Fac pedem figat, et terram movebit.
Its footing was now taken away, and it vanished from the world.
While the Catholic Bourbon courts were thus successful in accomplishing a manœuvre, which at fitful intervals they had essayed heretofore, the schismatical Empress, Catherine II of Russia, denounced it and endeavored to counteract it. She wrote to the Pope in 1783, "that she was resolved to maintain these Priests against any power, whatsoever it was"; and she was good to her word; the Society remained unsuppressed in White Russia. The Protestant King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, without exhibiting all the temper of the irascible lady, manipulated things as best he could to preserve the Society.
To sum up the Order's experiences, it may well be said that in public life there is no resurrection; and the State which dies is dead forever. From infancy on through maturity it goes its way decrepit to the grave. Yet Balmez observes, "the Society of Jesus did not follow the common course of others, either in its foundation, its development, or its fall; that Order, of which it is truly and correctly said, that it had neither infancy nor old age."[134] It rose again; and the flag of the Knight of Loyola, though worn and torn, was none the less fair for that:—
Jam se ipso formosius est.
For neither the violence of endurance, nor the vehemence of energy, although begetting intensest fatigue, is to be confounded with decay.
It was not decay, a century ago, when expropriation and exile were the confessed policy of the courts in Europe; when, as an American writer states it, in Portugal "Pombal cut the Gordian knot.... He commenced by the expulsion of the Jesuits and the expropriation of their property." Nor is it decay in the Order, when a liberal confederation in Switzerland, on obtaining the political ascendency in 1848, suppresses the Jesuit University at Fribourg, and provides in this wise, as an American writer records: "No religious society shall be allowed to teach; and persons hereafter educated by the Jesuits, or by any of the Orders affiliated to the Jesuits, shall be incapable of holding office in Church or State."[135] Policy like this, whether in the countries "expurgated," or in countries thereunto "affiliated," proves no decay in the Order.
But where decay may come in has been clearly pointed out by one of its Generals. Speaking of the Education of Youth and the Promotion of Humane Letters, Mutius Vitelleschi wrote, in 1639, "If ever the Society were to decline from that lofty position which it holds with so many provinces and peoples, such an event could come about in no other way than by failing to walk in the same steps, by which, with the Divine Grace, it has acquired that high esteem."[136]
Those steps had been taken in various paths, of which only two have concerned us here. For its men of action were largely identified with the general history of Europe; and its men of the word, who toiled in apostolic work, at home or abroad, have entwined their memories in the history of souls, often ungrateful, yet always worthy of the toil. But its men of the school did a work which we have sketched in a general way, and which we shall analyze in the second part of this essay; while its men of the pen deserve a passing word of notice here.
They concern us from a pedagogic point of view, in many ways. They wrote text-books, many of which are the basis of manuals in almost every line of education to-day, sometimes without the change of a word, and generally without acknowledgment. Besides that, their literary productions were, as a rule, the offspring of their labors in the schools. It might not be safe to estimate their standing as littérateurs, by the process which a Scotch Professor uses, who, in the course of forty-seven elegant lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, sees little occasion to recognize the existence of this Jesuit school of literature, except when he goes out of his way to salute Père Rapin in a somewhat questionable manner.[137] Many of those whom the Scottish Professor himself does honor to, in his pages, were Jesuit scholars,—Bossuet, Corneille, Molière, Tasso, Fontenelle, Didérot, Voltaire, Bourdaloue, himself a Jesuit. It would be safer then to determine the standing of these Professors, who were in control of a great literary age, by looking at the golden age itself, that of Louis XIV. The majority of the brilliant figures, whom Dr. Blair names as illustrating the epoch,[138] were all Jesuit scholars. Naturally, then, the fifty Professors of the Jesuit College at Paris were, as Cardinal Maury affirmed, a permanent tribunal of literature for all men of letters, a high court of judicature, a focus of public attention from which radiated the public opinion of the capital; in short, as Piron had emphatically said, "the Star-chamber of literary reputations."[139]