[ [43] Historians usually include among the causes the enforcement of a system of secular education only in the schools. But—as Sir Robert Stout kindly pointed out to me—the Catholic prelates in their letter to the French Minister of the Interior, dated 30th May 1806, had previously "willingly" accepted this arrangement. They agreed that it was enough to teach religion in the churches.
THE LAST PHASE
If we attempt to sum up in few words the story of the Jesuits during the first few decades after their suppression, we must say that there was little change in their spirit, and that they were wholly bent on returning to their former position. In actual conduct there is a material change. The industrial and commercial system, which had formed one of the most irregular roots of their power in the earlier centuries, has disappeared; they no longer haunt the courts of kings as they had done; they, as a rule, show less arrogance to the non-Jesuit clergy and the bishops; they are less lax in their casuistry; they shrink from regicide. Much of this change is, however, plainly attributable to their new situation. There is, for instance, hardly a single country where they enjoy an unbroken prosperity for even thirty years during the first half of the nineteenth century, so that we could hardly look for large estates or traffic; and their foreign missions are only slowly and laboriously constructed. As to regicide, the new age has a more humane way of dealing with superfluous kings. If they do not counsel kings, it is clearly not from lack of desire to do so. On the whole, let us say that the dreadful age, as they conceive it, into which they are reborn has improved their conduct in spite of themselves.
We have now to see how, as the age increases in wickedness, to use their phrase, the Jesuits continue to improve: how they retain their worst features only in lands which they pronounce godly and just, and are so innocent as to cast suspicion on the dark legends about them where heresy and unbelief abound. This last phase of Jesuit activity is very important, yet too close to us for proper historical study. Enough can be said, however, to show that what may be called the intermediate view of Jesuit degeneration is disputable. There are those (i.e. all Jesuits and their admirers) who hold that the Jesuits were never open to grave censure as a body; and there are those who maintain that the Jesuit of the nineteenth or twentieth century is as bad as the Jesuit of the seventeenth, and would poison a pope or forge a cheque complacently in the interest of the Society. A third view is that their heavy and repeated chastisements have made their evil features a thing of history. During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, we have seen that they had no idea of burying their past; they were to co-operate with kings in restoring the old order, and we have not the least ground to think that, had they restored it, they would have used their power otherwise than they did in the seventeenth century. It remains to see if they become wiser in the next half-century.
We left them on the eve of the revolution of 1848. Except in Switzerland, where their obstinacy in asserting their rights had been one of the chief causes of a civil war and made their prospects worse than ever, they still dreamed of erasing the revolution from the chronicle of Europe and beginning again at 1750. Hence the fearful storm of 1848 broke on them almost unexpectedly. They had only recently been forced to retire from France, so that the outbreak in that country affected them little. But the storm passed on to Austria and Italy, even Rome, and drove the Jesuits before it. A Jesuit writer observes sadly that "the first attack of the revolutionaries everywhere was on the Jesuits." Naturally; there were no more vehement opponents in Europe of the new age which the revolutionary movement represented. They had themselves traced the revolutionary spirit to their temporary absence from the schools of Europe, and the revolutionaries [44] concluded that the reign of terror had had their support. So from Rhineland, Austria, Galicia, Venice, Turin, Rome, Naples, and Sicily—the only Provinces of the Society which seemed secure—the Jesuits were driven by armed and angry crowds, and a vast colony of bewildered refugees shuddered in Belgium.
The Emperor of Austria was forced on 7th May to sign their expulsion from the whole of his empire, but it was in Italy that they suffered most. Since 1840 the authorities of the Society had received a succession of painful shocks. The Carlists had lost and the fathers had been driven from Spain: in 1845 they had been forced to dissolve the communities in France: in 1847 the Swiss Catholics had lost, and the Jesuit houses had been wrecked. They had attached themselves everywhere to losing causes. Manning was in Rome in the winter 1847-48, and his diary records the coming of the revolution to Rome, and flight of the Jesuits. Pius IX. had exhausted his Liberalism, and the Romans were uneasy and suspicious. Then, in January and February 1848, news came that the revolutionaries had triumphed in Sicily and Naples, and the Jesuits were flying north. By March the Jesuits at Rome were ready to fly at a moment's notice, as Manning found when he visited them. On 29th March they were expelled; and in the same month the Viennese conquered their Emperor, the Venetians rebelled and drove out the Jesuits, and the Piedmontese won a Liberal Constitution from Charles Albert. Manning speculates on the causes of the intense hostility to the Jesuits, and traces it to their alliance with ultramontanism and political reaction.
As the historian tells, the revolution of 1848 had in most countries only a temporary triumph, and in the course of 1849 and 1850 the Jesuits returned to their provinces. In very many places they returned to find their comfortable home a heap of ruins, but the storm had had one consoling effect. It had proved that the Jesuits were the chief enemies of Liberalism, and to the Jesuits must be entrusted the task of extinguishing such sparks as remained of the revolutionary fire. Pius IX. had been driven to Gaeta, while the Romans set up their short-lived Triumvirate and declared papal rule at an end. He returned to Rome in the spring of 1850, when French troops had cleared out his opponents, and from that moment he became the closest ally of the Jesuits. His first act was to canonise several members of the Society. He took a Jesuit confessor, and, with the aid of Cardinal Antonelli and the Society, set up the selfish and repressive system which the English ambassador described as "the opprobrium of Europe."