Missionaries from India penetrated Ceylon and Thibet, but they were expelled after a few years. The Chinese mission continued to prosper, and by 1620 claimed to have made a hundred thousand converts. One of the missionaries, Adam Schall, an expert in mathematics and mechanics, was employed by the Emperor to correct the Chinese calendar, make guns for his army, and construct fortifications. He received in return permission for his colleagues to preach throughout the Empire, and hundreds of churches were built. Presently, however, the rival Dominican missionaries reported to Rome that the Jesuits owed their success to a scandalous compromise with the native religion. There is no doubt that the Christianity they set before the Chinese was a very different creed from that which Xavier had intended to bring. They did not obtrude the crucifix on the notice of their converts, and they looked leniently on the worship of ancestors and the veneration for Kung-fu-tse. When the Dominicans and Franciscans insisted on the drastic purity of the faith, and characterised the pagan moralist with all the vigour of mediæval intolerance, the Jesuits persuaded the Chinese to expel them, and a spirited struggle, which will engage us at a later stage, took place in regard to their "Chinese rites."

The Japanese mission, on the other hand, was totally extinguished under the generalship of Vitelleschi. For a time after 1616 the new Emperor Xogun was indifferent to the labours of the Jesuits, who entered the country in disguise, and the converts were once more gathered into the Church. It is said that they numbered 400,000, and the record of the persecutions which followed shows that at least a large proportion of them were fervent and convinced Christians. In 1617, however, Xogun ordered all missionaries to leave the country, and a long and bloody persecution set in. The English and Dutch merchants had now supplanted the Portuguese, and they fed the animosity of the Emperor. Large numbers of the Jesuits and their followers were brutally tortured and executed; yet with signal heroism they continued to enter the land and lay down their lives for their work. But the fierce persecution was sustained by Xogun II. and his son, and by the time of the death of Vitelleschi, Christianity was extinct in Japan.

The next most interesting field of missionary activity was South America, where the Jesuits came to set up the remarkable commonwealths of which their admirers still speak with unstinted admiration. We must defer until a later stage the full consideration of these communities, and can only tell here the story of their origin and early fortunes. The natives of Paraguay had been so brutally treated by the Spaniards that when, in 1586, the Jesuits entered the country, they found it exceedingly difficult to disarm their apprehensions. They scattered over the country, winning thousands of the natives by their kindly and humane aid, but usually leaving them, after baptism, to their original ways. The mission was better organised in 1602, and definite Christian settlements began to appear. As a natural result of their sympathy with the natives they soon quarrelled with the Spaniards. While the Spaniards expected the missionaries to make the natives more pliant and submissive to their authority, the Jesuits reported that the natives would have nothing to do with the European colonists, whom they denounced for their cruelty and rapacity. The Spaniards retorted that the Jesuits sought to keep the trade in native products and industries for their own profit, and a bitter controversy was provoked. In 1610 the Jesuits obtained from Philip III. permission to colonise, and founded the first of their "reductions," or industrial settlements.

For many years the work proved extremely difficult. The natives appreciated the protection of the Jesuits, who obtained a royal order that none of their converts could be enslaved, but were little attracted to their creed. At the least pressure they would return to the forests, and could only be recovered with great labour. More workers came from Europe, however,—by 1616 there were a hundred and fifty Jesuits in Paraguay,—and more settlements were founded. By the year 1632 there were twenty "reductions," each containing about a thousand families. Not only was the ground assiduously tilled, but Jesuit lay-brothers taught the arts and crafts of civilisation, and even formed an armed and trained militia for defence. The children were taught and decently clothed, and the evenings and days of rest were brightened by song and dance. The hours of prayer, work, and sleep were appointed by the two Jesuit fathers who controlled each reduction; idleness was severely punished and industry rewarded with presents of knives, or mirrors, or trinkets; the products of their industry were distributed each week; and a very close observation was kept on the morals of all the members.

We will consider these "ideal republics" more closely when we find them reorganised and more extended at a later date. For the moment it is enough to notice a curious inconsistency which appears even in apologetic accounts of them. To the Spaniards the Jesuits declared that the natives were so suspicious that no European could be allowed to visit the reductions, and the intercourse of the fathers with other Europeans had to be concealed; yet they refused to teach Spanish to the natives on the ground that intercourse with the Spaniards would corrupt their morals. Their critics naturally inferred that they kept the races apart so that their monopoly of the trade might not be disturbed, and drew unfriendly comparisons between the comfortable houses of the missionaries and the rough unfurnished huts of their converts. We will return to the point when the great controversy about the reductions begins after 1645. Before that date they had a series of disasters to face and were partially destroyed. The hostile tribe of the Mamelus descended on them and drove most of them out of Paraguay. Of a hundred thousand subjects in the province of Guayra the Jesuits only retained and transferred twelve thousand.

The remaining Jesuit missions of the period may be dismissed briefly. They extended their operations to New Granada, but were expelled by the Archbishop of Santa Fe, at the complaint of the Spanish merchants, for mingling commerce with their preaching of the Gospel. In Canada they made little progress until the English abandoned that region in 1632, and even afterwards they found great difficulty in forming settlements among the Indians. Another attempt was made to enter Abyssinia, and this also ended in disaster. For services rendered by the Portuguese to the Emperor they were allowed to preach their faith and made many converts. A Jesuit at last became "Patriarch of Abyssinia," and he involved the Emperor in a sanguinary repression of the native Christian Church. On the accession of a new Emperor, however, they were denounced to him for a conspiracy to win the country for Portugal, and were expelled once more. Letters of theirs which were intercepted show that the charge was not groundless. In the same period, finally, they obtained, through France, permission to enter the Turkish Empire, and they began the work of organising the surviving Christians, and assailing the Nestorians, in Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, Armenia and Chaldæa.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [18] This rare and curious work, which was often condemned and burned in subsequent years, was published in 1654, and affords a particularly unpleasant picture of the Spanish Jesuits. It was attributed to a distinguished Dominican monk. He denied the authorship, but many believe that the denial was merely a matter of policy.

[ [19] See the author's Iron Cardinal (1909), p. 341.

[ [20] Crétineau-Joly suppresses the whole of these facts, and describes Père de Bérulle as "intimately united with the Jesuits"! De Bérulle's letter to Richelieu is published in the Annales, ii. 738.