The Jesuits had undertaken what was perfectly impossible; and the principal engine they employed for it—the monopoly of the rising generation—was not less impossible. Their greatest effort had been directed to this point; they had succeeded in getting into their hands the greater part of the children of the nobility and of people of fortune; they had contrived, by means of education, a machine to narrow the mind and crush the intellect. But such was the vigour of modern invention, that in spite of the most ingenious machinery to annihilate invention, the first generation produced Descartes, the second the author of Tartuffe, and the third Voltaire.
The worst of it is, by the light of this great modern flambeau which they had been unable to extinguish, they saw their own deformity. They knew what they were, and began to despise themselves. No one is so hardened in lying as to deceive himself entirely. They were obliged tacitly to confess that their probabilism, or doctrine of probability, was at bottom but doubt, and the absence of all principle. They could not help discovering that they, the most Christian of all societies, and the champions of the faith, were only sceptics.
Of faith?—what faith? It was not, at any rate, Christian faith: all their theology had no other tendency than to ruin the base on which Christianity is founded—grace and salvation by the blood of Jesus Christ.
Champions of a principle? No; but agents of a plot, occupied with one project, and this an impossible one—the restoration of popery.
Some few Jesuits resolved to seek a remedy in themselves for their fallen condition. They avowed frankly the urgent need that the Society had of reform. Their chief, a German, dared to attempt this reform; but it went hard with him: the great majority of the Jesuits wished to maintain the abuses, and they deprived him of all power.
These good workmen, who had been so successful in justifying the enjoyments of others, wanted to enjoy themselves in their turn. They chose for their general a man after their own heart, amiable, gentle, and kind, the epicure Oliva. Rome, recently governed by Madame Olympia, was in a season of indulgence; Oliva, retiring to his delightful villa, said, "Business to-morrow," and left the Society to govern itself after its own fashion.
Some became merchants, bankers, and cloth-makers for the profit of their establishments. Others following more closely the example of the pope, worked for their nephews, and transacted the business of their families. The idle wits frequented the public walks, coquetted, and made madrigals. Others again found amusement in chatting to the nuns, in the little secrets of women, and in sensual inquisitiveness. Their rulers, lastly, who found themselves excluded from the society of women, became too often the Thyrsis and Corydons of the Colleges; the consequence was in Germany a formidable investigation; when a great number of the proud and austere German houses were found to be criminal.
The Jesuits, who had fallen so low both in theory and practice, increased their party at the risk of the strangest auxiliaries. Whoever declared himself an enemy of the Jansenists became their friend. Hence arose the immoral inconsistency of the Society—its perfect indifference to systems. These people, who for more than half a century had been fighting for free will, formed a sudden alliance, without any intervening period of transition, with the mystics who confounded all their liberty in God. Just before they had been reproached with following the principles of pagan philosophers and jurisconsults, who attribute everything to justice and nothing to grace or love; now they receive quietism at its birth with open arms, and the preacher of love, the visionary Desmarets de St. Sorlin.
Desmarets had, it is true, done them some essential service. He had succeeded in dismembering Port-Royal, by gaining over some of the nuns. He assisted them powerfully in destroying poor Morin, another visionary more original and more innocent, who fancied himself to be the Holy Ghost. He tells us himself how, being encouraged by Father Canard (Annat) the king's confessor, he gained the confidence of this unfortunate man, made him believe he was his disciple, and drew from him written documents, by means of which he caused him to be burnt (1663).
The protection of this all-powerful confessor gained for the most extravagant books of Desmarets the approbation of the Archbishop of Paris. He declared in them that he was a prophet, and undertook to raise for the king and the pope an army of a hundred and forty-four thousand devots, as knights of papal infallibility, to exterminate, in concert with Spain, the Turks and the Jansenists.