This minister was the mouthpiece of Bismarck—“the hands indeed are Esau's, but the voice is that of Jacob.” Was there ever such a picture of injured innocence and righteous indignation?
Seven hundred and eight men who spend their lives, as all the world may see, in teaching, preaching, studying, visiting the sick, performing their daily household duties, are such terrible plotters, dangerous political leaders, that they cause the great Chancellor actually to tremble in his shoes. It is a strange fact that he did not find this conspiracy out sooner. Bismarck and the Jesuits are old neighbors, not to say friends. They have lived very happily together up to yesterday. They accompanied him to his wars, and took the place that is always theirs in the battle front, among the wounded and the dying, when no succor was nigh, in the endeavor to give rest and peace to the last moments of those whom Bismarck summoned from their quiet homesteads [pg 004] to die for him under the empty name of glory and patriotism. Some of them were rewarded by the Emperor with the Iron Cross—the proudest decoration which he can bestow on a man; as some others of them on the other side brought their science to bear on the dismal walls of the beleaguered city, spreading out light far and near to discover the crouching foe, and they were rewarded with death. Why, then, after living in harmony so long together, does the Chancellor turn round in a moment and make such a sweeping attack upon them, only them? The body, numerically, is absolutely too insignificant for all this uproar. Why, we could pack them all into some of our hotels, and they would scarcely make an appreciable difference in the number of visitors. Had there existed a conspiracy on their part against the empire, as is alleged, is it possible that with Bismarck's unlimited power and resources, aided by those wonderful spies of his, who so infested France that his generals knew the country better than the French themselves did—is it possible that he who esteems so highly the value of the opinion of “circles outside the empire,” could not produce one sorry fact to bring forward against them? Their most determined opponents must confess that he has utterly failed to do so; and failing to do so, he has exercised, and the majority of the German Parliament has sanctioned, a barefaced abuse of power, such as we thought had died out with the good old days of Henry VIII. and Queen Bess, or lived only with the Sultan of Turkey or the barbarous monarchs of the East. May it not recoil on their own heads!
The quarrel is scarcely confined to these limits, then, terrible as the power of the Jesuits may be. We do not intend to insult the intelligence of our readers by going into a needless defence, for the millionth time, of the Jesuit Order. Their defence is written on the world with the blood of their martyred children. Their defence rests on the fact of their very existence under such persistent and terrible persecutions as their mother, the church, only has surpassed. It rests in the record of every land upon which the sun has shone. And as for the time-worn themes, ever welcome and ever new, of secresy, unscrupulous agents, blood, poison, daggers, and all the mysterious paraphernalia which the Jesuit of the popular imagination still bears about with him under that famous black gown, which the intellect of the age, in the persons of the London Times' correspondents and those of the Saturday Review, are never weary of harping on, we leave them to the enlightened vision of these gentlemen, and their rivals in this respect—the concocters of the villains of fifth-rate novels. But they object: Well, we are ready to admire your Jesuits. They live among us and we know them, and really, on the whole, they are not half such bad fellows; in fact, we may go so far as to say they are very peaceable, intelligent, respectable gentlemen. When we wish to hear a good sermon we always go to listen to them. They are very fine writers, and very clever men. They have done much, or tried to do much, for America, Africa, Japan, and every out-of-the-way place; they have done something in Europe, even. But after all you must acknowledge that they are very dangerous fellows. Why, your own Pope, Sixtus V., could scarcely be prevailed upon to permit the foundation of the Order at the beginning; and another of your Popes, Clement XIV., actually condemned them. Come, now; what do you say to that?
Must we soberly sit down to answer this absurdity once more? Our readers will pardon us for merely glancing at it, and passing on to the more immediate subject of our article.
First of all, granting, which we by no means intend to do, that all that they allege is true, that it was with the greatest difficulty they even crept into existence, and that a Pope found it necessary to suppress them; there stands out in the face of such opposition the telling fact of their existence in the broad light of these open days, when no sham can pass muster, when the keen, eminently honest eye of these folk pick out the false in a twinkling, expose it, hoot it down, away with it, and there is an end. Such a fact opposed to such never-failing opposition is a very stubborn thing, and bears with it something very like reality and truth. As for the difficulty of their beginning, that is the history of all orders in the church, so careful is she of new-fangled notions. In fact, if our recollection serves us, that, we believe, is the history of the church herself. So much for the alleged opposition of Sixtus V. And now for the quelcher: the suppression by Clement XIV.
Here we give in: our opponents are right. Clement XIV. actually did issue a brief suppressing the Jesuits. Of course it is perfectly unnecessary to inform these theological and mediæval scholars that a brief is a very different thing from a bull; that a brief is in no wise binding on the successor of the Pontiff who issues it; that a brief has no more to do with infallibility than these gentlemen themselves have. And now we would beg them to listen a moment to the very few Jesuitical words in which we explain this whole thing away.
Clement XIV. issued this brief in exactly the same way that King John signed the Magna Charta; Charles I. the death-warrant of Strafford; or George IV. the act for Catholic emancipation. We believe none of our readers would blame King Charles for the death of Strafford, or thank King John for Magna Charta, or George IV. for Catholic emancipation; as little do we, can we, or any one who has read the history of the time, blame Clement XIV. for the brief which suppressed the Jesuits. The timid old monk—he was consecrated Pope at what the Bourbons considered the very safe age of sixty-four—was strong enough to resist this wicked demand of their suppression to the utmost. We must bear in mind that the demand was made by no body in the church; but only by the ambassadors of France, Spain, and Naples. “I know what you want,” he said, “you want to create a heresy and destroy the church.” Another time he writes, “I can neither censure nor abolish an institute which has been commended by nineteen of my predecessors.” In the meantime, we have a disinterested witness, happily enough from Prussia, a man whom we have no doubt even Prince Bismarck has some respect for. It is no less a person than Frederick the Great, who writes to Voltaire:
“That good Franciscan of the Vatican leaves me my dear Jesuits, who are persecuted everywhere else. I will preserve the precious seed, so as to be able one day to apply it to such as may desire again to cultivate this rare plant.”
At last, notwithstanding his entreaties and prayers, they wrung the brief from the heart of the tottering old man. They gained their point while he lost his peace of mind, and was ever after murmuring, Compulsus feci, compulsus feci. We should be [pg 006] more correct in saying that they only half-gained it; for they were wild with rage at its being only a brief. What they wanted was a bull: destruction, not suspension. And such is the history of the famous suppression of the Jesuits.
To make the story complete, we may as well add that, as soon as the brief became known, Switzerland, knowing that it was the production of the Bourbon faction and not of the Pope, refused to submit to it and deprive the Jesuits of their colleges. Catherine of Russia interceded in their favor, and gave the poor Pope a crumb of comfort in the few days that were left him. Well did he say, “This suppression will be the death of me.” While Frederick the Great—but he shall speak for himself, and we commend his utterance to Prince Bismarck. He writes to his agent at Rome: