his Order has prospered, it has been because it incarnated the qualities of its Founder. The administrative genius which, among the princes of Europe or the 'untutored minds' of Paraguay, is perhaps its most striking secular feature, comes to it direct from the man who might have ruled provinces in the greatest empire of the sixteenth century; but chose rather to rule, from the altars of the Church, an army which has outlasted the armies of Spain, and made conquests more perdurable than the vast empire which drifted to its fall in the wake of the broken galleons of the Armada."