Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 2: Renaissance and Reformation

by John Lord

** Steinmetz, i. p. 252.

*** Nicolini, p. 35.

The Jesuit was obliged to make all natural ties subordinate to the will of the General. And this General was a king more absolute than any worldly monarch, because he reigned over the minds of his subjects. His kingdom was an imperium in imperio; he was chosen for life and was responsible to no one, although he ruled for the benefit of the Catholic Church. In one sense a General of the Jesuits resembled the prime minister of an absolute monarch,—say such a man as Richelieu, with unfettered power in the cause of absolutism; and he ruled like Richelieu, through his spies, making his subordinates tools and instruments. The General appointed the presidents of colleges and of the religious houses; he admitted or dismissed, dispensed or punished, at his pleasure. There was no complaint; all obeyed his orders, and saw in him the representative of Divine Providence. Complaint was sin; resistance was ruin. It is hard for us to understand how any man could be brought voluntarily to submit to such a despotism. But the novice entering the order had to go through terrible discipline,—to be a servant, anything; to live according to rigid rules, so that his spirit was broken by mechanical duties. He had to learn the virtues of obedience before he could be fully enrolled in the Society. He was drilled for years by spiritual sergeants more rigorously than a soldier in Napoleon's army: hence the efficiency of the body; it was a spiritual army of the highest disciplined troops. Loyola had been a soldier; he knew what military discipline could do,—how impotent an army is without it, what an awful power it is with discipline, and the severer the better. The best soldier of a modern army is he who has become an unconscious piece of machinery; and it was this unreflecting, unconditional obedience which made the Society so efficient, and the General himself, who controlled it, such an awful power for good or for evil. I am only speaking of the organization, the machinery, the regime, of the Jesuits, not of their character, not of their virtues or vices. This organization is to be spoken of as we speak of the discipline of an army,—wise or unwise, as it reached its end. The original aim of the Jesuits was the restoration of the Papal Church to its ancient power; and for one hundred years, as I think, the restoration of morals, higher education, greater zeal in preaching: in short, a reformation within the Church. Jesuitism was, of course, opposed to Protestantism; it hated the Protestants; it hated their religions creed and their emancipating and progressive spirit; it hated religious liberty.

I need not dwell on other things which made this religious order so successful,—not merely their virtues and their mechanism, but their adaptation to the changing spirit of the times. They threw away the old dresses of monastic life; they quitted the cloister and places of meditation; they were preachers as well as scholars; they accommodated themselves to the circumstances of the times; they wore the ordinary dress of gentlemen; they remained men of the world, of fine manners and cultivated speech; there was nothing ascetic or repulsive about them, out in the world; they were all things to all men, like politicians, in order to accomplish their ends; they never were lazy, or profligate or luxurious. If their Order became enriched, they as individuals remained poor. The inferior members were not even ambitious; like good soldiers, they thought of nothing but the work assigned to them. Their pride and glory were the prosperity of their Order,—an intense esprit de corps, never equalled by any body of men. This, of course, while it gave them efficiency, made them narrow. They could see the needle on the barn-door,—they could not see the door itself. Hence there could be no agreement with them, no argument with them, except on ordinary matters; they were as zealous as Saul, seeking to make proselytes. They yielded nothing except in order to win; they never compromised their Order in their cause. Their fidelity to their head was marvellous; and so long as they confined themselves to the work of making people better, I think they deserved praise. I do not like their military organization, but I should have no more right to abuse it than the organization of some Protestant sects. That is a matter of government; all sects and all parties, Catholic and Protestant, have a right to choose their own government to carry out their ends, even as military generals have a right to organize their forces in their own way. The history of the Jesuits shows this,—that an organization of forces, or what we call discipline or government, is a great thing. A church without a government is a poor affair, so far as efficiency is concerned. All churches have something to learn from the Jesuits in the way of discipline. John Wesley learned something; the Independents learned very little.

But there is another side to the Jesuits. We have seen why they succeeded; we have to inquire how they failed. If history speaks of the virtues of the early members, and the wonderful mechanism of their Order, and their great success in consequence, it also speaks of the errors they committed, by which they lost the confidence they had gained. From being the most popular of all the adherents of the papal power, and of the ideas of the Dark Ages, they became the most unpopular; they became so odious that the Pope was obliged, by the pressure of public opinion and of the Bourbon courts of Europe, to suppress their Order. The fall of the Jesuits was as significant as their rise. I need not dwell on that fall, which is one of the best known facts of history.

Why did the Jesuits become unpopular and lose their influence?

They gained the confidence of Catholic countries because they deserved it, and they lost that confidence because they deserved to lose it,—in other words, because they degenerated; and this seems to be the history of all institutions. It is strange, it is passing strange, that human societies and governments and institutions should degenerate as soon as they become rich and powerful; but such, is the fact,—a sad commentary on the doctrine of a necessary progress of the race, or the natural tendency to good, which so many cherish, but than which nothing can be more false, as proved by experience and the Scriptures. Why were the antediluvians swept away? Why could not those races retain their primitive revelation? Why did the descendants of Noah become almost idolaters before he was dead? Why did the great Persian Empire become as effeminate as the empires it had supplanted? Why did the Jewish nation steadily retrograde after David? Why did not civilization and Christianity save the Roman world? Why did Christianity itself become corrupted in four centuries? Why did not the Middle Ages preserve the evangelical doctrines of Augustine and Jerome and Chrysostom and Ambrose? Why did the light of the glorious Reformation of Luther nearly go out in the German cities and universities? Why did the fervor of the Puritans burn out in England in one hundred years? Why have the doctrines of the Pilgrim Fathers become unfashionable in those parts of New England where they seemed to have taken the deepest root? Why have so many of the descendants of the disciples of George Fox become so liberal and advanced as to be enamoured of silk dresses and laces and diamonds and the ritualism of Episcopal churches? Is it an improvement to give up a simple life and lofty religious enthusiasm for materialistic enjoyments and epicurean display? Is there a true advance in a university, when it exchanges its theological teachings and its preparation of poor students for the Gospel Ministry, for Schools of Technology and boat-clubs and accommodations for the sons of the rich and worldly?

Now the Society of Jesus went through just such a transformation as has taken place, almost within the memory of living men, in the life and habits and ideas of the people of Boston and Philadelphia and in the teachings of their universities. Some may boldly say, "Why not? This change indicates progress." But this progress is exactly similar to that progress which the Jesuits made in the magnificence of their churches, in the wealth they had hoarded in their colleges, in the fashionable character of their professors and confessors and preachers, in the adaptation of their doctrines to the taste of the rich and powerful, in the elegance and arrogance and worldliness of their dignitaries. Father La Chaise was an elegant and most polished man of the world, and travelled in a coach with six horses. If he had not been such a man, he would not have been selected by Louis XIV. for his confidential and influential confessor. The change which took place among the Jesuits arose from the same causes as the change which has taken place among Methodists and Quakers and Puritans. This change I would not fiercely condemn, for some think it is progress. But is it progress in that religious life which early marked these people; or a progress towards worldly and epicurean habits which they arose to resist and combat? The early Jesuits were perhaps fanatical, strict, ascetic, religious, and narrow. They sought by self- denying labors and earnest exhortations, like Savonarola at Florence, to take the Church out of the hands of the Devil; and the people reverenced them, as they always have reverenced martyrs and missionaries. The later Jesuits sought to enjoy their wealth and power and social position. They became—as rich and prosperous people generally become—proud, ambitious, avaricious, and worldly. They were as elegant, as scholarly, and as luxurious as the Fellows of Oxford University, and the occupants of stalls in the English cathedrals,—that is all: as worldly as the professors of Yale and Cambridge may become in half-a-century, if rich widows and brewers and bankers without children shall some day make those universities as well endowed as Jesuit colleges were in the eighteenth century. That is the old story of our fallen humanity. I would no more abuse the Jesuits because they became confessors to the great, and went into mercantile speculations, than I would rich and favored clergymen in Protestant countries, who prefer ten per cent for their money in California mines to four per cent in national consols.

But the prosperity which the Jesuits had earned during their first century of existence excited only envy, and destroyed the reverence of the people; it had not made them odious, detestable. It was the means they adopted to perpetuate their influence, after early virtues had passed away, which caused enlightened Catholic Europe to mistrust them, and the Protestants absolutely to hate and vilify them.

From the very first, the Society was distinguished for the esprit de corps of its members. Of all things which they loved best it was the power and glory of the Society,—just as Oxford Fellows love the prestige of their university. And this power and influence the Jesuits determined to preserve at all hazards and by any means; when virtues fled, they must find something else with which to bolster themselves up: they must not part with their power; the question was, how should they keep it? First, they are accused of having adopted the doctrine of expediency,—that the end justifies the means. They did not invent this sophistry,—it is as old as our humanity. Abraham used it when he told lies to the King of Egypt, to save the honor of his wife; Caesar accepted it, when he vindicated imperialism as the only way to save the Roman Empire from anarchy; most politicians resort to it when they wish to gain their ends. Politicians have ever been as unscrupulous as the Jesuits, in adopting expediency rather than eternal right. It has been a primal law of government; it lies at the basis of English encroachments in India, and of the treatment of the aborigines in this country by our government. There is nothing new in the doctrine of expediency.