Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?
Æn. lib. i.
Their perseverance in this field of zeal was universally admired; it secured success during more than two centuries; and the latest missionary expeditions of their society proved, that the original spirit was not decayed. Whoever had caught it from the institute of Ignatius was a scholar without pride; a man disengaged from his own conveniences; indifferent to his employment, to country, to climate; submissive to guidance; capable of living alone, and of edifying in public; happy in solitude, content in tumult; never misplaced. In a word, great purity of manners, cultivated minds, knowledge without pretensions, close study without recompence, obedience without reasoning though not without reason, love of labour, willingness to suffer, and, finally, fervor of zeal; such were the qualifications, which Ignatius's discernment directed his successors in government to seek, to select, or to form; and it is an acknowledged truth, that, at every period of the society, they always found men of this description to lead out their sacred expeditions to the four quarters of
the world. These men planted Christian faith in the extremities of the East, in Japan, in the Molucca islands; they announced it in China, in the hither and further India, in Ethiopia and Caffraria, &c. Others, in the opposite hemisphere, appeared on the snowy wastes of North America; and, presently, Hurons were civilized, Canada ceased to be peopled only by barbarians. Others, almost in our own days, nothing degenerate, succeeded to humanize new hard-featured tribes, even to assemble them in Christian churches, in the ungrateful soil of California, to which angry Nature seems to have denied almost every necessary for the subsistence of the human species. They were but a detachment from the body of their brethren, who, at the same time, were advancing, with rapid progress, through Cinaloa, among the unknown hordes of savages, who rove through the immense tracts to the north of Mexico, which have not yet been trodden by the steps of any evangelical herald. Others, again, in greater numbers, from the school of Ignatius, with the most inflexible
perseverance, amidst every species of opposition, continued to gather new nations into the church, to form new colonies of civilized cannibals, for the kings of Spain and Portugal, in the horrid wilds of Brazil, Maragnon, and Paraguay. Here truly flowed the milk and honey of religion and human happiness. Here was realized more than philosophy had dared to hope, more than Plato, in his republic, or the author of Utopia, had ever ventured to imagine. Here was given the demonstration, from experience, that pure religion, steadily practised, is the only source of human happiness. The new settlements, called Reductions, of Brazil and Paraguay, were real fruits of the zeal of the Jesuits. Solipsian empires, and gold mines to enrich the society, existed only in libels[[65]].
The Jesuits were advancing, with gigantic strides, to the very centre of South America, they were actually civilizing the Abiponian barbarians, when their glorious course was interrupted by the wretched policy of Lisbon and Madrid. The missionaries of South America were all seized like felons, and shipped off, as so many convicts, to the ports of old Spain, to be still farther transported to Corsica, and, finally, to the coasts of the pope's states. One of these venerable men, Martin Dobrizhoffer, who had spent eighteen years among the South American tribes, has given, in his Historia de Abiponibus, the best account, that exists, of the field of his arduous mission. His work is here mentioned, because it is not unknown in England, and his testimony[[66]] proves the persuasion of the best men at Buenos Ayres, in 1767, when the Jesuits were dismissed, that, if they had been at all times properly supported, by the courts of Lisbon and Madrid, especially
against the self interested European settlers, not a barbarian, not an infidel, would then have been left in the whole extent of South America. "This," says the author, "was boldly advanced from the pulpit at Buenos Ares, in the presence of the royal governor, and of a thronged auditory, and it was proved with a strength of argument, that subdued all doubt, and wrought universal conviction." The impression must have been strengthened by the subsequent dissolution of all the Reductions, in consequence of the inability of the royal officers to substitute other missionaries to those, whom they had ejected[[67]].
Different was the providence of the superiors