# Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Jesuits

See also Society of Jesus on Wikipedia; Jesuits in the 11th edition; and the disclaimer.
JESUITS. The “Company of Jesus,” in its original conception, and in its avowed or ostensible objects, does not at the first glance appear as more than one of many similar communities which have grown up in the bosom of Latin Christianity. Like several of them, it is a congregation of ecclesiastics living in accordance with a definite rule, whence technically called “Clerks Regular”; like the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights, military ideas have entered largely into its plans; like Benedictines, Dominicans, and Franciscans, its spiritual labours have been those of teaching the young by schools and catechizings, conducting home missions by such agencies as sermons, retreats, and the like, combating heresy with the pulpit and the pen, and converting the heathen. In each and all of these peculiarities and occupations it comes late into a field where its precursors had been busy for centuries, and it might seem to differ from them merely by a more careful selection of instruments, a more skilful organization, and a more perfect discipline.
But such a view is entirely misleading. On closer
examination the Jesuit body proves to resemble those other religious societies only in external and separable accidents, differing from them and from all others in its essential character, — and that not in degree merely, but in kind also, so as to be an institution absolutely unique in history.
In the first place, all the earlier associations of the kind, even the military orders themselves, have their origin in a desire to withdraw so far as possible from contact with the world and its concerns, to seek spiritual perfection in a retired life of contemplation and prayer, to concentrate efforts for this end chiefly within the cloister where each such group is collected, and to act only indirectly, and as it were with the mere surplus overflow of religious energy, on their more immediate neighbours around, and even then chiefly with the idea of persuading all the most devout and fervent amongst them to forsake the world in a similar fashion. Contrariwise, the Jesuit system is to withdraw religious men from precisely this sort of retirement, except as a mere temporary preparation for later activity, and to make habitual intercourse with society a prime duty, rigidly suppressing all such external regulations of dress, rule, and austerities as tend to put obstacles in the way, so leaving the members of the “Company” free to act as emissaries, agents, or missionaries in the most various places and circumstances. Next, the constitution of the elder societies was for the most part democratic. Allowing for special exceptions, the normal scheme of government was this. Each house of an order had a separate life and partial independence of its own. It elected its own superior and officers, usually by ballot, for a short term of years, it discussed its business, and its members confessed their faults, in open chapter. Each group of houses elected a provincial; the provincials, or delegates from among them, elected the general, whose authority was strictly constitutional, and limited as definitely by the rule and statutes as the rights of the youngest novice. Further, admission was seldom difficult; the noviciate rarely exceeded two years, and the novice, professed at the close of that probation, at once entered on a share in the government of the society, and became eligible for its highest offices. Unlike this method in every respect, the Jesuit polity is almost a pure despotism, guarded, no doubt, with certain checks, but even those of an oligarchical kind. The general is indeed elected by the congregation of the society; but, once appointed, it is for life, and with powers lodged in his hands, partly due to the original constitutions, and partly to special faculties and privileges conferred by various popes, which enormously exceed, as regards enactment and repeal of laws, as to restraint and dispensation, and both in kind and degree, those wielded by the heads of any other communities. He alone nominates to every office in the society (with certain significant exceptions to be named presently) and appoints the superiors of all the houses and colleges. The vow of obedience is taken directly to him, and not, as in the older orders, to the rule, as distinguished from the mere chief of the executive. The admission or dismissal of every member depends on his absolute fiat; and, by a simple provision for reports to him, he holds in his hands the threads of the entire business of the society in its most minute and distant ramifications.
Once more, the distinguishing peculiarity of the earlier communities, dating from the origin of the Benedictine rule, is their hostility to local change. The vow of stability, soon added to the three customary pledges of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was designed to impede, not merely itinerancy without settled abode, such as had brought discredit on those ancient monks who were styled circumcellions, nor even easy transition from one religious community to another, unless in search of greater austerity,
but even facility of transfer from one house to another of the very same order. Where the profession was made, there, in the absence of exceptional reasons, the life should be spent; and this rule of course tended to nationalism in the monasteries of every country, even in the great military orders, which, though accepting recruits from all quarters, yet grouped them into tongues. But mobility and cosmopolitanism are of the very essence of the Jesuit programme. The founder of the society has excluded the possibility of doubt on this subject, for having chosen the military term “Company,” rather than “Order” or “Congregation” to describe his new institute, he explained its meaning to Paul III. as being that, whereas the ancient monastic communities were, so to speak, the infantry of the church, whose duty was to stand firmly in one place on the battlefield, the Jesuits, contrariwise, were to be the “light horse,” capable of going anywhere at a moment's notice, but especially apt and designed for scouting or skirmishing. And, to carry out this view, it was one of his plans to send foreigners as superiors or officers to the Jesuit houses of each country, requiring of these envoys, however, to use invariably the language of their new place of residence, and to study it both in speaking and writing till entire mastery of it had been acquired, — thus by degrees making all the parts of his vast system mutually interchangeable, and so largely increasing the number of persons eligible to fill any given post, without reference to locality.
Further, the object of the older monastic societies was the sanctification of their individual members. In truth, community life was only a later development of the original system, as exhibited in the Thebaid, in accordance with which solitary hermits began to draw near to each other, until the collection of separate huts gradually assumed the form of a laura or hamlet of cells, grouped under an abbot, and with a common place of worship — a model still surviving in the Camaldolese order. Their obedience to a superior, and the observance of some kind of fixed rule, had no further intention than the improvement of the spiritual character of each person who entered such a community; and, with certain qualifications, this has continued the ideal of the older orders, — modified chiefly by the natural desire of each such body to gain influence and credit from the personal character of all its members and the efficiency of its active operations. But the founder of Jesuitism started at once with a totally different purpose. To him, from the first, the society was everything, and the individual nothing, except so far as he might prove a useful instrument for carrying out the society's objects. In a MS. collection of sayings by Loyola, whose genuineness is accepted by the Bollandists, themselves Jesuits, and by his biographer F. Genelli, he is stated to have said to his secretary, Polanco, that “in those who offered themselves he looked less to purely natural goodness than to firmness of character and ability for business, for he was of opinion that those who were not fit for public business were not adapted for filling offices in the society.” He went even further than this, and laid down that even exceptional qualities and endowments in a candidate were valuable in his eyes only on the condition of their being brought into play or held in abeyance strictly at the command of a superior. On this principle, he raised obedience to a position it had never held before, even amongst monastic virtues. His letter on this subject, addressed to the Jesuits of Coimbra in 1553, is still one of the standard formularies of the society, ranking with those two other products of his pen, the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions; and it is evident that his views differ very seriously from the older theories on the subject, as formulated in other rules. In them the superior is head of a local family, endued with paternal authority, no doubt as
understood by the old civil code of the Roman empire, centuries after the very memory of freedom had been lost, yet having fixed limits, alike traditional and prescribed, besides being exercised only within a limited area and for certain specified purposes. Loyola, true to his military training and instincts, clothes the general with the powers of a commander-in-chief of an army in time of war, giving him the absolute disposal of all members of the society in every place and for every purpose. Not only so, but he pushes the claim much further, requiring, besides entire outward submission to command, also the complete identification of the inferior's will with that of the superior. He lays down that this superior is to be obeyed simply as such, and as standing in the place of God, without reference to his personal wisdom, piety, or discretion; that any obedience which falls short of making the superior's will one's own in inward affection as well as in palpable effect, is lax and imperfect; that going beyond the letter of command, even in things abstractly good and praiseworthy, is disobedience; and that the “sacrifice of the intellect” — a familiar Jesuit watchword — is the third and highest grade of obedience, well-pleasing to God, when the inferior not only wills what the superior wills, but thinks what he thinks, submitting his judgment so far as it is possible for the will to influence and lead the judgment. So far-reaching and dangerous are these maxims that the Letter on Obedience was formally condemned, not long after Loyola's death, by the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, and it tasked all the skill and learning of Bellarmine as its apologist, together with the whole influence of the company, to avert the ratification of the sentence at Rome.
It has, however, been alleged in defence that this very strong language must be glossed and limited by two other maxims penned by Loyola: (1) “Preserve your freedom of mind, and do not relinquish it by the authority of any person, or in any circumstances whatever”; and (2) “In all things except sin I ought to do the will of my superior, and not my own.” But the value of these checks is seriously diminished when it is added that the former of them occurs in the introductory part of the Spiritual Exercises, a manual expressly designed and used for the purpose of breaking down the will of those who pass through its appointed ordeal under a director; while the latter is qualified in its turn, not only by the whole principle of probabilism, the special doctrine of the society, which can attenuate and even defend any kind of sin, but by the four following maxims, in close juxtaposition to itself in the very same document: “I ought to desire to be ruled by a superior who endeavours to subjugate my judgment or subdue my understanding”; “When it seems to me that I am commanded by my superior to do a thing against which my conscience revolts as sinful, and my superior judges otherwise, it is my duty to yield my doubts to him, unless I am otherwise constrained by evident reasons”; “If submission do not appease my conscience, I must impart my doubts to two or three persons of discretion, and abide by their decision”; “I ought not to be my own, but His who created me, and his too by whose means God governs me, yielding myself to be moulded in his hands like so much wax. . . . . I ought to be like a corpse, which has neither will nor understanding, or like a small crucifix, which is turned about at the will of him that holds it, or like a staff in the hands of an old man, who uses it as may best assist or please him.” And one master-stroke of Loyola's policy was to insure the permanence of this submission by barring access to all independent positions on the part of members of the society, through means of a special constitution that no Jesuit can accept a cardinal's hat, a bishopric other than missionary, an abbacy, or any similar dignity, save with permission of the general, not to
be accorded unless and until the pope has commanded its acceptance under pain of sin.
The next matter for consideration is the machinery by which the society is constituted and governed, so as to enable this principle to become a living energy, and not a mere abstract theory. The society, then, is distributed into six grades: — novices, scholastics, temporal coadjutors, spiritual coadjutors, professed of the three vows, and professed of the four vows. The novice cannot become a postulant for admission to the society till fourteen years old, unless by special dispensation, and is at once classified according as his destination is the priesthood or lay brotherhood, while a third class of “indifferents” receives such as are reserved for further inquiry before a decision of this kind is made. They first undergo a strict retreat of a month in what is practically solitary confinement, during which they go through the Spiritual Exercises, and make a general confession of their whole previous life; after which the first noviciate, of two years duration, begins. This is spent partly in daily study, partly in hospital work, and partly in teaching the rudiments of religious doctrine to children and the poor. They may leave or be dismissed at any time during this noviciate, but if approved are advanced into the grade of scholastics, corresponding in some degree to that of undergraduates at a university. The ordinary course for these is five years in arts, when, without discontinuing their own studies, they must pass five or six years more in teaching junior classes, not reaching the study of theology till the age of twenty-eight or thirty, when, after another year of noviciate, a further course of from four to six years is imposed, and not till this has been completed can the scholastic be ordained as a priest of the society, and enter on the grade of spiritual coadjutor, assuming that he is not confined to that of temporal coadjutor, who discharges only such functions as are open to lay-brothers, and who must be ten years in the society before being admitted to the vows. The time can be shortened at the general's pleasure, but such is the normal arrangement. Even this rank confers no share in the government, nor eligibility for the offices of the society. That is reserved for the professed, themselves subdivided into those of the three vows and of the four vows. It is these last alone, forming only a small percentage of the entire body, who constitute the real core of the society, whence its officers are all taken, and their fourth vow is one of special allegiance to the pope, promising to go in obedience to him for missionary purposes whensoever and whithersoever he may order, — a pledge seriously qualified in practice, however, by the power given to the general of alone sending out or recalling any missionary. The constitutions enjoin, by a rule seldom dispensed with, that this final grade cannot be attained till the candidate has reached his forty-fifth year, which involves a probation of no fewer than thirty-one years for even such as have entered on the noviciate at the earliest legal age. These various members of the society are distributed in its noviciate houses, its colleges, its professed houses, and its mission residences. The question has long been hotly debated whether, in addition to these six avowed grades, there be not a seventh, answering in some degree to the Tertiaries of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, secretly affiliated to the society, and acting as its unsuspected emissaries in various lay positions. This class is styled in France “Jesuits of the short robe,” and some evidence in support of its actual existence was alleged during the lawsuits against the company under Louis XV. The Jesuits themselves deny the existence of any such body, and are able to adduce the negative disproof that no provision for it is to be found in their constitutions. On the other hand, there are clauses therein which make the creation of such
a class perfectly feasible if thought expedient. One is the power given to the general to receive candidates secretly, and to conceal their admission, for which there is a remarkable precedent in the case of Francis Borgia, duke of Gandia, afterwards himself general of the society; the other is an even more singular clause, providing for the admission of candidates to the company by persons who are not themselves members of it. The known facts on either side are insufficient for a decisive verdict, and “Not proven” is the only impartial judgment possible. The general, who should by the statutes of the society reside permanently at Rome, holds in his hands the right of appointment, not only to the office of provincial over each of the great districts into which the houses are mapped, but to the offices of each house in particular, no shadow of electoral right or even suggestion being recognized.
The superiors and rectors of all houses and colleges in Europe must report weekly to their provincial on all matters concerning the members of the society and all outsiders with whom they may have had dealings of any sort. Those employed in district missions report at such longer intervals as the provincial may fix. The provincial, for his part, must report monthly to the general, giving him a summary of all details which have reached himself. But, as a check on him, all superiors of houses in his province are to make separate reports directly to the general once in three months, and further to communicate with him without delay every time any matter of importance occurs, irrespective of any information which the provincial may have forwarded. Nor is this all; an elaborate system of espionage and delation forms part of the recognized order of every house, and, in direct contrast to the ancient indictment and confession of faults in open conventual chapter, every inmate of a house is liable to secret accusation to its superior, while the superior himself may be similarly delated to the provincial or the general.
Nor is the general himself exempt from control on the part of the society, lest by any possibility he might prove, from disaffection or error, unfaithful to its interests. A consultative council is imposed on him by the general congregation, consisting of six persons, whom he may neither select nor remove, — namely, four assistants, each representing a nation, an admonisher or adviser (resembling the adlatus of a military commander) to warn him of any faults or mistakes, and his confessor. One of these must be in constant attendance on him; and, while he is not at liberty to abdicate his office, nor to accept any dignity or office outside it without the assent of the society, he may yet be suspended or deposed by its authority. No such instance, however, has yet occurred in Jesuit history, although steps in this direction were once taken in the case of a general who had set himself against the current feeling of the society. With so widely ramifying and complex a system in full working order, controlled by the hand of one man, the Company of Jesus has been aptly defined as “a naked sword, whose hilt is at Rome, and whose point is every where.”
There would seem at first to be an effectual external check provided, however, in the fact that, while all the officers of the society, except the council aforesaid, hold of the general, he in turn holds of the pope, and is his liegeman directly, as well as in virtue of the fourth vow, which he has taken in common with the other professed. But such is the extraordinary skill with which the relations of the society to the papacy were originally drafted by Loyola, and subsequently worked by his successors, that it has always remained organically independent, and might very conceivably break with Rome without imperilling its own existence. The general has usually stood towards the pope much as a powerful grand feudatory of the Middle Ages
did towards a weak titular lord paramount, or perhaps as the captain of a splendid host of “Free Companions” did towards a potentate with whom he chose to take temporary and precarious service; and the shrewd Roman populace have long shown their recognition of this fact by styling these two great personages severally the “White Pope” and the “Black Pope.” In truth, the society has never, from the very first, obeyed the pope, whenever its will and his happened to run counter to each other. Even in the very infancy of the company, Loyola himself used supplications and arguments to the pope to dissuade him from enforcing injunctions likely to prove incompatible with the original plan, and on each occasion succeeded in carrying his point; while his immediate successors more openly resisted Paul IV. when attempting to enforce the daily recitation of the breviary on the clerks of the society, and to limit the tenure of the generalship to three years, and Pius V. when following his predecessor's example in the former respect. Sixtus V. having undertaken with a high hand the wholesale reform of the company, including the change of its name from “Society of Jesus” to “Society of Ignatius,” met with strenuous opposition, and the fulfilment of Bellarmine's prophecy that he would not survive the year 1590 was looked on less as the accomplishment of a prediction than of a threat, — an impression deepened by the sudden death of his successor, Urban VII., eleven days after his election, who, as Cardinal Castagna, had been actively co-operating with Sixtus in his plans. The accuracy of a similar forecast made by Bellarmine as to Clement VIII., who was also at feud with the society, and who died before he could carry out his intended measures, confirmed popular suspicion. Urban VIII., Innocent XI., Alexander VIII., and Clement XII. vainly contended against the doctrines taught in Jesuit books and colleges, and could effect no change. Nine popes fruitlessly condemned the “Chinese rites,” whereby the Jesuit missionaries had virtually assimilated Christianity to heathenism, and the practical reply of the latter was to obtain in 1700 an edict from the emperor of China, in opposition to the papal decree, declaring that there was nothing idolatrous or superstitious in the inculpated usages, while in 1710 they flung Cardinal Tournon, legate of Clement XI., into the prison of the Inquisition at Macao, where he perished; and finally, they disobeyed the brief of suppression issued by Clement XIV. in 1773, which enjoined them to disperse at once, to send back all novices to their houses, and to receive no more members. It is thus clear that the society has always regarded itself as an independent power, ready indeed to co-operate with the papacy so long as their roads and interests are the same, and to avail itself to the uttermost of the many pontifical decrees in its own favour, but drawing the line far short of practical submission when their interests diverge.
So constituted, with a skilful combination of strictness and laxity, of complex organization with the minimum of friction in working, the society was admirably devised for its purpose of introducing a new power into the church and the world, and for carrying out effectively every part of its vast programme. Thus equipped, its services to Roman Catholicism have been incalculable. The Jesuits alone rolled back the tide of Protestant advance when that half of Europe which had not already shaken off its allegiance to the papacy was threatening to do so, and the whole honours of the counter-Reformation are theirs singly. They had the sagacity to see, and to admit in their correspondence with their superiors, that the Reformation, as a popular movement, was fully justified by the gross ignorance, negligence, and open vice of the Catholic clergy, whether secular or monastic; and they were shrewd enough to discern the only possible remedies. At a time when primary and even secondary education had in most places
become a mere effete and pedantic adherence to obsolete methods, they were bold enough to innovate, less in system than in materials, and, putting fresh spirit and devotion into the work, not merely taught and catechized in a new, fresh, and attractive manner, besides establishing free schools of good quality, but provided new manuals and schoolbooks for their pupils, which were an enormous advance on those they found in use, so that for nearly three centuries the Jesuits were accounted the best schoolmasters in Europe, as they were, till their forcible suppression the other day, confessedly the best in France, — besides having always conciliated the good will of their pupils by mingled firmness and gentleness as teachers. And, although their own methods have in time given way to further improvements, yet they revolutionized instruction as completely as Frederick the Great did modern warfare, and have thus acted, whether they meant it or not, as pioneers of human progress. Again, when the regular clergy had sunk into the moral and intellectual slough which is pictured for us in the writings of Erasmus and in the powerful satire Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, while there was little of a better kind visible in the lives of the parochial priesthood, the Jesuits won back respect for the clerical calling by their personal culture and the unimpeachable purity of their lives. These are qualities which they have all along carefully maintained, and probably no body of men in the world has been so free from the reproach of discreditable members, or has kept up an equally high average level of intelligence and conduct. As preachers, too, they delivered the pulpit from the bondage of an effete scholasticism, and reached at once a clearness and simplicity of treatment such as the English pulpit scarcely begins to exhibit till after the days of Tillotson; while in literature and theology they count a far larger number of respectable writers than any other religious society can boast. It is in the mission-field, however, that their achievements have been most remarkable, which might fully justify their taking as their motto —
“Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?”
Whether toiling amongst the teeming millions of Hindustan and China, labouring amongst the Hurons and Iroquois of North America, governing and civilizing the natives of Brazil and Paraguay, in the missions and “reductions,” or ministering, at the hourly risk of his life, to his coreligionists in England under Elizabeth and James I., the Jesuit appears alike devoted, indefatigable, cheerful, and worthy of hearty admiration and respect.
Nevertheless, two most startling and indisputable facts meet the student who pursues the history of this unique society. The first is the universal suspicion and hostility it has incurred, — not, as might reasonably be expected, merely from those Protestants whose avowed and most successful foe it has been, nor yet from the enemies of all clericalism and religious dogma, to whom it is naturally the embodiment of all they most detest, but from every Roman Catholic state and nation in the world, with perhaps the insignificant exception of Belgium. Next is the brand of ultimate failure which has invariably been stamped on all its most promising schemes and efforts. It controlled the policy of Spain, when Spain was aiming, with good reason to hope for success, at the hegemony of Europe, and Spain came out of the struggle well-nigh the last amongst the nations. It secured the monopoly of religious teaching and influence in France under Louis XIV. and XV. only to see an atheistic revolution break out under Louis XVI. and sweep over the nation after a century of such training. It guided the action of James II., lost the crown of England for the house of Stuart, and brought about the limitation of the throne to the Protestant succession. Its Japanese and Red Indian missions have vanished without
leaving a trace behind; its labours in Hindustan did but prepare the way for the English empire there; it was swept out of its Paraguayan domains without power of defence; and, having in our own day concentrated its efforts on the maintenance of the temporal power of the popes, and raised it almost to the rank of a dogma of the Catholic faith, it has seen Rome proclaimed as the capital of united Italy, and a Piedmontese sovereign enthroned in the Quirinal. These two phenomena demand some inquiry and analysis. As regards the former of them, the hostility the Jesuits have encountered has been twofold, political and moral or religious. There has been, from a very early date in their annals, a strong conviction prevalent that the famous motto of the society, “A.M.D.G.” {Ad majorem Dei gloriam), did not adequately represent its policy and motives, that its first and last aim was its own aggrandizement in power and wealth (for Julius II. had dispensed the general from the vow of poverty, and the colleges also were allowed to hold property), and that it spared no efforts to compass this end, even to the extent of embroiling cabinets, concocting conspiracies, kindling wars, and procuring assassinations. In several of these cases, notably as regards the charges which led to their first expulsion from France and Portugal, inclusive in the latter instance of their exile from Paraguay, the Jesuits are able to make one very telling reply, pleading that motives of statecraft alone, of an unworthy kind, and the evidence of untrustworthy and disreputable agents of their enemies, were suffered to decide the matter. In other cases, as for example the assassination of Henry IV. by Ravaillac, they deny all complicity, and no sufficient proof has ever been adduced against them. But, when full allowance has been made for such rejoinders, there remain several counts of the indictment which are but too clearly made out: as, for instance, their large share, as preachers, in fanning the flames of polemical hatred against the Huguenots under the last two Valois kings, their complicity in the plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth which followed on her excommunication by Pius V.; their responsibility for kindling the Thirty Years War; the part they took in prompting and directing the cruelties which marked the overthrow of Protestantism in Bohemia; their decisive influence in causing the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the expulsion of the Huguenots from the French dominions; and their accountability for precipitating the Franco-German war of 1870. And in regard to a large number of other cases where the evidence against them is defective, it is at least an unfortunate coincidence that there is always direct proof of some Jesuit having been in communication with the actual agents engaged. So it was with the massacre of St Bartholomew, almost immediately preceded by a visit of the Jesuit general, Francis Borgia, to the French court, though there is no further evidence to connect him therewith; so with Châtel and Ravaillac, the unsuccessful and successful assassins of Henry IV.; so with Jaureguay and Balthasar Gerard, who held the like relation to William the Silent, prince of Orange; so (as is more familiarly known) with the accomplices in the Gunpowder Plot. In all these and several other instances, the precautions which would naturally, and even inevitably, be taken by skilled and wary diplomatists for their own protection are sufficient to account for the lack of direct proof against them, but it is not easy to explain the invariable presence of a Jesuit in the background, on any hypothesis which will secure the complete acquittal of the society from charges of the sort. It is sufficient to say here in illustration that the English Roman Catholics under Elizabeth, addressing the pope with regard to the severe penal laws which oppressed them, laid the whole blame of the Government's action on the Jesuits, as having provoked
it by their conspiracies; while the secular priests in England issued in 1601 by the pen of one of their number, William Watson (afterwards executed in 1603), a pamphlet known as Important Considerations, to the same effect.
The merited odium which has overtaken the Inquisition, usually officered by Dominicans, has induced the Jesuits, whose own controversial method has for the most part been different, to disclaim all connexion with that tribunal, and to represent their society as free from complicity in its acts. But, in truth, it was Ignatius Loyola himself who procured its erection in Portugal in 1545-6, and F. Nithard, one of the very few cardinals of the society, was inquisitor-general of that kingdom in 1655.
The charges against the Jesuits on moral and doctrinal grounds are not less precise, early, numerous, and weighty. Their founder himself was arrested more than once by the Inquisition, and required to give account of his belief and conduct. But Loyola, with all his powerful gifts of intellect, was entirely practical and ethical in his range, and had no turn whatever for speculation, nor desire to reason on, much less question, any of the received dogmas of his church. He was therefore acquitted on every occasion, and sagaciously applied for and obtained each time a formally attested certificate of his orthodoxy, knowing well that, in default of such documents, the fact of his arrest as a suspected heretic would be more distinctly recollected by opponents than that of his honourable dismissal from custody. His successors, however, have not been so fortunate. On doctrinal questions indeed, though their teaching on grace, especially in the form given it by Molina, one of their number, was directly Pelagian (the result of reaction from Luther's teaching, which they had combated in Germany), and condemned by several popes, yet their pertinacity in the long run carried the day, and gained a footing for their opinions which was denied to the opposite tenets of the Jansenists. But the accusations against their moral theology and their action as guides of conduct, nay, as themselves involved in many doubtful transactions, have not been so appeased. They were censured by the Sorbonne as early as 1554, chiefly at the instance of Eustache de Bellay, bishop of Paris, on grounds of which some were quite true, though others appear to have been at least exaggerations; but they can plead that no other theological faculty of the time joined in the condemnation. Melchior Cano, one of the ablest divines of the 16th century, never ceased to lift up his testimony against them, from their first beginnings till his own death in 1560, and, unmollified by the bribe of the bishopric of the Canaries, which their interest procured for him, succeeded in banishing them from the university of Salamanca. St Charles Borromeo, to whose original advocacy they owed much, and especially the exception made in their favour by the council of Trent (Sess. XXV., xvi.) from the restrictions it laid on other communities, retracted his protection, and expelled them from the colleges and churches which they occupied in his diocese and province of Milan, — a policy wherein he was followed in 1604 by his cousin and successor, the equally saintly Cardinal Frederick Borromeo. The credit of the society was, however, far more seriously damaged by the publication at Cracow in 1612 of an ingenious forgery (whose authorship has been variously ascribed to John Zaorowsky or to Cambilone and Schloss, all ex-Jesuits) entitled Monita Secreta, professing to be the authoritative secret instructions drawn up by the general Acquaviva and given by the superiors of the company to its various officers and members, and to have been discovered in MS. by Christian of Brunswick in the Jesuit college at Prague. It is full of suggestions for extending the influence of the Jesuits in various ways, for securing a footing in fresh places, for acquiring wealth, and so forth, all marked with
ambition, craft, and unscrupulousness. It had a wide success and popularity, passing through several editions, and, though declared a forgery by a congregation of cardinals specially appointed to examine into it, has not ceased to be reprinted and credited down to the present day. The truth seems to be that, although both caricature and libel, it was drafted by a shrewd and keen observer, who, seeing what the fathers actually did, travelled analytically backwards to find how they did it, and on what methodical system, conjecturally reconstructing the process, and probably coming very near the mark in not a few details. Later on, a formidable assault was made on their moral theology in the famous Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal, eighteen in number, issued under the pen-name of Louis de Montalte, from January 1656 to March 1657. Their wit, irony, eloquence, and finished style have kept them alive as one of the great French classics, a destiny more fortunate than that of two kindred works by Antoine Arnauld, his collaborator in the Provincial Letters, namely, Théologie Morale des Jesuites, consisting of extracts from writings of members of the society, and Morale Pratique des Jesuites, made up of narratives exhibiting the manner in which they carried out their own maxims in their personal action. The reply on behalf of the society to Pascal's charges of lax morality, apart from mere general denials (such as that embodied in F. Ravignan's name for the Provinciales, “Le Dictionnaire de la Calomnie”), is broadly as follows. (1) Ignatius Loyola himself, the founder of the society, had a special aversion from untruthfulness in all its forms, from quibbling, equivocation, or even studied obscurity of language, and it would be contrary to the spirit of conformity with his example and institutions for his followers to think and act otherwise. (2) Several of the cases cited by Pascal are mere abstract hypotheses, many of them now obsolete, argued on simply as matter of intellectual exercise, but having no practical bearing whatever. (3) Even such as do belong to the sphere of actual life are of the nature of counsel to spiritual physicians, how to deal with exceptional maladies, and were never intended to fix the standard of moral obligation for the general public. (4) The theory that they were intended for this latter purpose, and do represent the normal teaching of the Jesuit body, becomes more untenable in exact proportion as this immorality is insisted on, because it is matter of notoriety that the Jesuits themselves have been singularly free from personal, as distinguished from corporate, evil repute, and no one pretends that the large numbers of lay-folk whom they have educated or influenced exhibit any great moral inferiority to their neighbours. The third of these replies is the most cogent as regards Pascal, but the real weakness of his attack lies in that nervous dread of appeal to first principles and their logical results which has been the besetting snare of Gallicanism. Afraid to deal with the fact that the society was on the whole what its founder meant it to be, and was merely carrying out his programme, because that admission would have involved challenging Loyola's position as a canonized saint, and the action of the Holy See in approving his institute, Pascal was obliged to go on the historically untenable ground that the Jesuits of his day had degenerated from their original standard; and thus he was not at liberty to go down to that principle which underlies the whole theory of probabilism, namely, the substitution of external authority for the voice of conscience. Hence the ultimate failure of his brilliant attack. The same error of complaining against integral parts of the original system as though they were departures from its spirit marks the treatise of the Jesuit Mariana on certain faults in the government of the society, which was published at Bordeaux soon after his death, in Spanish, French, Latin,
and Italian, from a MS. taken from him when he was in prison. The evils he specifies are the spy system (which he declares to be carried so far that, if the general's archives at Rome should be searched, not one Jesuit's character would be found to escape), the monopoly of the higher offices in the hands of a small clique, the narrow range of study, and the absence of encouragement and recompense for the best men of the society. But any fair examination of the constitutions will show that all these belong to the original scheme of government, and should have been challenged on that ground, if at all. Yet, on the broad issue, Pascal's censures have in the main been justified by the subsequent teaching of the society, for the lax casuistry which he held up to ridicule has been formally reproduced in the most modern and popular Jesuit text book on the subject, that of F. Gary, while the works of Liguori and Scavini, though not of direct Jesuit origin, are yet interpenetrated with the same opinions. And the result of dispassionate examination of these and kindred works — always bearing in mind that no Jesuit writings can be published without special licence from the general, after careful scrutiny and review — is that the three principles of probabilism, of mental reservation, and of justification of means by ends, which collectively make up what educated men intend by the term “Jesuitry,” are recognized maxims of the society. As the last of these three is at once the most odious in itself and the charge which is most anxiously repelled, it is well to cite three leading Jesuit theologians in proof. Busembaum, whose Medulla Theologiæ has been more than fifty times printed, and lately by the Propaganda itself, lays down the maxim in the following terms: “Cum finis est licitus, etiam media sunt licita,” and, “Cui licitus est finis, etiam licent media.” Layman, similarly, in his Theologia Moralis, “Cui concessus est finis, concessa etiam sunt media ad finem ordinata;” and Wagemann, in his Synopsis Theologiæ Moralis, yet more tersely, “Finis determinat probitatem actus.” In point of fact, many rules of conduct based on these three principles have gradually percolated, as might have been expected, into popular catechisms, and so have weakened the plea that we are dealing only with technical manuals for a professional class; while the plausible defence from the fair average honesty and morality of the lay-folk taught by a clergy which uses these manuals, amounts simply to a confession that the ordinary secular conscience is a safer guide in morals than a Jesuit casuist, since the more nearly the code deducible from his text-books is conformed to the more widely must the pupil diverge from all accredited ethics.
Two causes have been at work to produce the universal failure of the great company in all its plans and efforts. And first stands its lack of powerful intellects. Nothing can be wider from the truth than the popular conception of the ordinary Jesuit as a being of almost superhuman abilities and universal knowledge. The company is without doubt a corps d'élite, and an average member of it is of choicer quality than the average member of any equally large body, besides being disciplined by a far more perfect drill. But it takes great men to carry out great plans, and of great men the company has been markedly barren from almost the first. Apart from its mighty founder, and his early colleague Francis Xavier, there are absolutely none who stand in the very first rank. They have had, no doubt, able administrators, like Acquaviva; methodical and lucid compilers, like the Bollandists and Cornelius a Lapide; learned and plausible controversialists, like Bellarmine; elegant preachers, as Bourdaloue, Segneri, and Vicyra; distinguished mathematicians, like Le Seur, Jacquier, and more lately Secehi; but even their one boldest and most original thinker, Denis Petau, has produced no permanent influence
over the current of human thought. They have had no Aquinas, no Anselm, no Bacon, no Richelieu. Men whom they trained and who broke loose from their teaching, Pascal, Descartes, Voltaire, have powerfully affected the philosophical and religious beliefs of great masses of mankind, but respectable mediocrity is the brand on the long list of Jesuit names in the catalogues of Alegambe and De Backer. This result is due chiefly to the destructive process of scooping out the will of the Jesuit novice, to replace it with that of his superior (as a watchmaker might fit a new movement into a case), and thereby annihilating in all instances those subtle qualities of individuality and originality which are essential to genius. Men of the highest stamp will either refuse to submit to the process, or will come forth from the mill with their finest qualities pulverized and useless. Nor is this all. The Ratio Studiorum, as devised by Acquaviva, and still followed in the colleges of the society, lays down rules which are incompatible with all breadth and progress in the higher forms of education. True to the anti-speculative and traditional side of Loyola's mind, it prescribes that even where religious topics are not in question, the teacher is not to permit any novel opinions or discussions to be mooted; nor to cite himself, or allow others to cite, the opinion of an author not of known repute; nor to teach or suffer to be taught anything contrary to the prevalent opinions of acknowledged doctors current in the schools. Obsolete and false opinions are not to be mentioned at all, even for refutation, nor are objections to received teaching to be dwelt on at any length. The professor of Biblical literature is always to support and defend the Vulgate reading, and to cite the Hebrew and Greek only when they can at least be reconciled therewith; while all versions except the LXX. (which is to be spoken of respectfully) are to be passed over entirely, save when they help to confirm the Vulgate text. In philosophy, Aristotle is to be always followed, and Aquinas generally, care being taken to speak respectfully of him even when abandoning his opinion. It is not wonderful that, under such a method of training, highly cultivated commonplace should be the inevitable average result, and that in proportion as Jesuit power has become dominant in Latin Christendom, the same doom of intellectual sterility, and consequent loss of influence with the higher and thoughtful classes, has spread from the part to the whole. The second cause which has blighted the efforts of the company is the lesson, too faithfully learnt and practised, of making its corporate interests the first object at all times and in all places. The most brilliant exception to this rule is found in some of the foreign missions of the society, and notably in that of St Francis Xavier. But Xavier quitted Europe in 1541, before the new society had hardened into its final mould, and never returned. His work, so far as we can gather from contemporary accounts, was not done on the true Jesuit lines, though the company has reaped all its credit; and it is even possible that had he succeeded Loyola as general of the Jesuits the institute might have been seriously and healthfully modified. It would almost seem that careful selection was made of the men of greatest piety and enthusiasm, such as Anchieta, Baraza, and Brebeuf, whose unworldliness made them less apt for the diplomatic intrigues of the society in Europe, to break new ground in the various foreign missions, where their successes would throw lustre on the society, and their scruples need never come into play. But such men are rare, and as they died off, their places had to be filled with more sophisticated and ordinary characters, whose one aim was to increase the power and resources of the society. Hence the condescension to heathen rites in Hindustan and China. The first successes of the Indian mission were entirely amongst the lowest class; but when Robert de Nobili, to win the
Brahmans, adopted their insignia and mode of life in 1605 — a step sanctioned by Gregory XV. in 1623 — the fathers who followed his example pushed the new caste-feeling so far as absolutely to refuse the ministrations and sacraments of religion to the pariahs, lest the Brahman converts should take offence, — an attempt which was reported to Rome by Norbert, a Capuchin, and by the bishop of Rosalia, and was vainly censured in the pontifical briefs of Innocent X. in 1645, Clement IX. in 1669, Clement XII. in 1734 and 1739, and Benedict XIV. in 1745. The Chinese rites, assailed with equal unsuccess by one pope after another, were not finally put down until 1744, by a bull of Benedict XIV. For Japan, where their side of the story is that best known, we have a remarkable letter, printed by Wadding, addressed to Paul V. by Soleto, a Franciscan missionary, who was martyred in 1624, in which he complains to the pope that the Jesuits had systematically postponed the spiritual welfare of the native Christians to their own convenience and advantage, while, as regards the test of martyrdom, no such result had followed on their teaching, but only on that of the other orders who had undertaken missionary work in Japan. Again, even in Paraguay, the most promising of all Jesuit undertakings, the evidence shows that the fathers, though civilizing the Guarani population just sufficiently to make them useful and docile servants, happier, no doubt, than they were before or after, stopped short there, and employed them simply in raising produce to be traded with for the interests of the society, in accordance with a privilege conferred on them by Gregory XIII., licensing them to engage in commerce.
These examples are sufficient to explain the final collapse of so many promising efforts. The individual Jesuit might be, and often was, a hero, saint, and martyr, but the system of which he was a part, and which he was obliged to administer, is fundamentally unsound, and in contravention of inevitable laws of nature, so that his noblest toils were foredoomed to failure, save in so far as they tended to ennoble and perfect himself, and offered a model for others to imitate.
The influence of the society since its revival in Latin Christendom has not been beneficial. It presents the seeming paradox of the strictest and most irreproachable body amongst the Roman clergy doing nothing to raise the general standard of clerical morals; of that which is collectively the best educated order setting itself to popularize merely emotional and material cults, to the practical neglect and disparagement of more spiritual agencies; of the most intellectual religious teachers deliberately eviscerating the understanding, and endeavouring to substitute mechanical submission to a word of command for intelligent and spontaneous assent to reasonable argument. And yet in all this they are but carrying out the fatal principles of the original institute. True to the teaching of that remarkable panegyric on the society, the Imago Primi Sæculi Societatis Jesu (probably written by John Tollenarius in 1640), they have identified the church with their own society, and have considered only what mode of action would make it more easily governed in the same spirit. It is thus for the advantage of such a scheme that laymen should reason as little as possible on questions of theology, that the fathers of the company should hold an acknowledged position of moral and intellectual superiority to the ordinary secular clergy, that all the threads of ecclesiastical authority should be gathered up into one hand, and that one hand in the stronger grasp of the society — a policy modelled exactly on the lines of the concordat of Napoleon I. with Pius VII. Hence the long preparation and elaborate intrigues which issued in the Vatican decrees of papal infallibility and immediate jurisdiction in all dioceses, the ultimate issues of which are still hidden in futurity.
History.
Such being in outline the constitution and character of the Company of Jesus, it remains to summarize its historical career. Don Inigo de Loyola, a nobleman of Guipuzcoa, brave and accomplished, but unversed in letters, was severely wounded at the siege of Pampeluna in 1521, when he was thirty years of age. Sent to his father's castle by his chivalrous captors, he was induced by the reading of some pious books, intended to divert the tedium of illness, to devote himself to a religious life. Quitting his home, he betook himself first to Montserrat and thence, in the garb of a pilgrim, to Manresa, a small town near Barcelona, whence, after serving for a time in the hospital, he withdrew to a cavern close at hand, where, amidst the practice of various austerities, he made the first draft of his famous Spiritual Exercises, a work which, often retouched and amplified in his later years, is one of the chief authoritative formularies of his society. Thence he proceeded by way of Barcelona to sail for Italy, and, after visiting Rome and Venice, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, intending if possible to establish a missionary society there for the conversion of the Mahometans. Compelled to withdraw by the provincial of the Franciscans, who feared a collision with the Turkish authorities, Loyola returned to Spain, and at thirty-three years of age attended school at Barcelona to acquire the rudiments of Latin, spending two years there between his studies and such missionary work as was possible for him. He then removed in 1526 to the newly founded university of Alcala, where he first began to gather round him a little band of fellow-workers, holding religious conferences amongst the students, and giving private instruction besides to various townsfolk. This conduct drew on him the suspicions of the Inquisition, but after a short imprisonment he was released, and migrated to Salamanca, whither two of his friends had preceded him. Here he was again thrown into prison on suspicion of heresy, and formed the plan of going to Paris on recovering his liberty, as a place where he could have more freedom of action, superior teaching, and a greater likelihood of finding able recruits in so central and populous a city for the society he was preparing to found. He reached Paris in 1528, and entered at the college of St Barbara in the university. Not until his sixth year of residence did he attempt the regular organization of the most promising of the young men whom he drew around him. It was in July 1534 that he opened his plans to them for starting a missionary society to work in the Holy Land, and the actual vows, binding the new companions to one another and to the sort of life they contemplated, or to direct service of the pope, should that prove impracticable, were taken in the crypt of Notre Dame de Montmartre on August 15, 1534, by Ignatius Loyola himself; Peter Faber or Le Fèvre, a Savoyard; Francis Xavier, Diego Laynez, Alfonso Salmeron, Nicolas Alfonso de Bobadilla, Spaniards; and Simon Rodriguez, a Portuguese. With his usual practical foresight, Loyola postponed the execution of their scheme till January 25, 1537, and provided for its possible modification or abandonment. Three more disciples speedily joined the infant society, Jean Codure, Claude le Jay, and Paschase Brouet. In March 1535 Loyola quitted Paris, committing his society to Faber, the eldest, and betook himself to Spain, where he remained a few months, and then proceeded to Venice, whence he wrote to summon his companions to join him. They left Paris on November 15, 1536, and reached Venice on January 6, 1537, where their leader had already gained three fresh recruits, Hosez and the two brothers D'Eguia. Remaining in Venice himself for prudential reasons, he sent all the others to Rome to solicit from Paul III. leave to go as missionaries to Jerusalem. They were aided in their application by Pedro Ortiz, the emperor's envoy, and readily obtained the desired permission, with further licence to be ordained priests by any bishop, on being duly qualified.
Returning to Venice, they were ordained on St John Baptist's Day, 1537, along with Loyola himself, by Vincenzio (or Antonio) Nigusanti, bishop of Arba. A war which broke out between Turkey and Venice made the intended journey to Palestine impracticable; and accordingly Loyola, Faber, and Laynez betook themselves to Rome, while the others dispersed themselves through the chief university towns of North Italy, and began their work as borne missionary preachers; and it was immediately before they separated on this occasion, at Vicenza in November 1537, that Loyola announced his intention that their fellow-ship should henceforward be known as the “Company of Jesus,” and that, abandoning their original plan of a purely Oriental mission, they should offer themselves to the pope as a special militia. It may be here remarked that the more popular name “Jesuits” seems to have been first used by Calvin, and it appears also in the register of the parliament of Paris as early as 1552, while the enemies of the society in Spain usually spoke of its members as “Inigistas,” after the name of its founder.
On their arrival at Rome, the three Jesuits were favourably received by Paul III., who at once appointed Faber to the chair of Biblical exegesis, and Laynez to that of scholastic theology, in the college of Sapienza. But they encountered much opposition, and were even charged with heresy, nay, when this accusation had been disposed of, there still were difficulties in the way of starting any new order. Despite the approval of Contarini, and the goodwill of the pope himself (who is said to have exclaimed, on perusing Loyola's papers, “The finger of God is here”), there was a strong and general feeling that the monastic system had broken down utterly, and could not be wisely developed further. Cardinal Guidiccioni, one of a committee of three appointed to examine the draft constitutions, was known to advocate the abolition of all existing orders save four, which were to be remodelled and put under strict control. And it was that very year, 1538, that a committee of cardinals, consisting of Reginald Pole, Contarini, Sadolet, Caraffa (afterwards Paul IV.), Fregoso, Aleander, and Badia, had just reported to the pope that the conventual orders were such a scandal to Christendom that they should be all abolished — “abolendos putamus omnes.” Not only so, but, when greater strictness of rule and of enclosure seemed the most needful reforms in communities which had become too secular in tone, the proposal of Loyola to make it a first principle that the members of his new institute should mix freely with the world, and be as little marked off as possible externally from secular life and usages, ran counter to all tradition and prejudice, save that Caraffa's then recent order of Theatines, from which Loyola copied some details, had taken some steps in the same direction.
Loyola and his companions, however, had little doubt of ultimat success, and so bound themselves, on April 15, 1539, to obey any superior chosen from amongst their body, and added on May 4 certain other rules, the most important of which was the vow of special allegiance to the pope for mission purposes, to be taken by all members of the society. But Guidiccioni, on a careful study of the papers, changed his mind, — partly, it is supposed, because of the strong interest in the new scheme exhibited by the king of Portugal, who instructed his ambassador to press it on the pope, and to ask Loyola himself for some priests of his society for mission work in Portugal and its Indian possessions, and accordingly Xavier and Rodriguez were sent to the king in March 1540. And on September 27, 1540, the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiæ was published, confirming the new order, but limiting its members to sixty, a restriction which was removed by a later bull in March 1543. In the Latin translation of the original draft constitutions, approved by the pope, the word compañia, was represented by societas, though cohors or some such military term would have more exactly reproduced the founder's idea, and thus the Jesuit body is known indifferently as “Company” or “Society,” while the title “Order” is never officially given to it. This title was finally settled by Gregory XIV. in a bull of June 28, 1594.
On April 7, 1541, Loyola was unanimously chosen superior. His refusal of this post was overruled, so he entered on his new office on April 13, and on April 15 the newly constituted society took its formal corporate vows as a religious order in the church of St Paul-without-the-Walls. The general entered on his duties by holding public catechizings in Sta Maria in Strata for eight and forty days, a precedent followed ever since by his successors in office. Scarcely was the society launched when its members dispersed in various directions to their new tasks. Salmeron and Brouet were sent, clothed with the powers of papal legates, on a secret mission to Ireland, to encourage the native clergy and people in resistance to the religious changes introduced by Henry VIII.; Bobadilla went to Naples; Faber, first to the diet of Worms, and then to Spain; Laynez and Le Jay to Germany, while their general busied himself in founding the convent of St Martha at Rome for female penitents, and that of St Catherine for unprotected young women, as also in perfecting the original draft of the constitutions, a task he did not finish till 1550. Success crowned these first efforts, and the earliest college of the society was founded at Coimbra in 1542 by King John III. of Portugal, who secured the appointment of Simon Rodriguez as its rector. It was designed as a training-school to feed the Indian mission, of which Francis Xavier had already taken the oversight, while a seminary at Goa was the second institution founded out of Rome in connexion with the society. In Spain, national pride in the founder aided their cause almost as much as royal patronage in Portugal, and the next house of the society after Goa was opened at Gandia under the protection of its duke, Francis Borgia; in Germany they were eagerly welcomed as the only persons able to meet the Lutherans on equal terms; and only in France, of the countries still belonging to the Roman communion, was their advance checked, owing to political distrust of their Spanish origin, together with the hostility of the Sorbonne and the bishop of Paris. However, after many difficulties, they succeeded in getting a footing through the help of Duprat, bishop of Clermont, who founded a college for them in 1545 in the town of Billom, besides making over to them his house at Paris, the Hôtel de Clermont, which became the nucleus of the afterwards famous college of Louis-le-Grand, while a formal legalization was granted to them by the states-general at Poissy in 1561.
In Rome, Paul III.'s favour did not lessen. He bestowed on them the church of St Andrea, where now Cardinal Alessandro Farnese's stately erection, the Gesù, stands, and conferred on them at the same time the more valuable privilege of altering their own statutes, besides two others procured in 1546, which Loyola had still more at heart, as touching the very essence of his institute, namely, exemption from ecclesiastical offices and dignities, and from the task of acting as directors and confessors to convents of nuns. The former of these measures effectually stopped any drain of the best members away from the society, and limited their hopes within its bounds, by putting them more fully at the general's disposal, especially as it was provided that the final vows could not be annulled, and that only the joint action of the general and the pope could dismiss a professed member from the society. The regulation as to convents seems due partly to a desire to avoid the worry and expenditure of time involved in the discharge of such offices, and partly to a conviction that penitents of the kind would be of no effectual use to the society; whereas Loyola, against the wishes of several of his companions, laid much stress on the duty of accepting the post of confessor to kings, queens, and women of high rank, when opportunity presented itself. And the year 1546 is notable in the annals of the society as that in which it embarked on its great educational career, especially by the annexation of free day-schools to all its colleges.
The council of Trent did much to increase the reputation of the new society, for the pope chose three of its members, Laynez, Faber, and Salmeron, to act as his theologians in that assembly, and they had no little influence in framing its dogmatic definitions and decrees. In 1548 the company received a valuable recruit in the person of Francis Borgia, duke of Gandia, afterwards third general, while two important events marked 1550, — the foundation of the Collegio Romano, and a fresh confirmation of the society by pope Julius III. The German college, for the children of poor nobles, was founded in 1552, and in the same year Loyola firmly settled the discipline of the society by putting down with promptness and severity some attempts at independent action on the part of Rodriguez at Coimbra; while 1553 saw the despatch of a mission to Abyssinia, and the first quarrel of the society with the pope, who thought that the Spanish Jesuits were taking part with the emperor against the Holy See, but was reconciled by the good offices of Ferdinand, king of the Romans. Paul IV. (whose election at first alarmed the Jesuits, for they had found him not very friendly as Cardinal Caraffa) proved as favourable to them as his predecessors; and, when Ignatius Loyola died in 1556 under his pontificate, the society already counted forty-five professed fathers and two thousand ordinary members, distributed over twelve provinces, with more than a hundred colleges and houses. After two years' interregnum, Laynez, who had acted as vicar in the meanwhile, was elected general in 1558, and was successful in a struggle with the pope, who desired to enforce the recitation of the breviary on the society, and to limit the tenure of the generalship to a term of three years, but could effect neither object. Laynez also succeeded in increasing further the already enormous powers of the general by adding these four clauses to the constitutions: — that the general alone can make contracts binding the society; that he can authoritatively gloss and interpret the rules and laws, can enact new or repeal old laws, and may have prisons for the incarceration of refractory members. He took a leading part in the colloquy of Poissy in 1561 between the Catholics and Huguenots, and obtained, as already said, a legal footing from the states-general for colleges of the society in France. He died in 1564, leaving the society increased to eighteen provinces, with a hundred and thirty colleges, and was succeeded by Francis Borgia. It was during his generalship that the greatest favour yet vouchsafed the company was bestowed by Pius V., who not only confirmed by bull all former privileges, and extended to it further every privilege that had been or might afterwards be granted to any order with vows of poverty, but also decreed that these letters should at no time be capable of being revoked, limited, or derogated from by the Holy See, nor be included within any revocation of similar or dissimilar privileges, but be for ever excepted therefrom. It was a trifling set-off to such a grant that the pope in 1567 again enjoined the fathers to recite the canonical hours in choir, and to admit only the professed to priest's orders, especially as Gregory XIII. rescinded both these injunctions in 1573; and indeed, as regards the hours, all that Pius V. was able to obtain was the nominal concession that the breviary should be recited in the professed houses only, and that not of necessity by more than two persons at a time. Eberhard Mercurian, a Fleming, succeeded Borgia in 1572 (being forced on the company by the pope, in preference to Polanco, Loyola's secretary and their vicar-general, who was rejected partly as a Spaniard, and still more because he was a “New Christian” of Jewish origin, and therefore objected to in Spain itself), and was in turn followed by Claudio Acquaviva, an able and strong-willed man, who sat from 1581 to 1615, a time almost exactly coinciding with the high tide of the great and successful counter-Reformation movement, chiefly due to the Jesuits, which had begun under Borgia. It was, however, during his generalship that the company's evil reputation began to eclipse its good report, that they first had the pope their avowed enemy, and that they were driven from England (whither they had come chiefly from the seminary founded at Douay by Cardinal Allen in 1568), once in 1581, and again in 1601, as conspirators against the life of Queen Elizabeth, and later again for their share in the Gunpowder Plot; from France as accomplices in the attempt of Châtel to assassinate Henry IV.; and from Antwerp as having resisted the pacification of Ghent. It is true that the edict of the parliament of Paris in 1594, which banished them from France, was revoked in 1603, by desire of Henry IV., who permitted them to return under conditions; and this fact has been much relied on by Jesuit writers in proof of their innocence of all complicity in Châtel's plot. But as Sully has recorded for us that Henry declared his only motive to be the expediency of not driving them into a corner, and so inducing them to murder him through despair or revenge, and that his only hope of tranquillity lay in appeasing them, his conduct does not tell much in their favour.
It was also during Acquaviva's generalship that Philip II. of Spain complained bitterly of the company to Pope Sixtus V., and encouraged him in those plans of reform which were cut short by his death in 1590, and also that the long-protracted discussions on grace, wherein the Dominicans contended against the Jesuits, were carried on at Rome, with little practical result, by the Congregation De Auxiliis, which began to sit in 1598, and continued till 1607. He saw too the expulsion of the Jesuits from Venice in 1606 for siding with Paul V. when he placed the republic under an interdict, but did not live to see their recall, which took place at the intercession of Louis XIV. in 1657. But the concessions made to the company by Gregory XIV., successor of Sixtus V., during his short reign of twelve months, almost seemed to compensate for all these troubles; for he not only confirmed all existing privileges, but conferred also that of being able to expel members of the society without any form of trial, or even documentary procedure, besides denouncing excommunication against every one save the pope or his legates who directly or indirectly infringed the constitutions of the society, or attempted to bring about any change therein.
Under Vitelleschi, Acquaviva's successor, the first centenary of the society was held on September 25, 1639, the hundredth anniversary of the verbal approbation given to the draft constitutions by Paul III., and there were then thirty-six provinces, with eight hundred houses, containing fifteen thousand Jesuits. It was in the following year that the great controversy which raged for a century in the Latin Church broke out by the posthumous publication of the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres, in which the Jesuits took the leading part, and finally secured the victory for their teaching throughout the Roman obedience. It was in this same year 1640 that, considering themselves ill-used by the count-duke Olivarez, prime minister of Philip IV. of Spain, they powerfully aided the revolution which placed the duke of Braganza on the throne of Portugal, and their services were rewarded with a practical control of ecclesiastical and almost of civil affairs in that kingdom, which lasted for more than a hundred years.
The society also gained ground steadily in France, for, though held in check during Richelieu's life, and little more favoured by Mazarin, yet from the moment Louis XIV. assumed the reins of government, their star was in the ascendant, and Jesuit confessors, the most celebrated of whom were La Chaise and Letellier, guided the policy of the king, not hesitating to take his side in his quarrel with the Holy See, which nearly resulted in a schism, nor to sign the Galilean articles. How their hostility to the Huguenots forced on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and their war against Jansenism did not cease till the very walls of Port Royal were demolished in 1710, even to the abbey church itself, and the bodies of the holy dead taken with every mark of insult from their graves, and literally flung to the dogs to devour, is well known. But, while thus gaining power in one direction, the company was losing it in others. The Japanese mission had vanished in blood by 1651, and, though many Jesuit fathers and their converts died bravely as martyrs for the faith, yet it is impossible to acquit them of a large share in the causes of that overthrow. And it was about this same period that the grave scandal of the Chinese and Malabar rites, already referred to, began to attract attention in Europe, and to make thinking men ask seriously whether the Jesuit missionaries taught anything which could be fairly called Christianity at all. When it is remembered, too, that they decided in a council at Lima that it was inexpedient to impose any act of Christian devotion except baptism on their South American converts, without the greatest precautions, on the ground of intellectual difficulties, it is not wonderful that this doubt was not satisfactorily cleared up, notably in face of the charges brought against the society by Bernardin de Cardonas, bishop of Paraguay, and the saintly Palafox, bishop of Angelopolis in Mexico, whom they persecuted till he had to fly for his life, and could be protected by the pope himself only by his translation to a European see. As regards their North American work, the Abbé Badiche, continuator of Helyot, pays the Jesuits the doubtful compliment of saying that the Red Indian tribes which accepted the gospel with joy, “learned to mingle Jesus Christ and France together in their affection.”
The seeds of decay were already germinating within the company itself. A succession of devout but incapable generals after the death of Acquaviva saw the gradual secularization of tone by the flocking in of recruits of rank and wealth, desirous to share in the glories and influence of the company, but not well adapted to increase them, and too readily admitted on merely temporal grounds; while the old strict discipline was relaxed, as the professed fathers gradually encroached on the general's authority, till they went the length, in 1661, of appointing a vicar-general with powers which practically superseded those of the general, Goswin Nickel, whom they did not think it expedient to depose formally. And, though the political weight of the company continued to increase in the cabinets of Europe, yet it was being steadily weakened internally. They abandoned, too, the system of free education, which had won them so much influence and honour; by attaching themselves exclusively to the interests of courts, they lost favour with the middle and lower classes; and, above all, their monopoly of power and patronage in France, with the fatal use they had made of it, drew down the bitterest hostility upon them. It was indeed to their credit that the Encyclopedists attacked them as the foremost representatives of Christianity, but they are accountable in no small degree for the unfavourable opinion of the nature and merits of Christianity itself which their opponents entertained. But that part of the policy of the company which proved most fatal to it, and served as the pretext of the attacks before which it fell, was its activity, wealth, and importance as a great trading firm, with branch houses scattered over the richest producing countries in the world. Its founder, with a wise instinct, had forbidden the accumulation of wealth; its own constitutions, as revised in the eighty-fourth decree of the sixth general congregation, had forbidden all pursuits of a commercial nature, as also had various popes, rescinding the decree of Gregory XIII.; but nevertheless, the trade went on unceasingly. The first mutterings of the storm which was soon to break were heard in a severe brief issued in 1741 by Benedict XIV., the most learned and able of the later popes, wherein he denounced the Jesuits as “disobedient, contumacious, captious, and reprobate persons,” and enacted many stringent regulations for their better government; and this was followed up by two bulls, Ex quo singulari in 1742, and Omnium sollicitudinum in 1744, striking at their continued insubordination in the matter of the Chinese rites, which, however, did not save them from an edict of banishment from China itself in 1753, and the last of them disappeared thence in 1774.
The first serious attack came from a country where they had been long dominant. In 1753 Spain and Portugal exchanged certain American provinces with each other, which involved a transfer of sovereign rights over Paraguay, but it was provided that the populations should severally migrate also, that the subjects of each crown might remain the same as before. The inhabitants of the “reductions,” whom the Jesuits had trained in the use of European arms and discipline, rose in revolt, and attacked the troops and authorities. Their previous docility, and their entire submission to the Jesuit missionaries, left no doubt possible as to the source of their rebellion, though direct proof was, as usual, lacking; and the matter was not soon forgotten. In 1757 Carvalho, marquis of Pombal, prime minister of Joseph I. of Portugal, dismissed the three Jesuit chaplains of the king, and named three secular priests in their stead. He next complained to Benedict XIV. that the trading operations of the society hampered the commercial prosperity of the nation, and asked for remedial measures. The pope granted a visitation of the society, and committed it to Cardinal Saldanha, a close intimate of Pombal's. He issued a severe decree against the Jesuits, and ordered the confiscation of all their merchandise.
But at this juncture Benedict XIV. died, and was succeeded, much as had happened on several previous occasions, by a pope strongly in favour of the Jesuits, Cardinal Rezzonico, who took the title of Clement XIII. Pombal, finding that no help was to be expected from this quarter, adopted other means. The king was fired at and wounded on returning from an assignation with his mistress, the marchioness of Tavora, September 3, 1758. The duke of Aveiro, the marquis of Tavora, and other persons of high rank were tried and executed for conspiracy, while some of the Jesuits, who had undoubtedly been in communication with them, were charged, on evidence whose value there are no certain means of testing, but which seems very doubtful, with complicity in the attempted assassination. Pombal charged the whole society with its guilt, and, unwilling to await the dubious issue of an application he had made to the pope for licence to try them in the civil courts, whence they were exempt, issued a decree on September 1, 1759, ordering their immediate deportation from Portugal and all its dependencies, and their supersession by the bishops in the schools and universities. Those in Portugal were at once shipped to Italy, and such as were in the colonies expelled speedily after. In France, Madame de Pompadour was their enemy, — it is said, because they endeavoured to make her break off her connexion with Louis XV., and refused her absolution on any other terms; but the immediate cause of their ruin was the bankruptcy of F. Lavalette, the Jesuit administrator of Martinique, a daring speculator, who failed for 2,400,000 francs, and ruined some French commercial houses of note. Ricci, then general of the Jesuits, repudiated the debt, alleging lack of authority on Lavalette's part to pledge the credit of the society, and was sued by the creditors. Losing his cause, he appealed to the parliament of Paris, and it, to decide the issue raised by Ricci, required the constitutions of the Jesuits to be produced in evidence, and affirmed the judgment of the courts below. But the publicity given to a document scarcely known till then (indeed the first authoritative edition of the Constitutions is that of Prague in 1757) raised the utmost indignation against the company. A royal commission, appointed by the duke of Choiseul to examine the constitutions, convoked a private assembly of fifty-one archbishops and bishops under the presidency of Cardinal de Luynes, all of whom except six voted that the unlimited authority of the general was incompatible with the laws of France, and that the appointment of a resident vicar, subject to those laws, was the only solution of the question fair on all sides. Ricci replied with the historical answer, “Sint ut sunt, aut non sint”; and after some further delay, during which much interest was exerted in their favour, the Jesuits were suppressed by an edict in November 1764, but suffered to remain on the footing of secular priests, a grace withdrawn in 1767, when they were expelled from the kingdom. In the very same year, Charles III. of Spain, a monarch known for personal devoutness, convinced, on evidence not now forthcoming, that the Jesuits were plotting against his authority, prepared, through his minister D'Aranda, a decree suppressing the society in every part of his dominions. Sealed despatches were sent to every Spanish colony, to be opened on the same day, April 2, 1767, when the measure was to take effect in Spain itself, and the expulsion was relentlessly carried out, nearly six thousand priests being deported from Spain alone, and sent to the Italian coast, whence, however, they were repelled by the orders of the pope and Ricci himself, finding a refuge at Corte in Corsica, after some months' suffering in overcrowded vessels at sea. The general's object may probably have been to accentuate the harshness with which the fathers had been treated, and so to increase public sympathy, but the actual result of his policy was blame for the cruelty with which he enhanced their misfortunes, for the poverty of Corsica made even a bare subsistence scarcely procurable for them there. The Bourbon courts of Naples and Parma followed the example of France and Spain, and Clement XIII. retorted with a bull launched at the weakest adversary, and declaring the rank and title of the duke of Parma forfeit. The Bourbon sovereigns threatened to make war on the pope in return (France, indeed, seizing on the county of Avignon), and a joint note demanding a retractation, and the abolition of the Jesuits, was presented by the French ambassador at Rome on December 10, 1768, in the name of France, Spain, and the Two Sicilies. The pope, a man of eighty-two, died of apoplexy, brought on by the shock, early in 1769. Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli, a Franciscan, was chosen to succeed him, and took the name of Clement XIV. He endeavoured to avert the decision forced upon him, but, as Portugal joined the Bourbon league, and Maria Theresa with her son the emperor Joseph II. ceased to protect the Jesuits, there remained only the petty kingdom of Sardinia in their favour, though the fall of Choiseul in France raised the hopes of the society for a time. The pope began with some preliminary measures, permitting first the renewal of lawsuits against the society, which had been suspended by papal authority, and which, indeed, had in no case been ever successful at Rome. He then closed the Collegio Romano, on the plea of its insolvency, seized on the houses at Frascati and Tivoli, and broke up the establishments in Bologna and the Legations at large. Finally, on July 21, 1773, the famous brief Dominus ac Redemptor appeared, suppressing the Society of Jesus. This remarkable document opens by citing a long series of precedents for the suppression of religious orders by the Holy See, amongst which occurs the ill-omened instance of the Templars. It then briefly sketches the objects and history of the Jesuits themselves. It speaks of their defiance of their own constitution, expressly revived by Paul V., forbidding them to meddle in politics; of the great ruin to souls caused by their quarrels with local ordinaries and the other religious orders, their conformity to heathen usages in the East, and the disturbances, resulting in persecutions of the church, which they had stirred up even in Catholic countries, so that several popes had been obliged to punish them. Seeing then that the Catholic sovereigns had been forced to expel them, that many bishops and other eminent persons demanded their extinction, and that the society had ceased to fulfil the intention of its institute, the pope declares it necessary for the peace of the church that it should be suppressed, extinguished, abolished, and abrogated for ever, with all its rites, houses, colleges, schools, and hospitals; transfers all the authority of its general or officers to the local ordinaries; forbids the reception of any more novices, directing that such as were actually in probation should be dismissed, and declaring that profession in the society should not serve as a title to holy orders. Priests of the society are given the option of either joining other orders or remaining as secular clergy, under obedience to the ordinaries, who are empowered to grant or withhold from them licences to hear confessions. Such of the fathers as are engaged in the work of education are permitted to continue, on condition of abstaining from lax and
questionable doctrines, apt to cause strife and trouble. The question of missions is reserved, and the relaxations granted to the society in such matters as fasting, reciting the hours, and reading heretical books, are withdrawn; while the brief ends with clauses carefully drawn to bar any legal exceptions that might be taken against its full validity and obligation. It has been necessary to cite these heads of the brief, because the apologists of the society allege that no motive influenced the pope save the desire of peace at any price, and that he did not believe in the culpability of the fathers. The categorical charges made in the document, and that in the most solemn fashion, rebut this plea. The pope followed up this brief by appointing a congregation of cardinals to take possession of the temporalities of the society, and armed it with summary powers against all who should attempt to retain or conceal any of the property. He also threw Lorenzo Ricci, the general, into prison in the castle of St Angelo, where he died in 1775, under the pontificate of Pius VI., who, though not unfavourable to the company, and owing his own advancement to it, dared not release him, probably because his continued imprisonment was made a condition by the powers who enjoyed a right of veto in papal elections. In September 1774 Clement XIV. died after much suffering, and the question has been hotly debated ever since whether poison administered by the Jesuits was the cause of his death. It is impossible to decide the doubt, as the opinions and evidence on each side are nearly balanced. On the one hand, Salicetti, the pope's physician, denied that the body showed signs of poisoning, and Tanucci, Neapolitan ambassador at Rome, who had a large share in procuring the brief of suppression, entirely acquits the Jesuits, while F. Theiner, no friend to the company, does the like. On the other hand, Scipio de' Ricci, bishop of Pistoia, nephew and heir of the unfortunate general, distinctly charges the Jesuits with the crime, as also does Cardinal de Bernis; and the report by the Spanish minister to the court of Madrid, printed by De Potter in his Vie et Mémoires de Scipion de Ricci, vol. iii. pp. 151-74, contains the noteworthy fact that the date of the pope's death was predicted beforehand, notably in a statement made by the vicar-general of Padua to the secretary of the congregation for Jesuit affairs, that several members of the company, believing him to be one of their friends, told him that the pope would die before the end of September.
At the date of this suppression, the company had 41 provinces and 22,589 members, of whom 11,295 were priests. Far from submitting to the papal brief, the Jesuits, after some ineffectual attempts at direct resistance, withdrew into the territories of the non-Roman-Catholic sovereigns of Russia and Prussia, Frederick II. and Catherine II., both of them freethinkers, who became their active friends and protectors; and the fathers alleged as a principle, in so far as their theology is concerned, that no papal bull is binding in a state whose sovereign has not approved and authorized its publication and execution. Russia formed the headquarters of the company; and two forged briefs were speedily circulated, being dated June 9 and June 29, 1774, approving their establishment in Russia, and implying the repeal of the brief of suppression. But these are contradicted by the tenor of five genuine briefs, all issued in September of that year to the archbishop of Gnesen, and making certain assurances to the Jesuits, on condition of their complete obedience to the injunctions already laid on them. They also pleaded a verbal approbation by Pius VI., technically known as an Oraculum vivæ vocis, but no proof of either its existence or its validity is forthcoming.
They elected three Poles successively as generals, taking, however, only the title of vicars, till on March 7, 1801, Pius VII. granted them liberty to reconstitute themselves in North Russia, and permitted Karen, then vicar, to exercise full authority as general. On July 30, 1804, a similar "brief restored the Jesuits in the Two Sicilies, at the express desire of Ferdinand IV., the pope thus anticipating the further action of 1814, when, by the brief Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum, he revoked the action of Clement XIV., and formally restored the society to corporate legal existence, yet not only omitted any censure of his predecessor's conduct, but all vindication of the Jesuits from the heavy charges in the brief Dominus ac Redemptor. In France, even after their expulsion in 1765, they had maintained a precarious footing in the country under the partial disguise and names of “Fathers of the Faith,” or “Clerks of the Sacred Heart,” but were obliged by Napoleon I. to retire in 1804. They reappeared under their true name in 1814, and obtained formal licence in 1822, but became the objects of so much hostility that Charles X. deprived them by ordinance of the right of instruction, and obliged all applicants for licences as teachers to make oath that they did not belong to any community unrecognized by the laws. They were dispersed again by the revolution of July 1830, but soon reappeared, and, though put to much inconvenience during the latter years of Louis Philippe's reign, notably in 1845, maintained their footing, recovered the right to teach freely after the revolution of 1848, and gradually became the leading educational and ecclesiastical power in France, notably under the second empire, till they were once more expelled by the Ferry laws of 1880, though they have been quietly returning since the execution of those measures. In Spain they came back with Ferdinand VII., but were expelled at the constitutional rising in 1820, returning in 1823, when the duke of Angoulême's army replaced Ferdinand on his throne; they were driven out once more by Espartero in 1835, and have had no legal position since. In Portugal, ranging themselves on the side of Don Miguel, they fell with his cause, and were exiled in 1834. Russia, which had been their warmest patron, drove them from St Petersburg and Moscow in 1813, and from the whole empire in 1820, mainly on the plea of attempted proselytizing in the imperial army. Holland drove them out in 1816, and, by giving them thus a valid excuse for aiding the Belgian revolution of 1830, secured them the strong position they have ever since held in Belgium. They were expelled from Switzerland in 1847-48 for the part they had taken in exciting the war of the Sonderbund. In South Germany, inclusive of Austria and Bavaria, their annals since their restoration have been uneventful; but in North Germany, owing to the footing Frederick II. had given them in Prussia, they became very powerful, especially in the Rhine provinces, and, gradually moulding the younger generation of clergy after the close of the War of Liberation, succeeded in spreading Ultramontane views amongst them, and so leading up to the difficulties with the civil Government which issued in the Falk laws, and their own expulsion by decree of the German parliament, June 19, 1872. In Great Britain, whither they began to straggle over during the revolutionary troubles at the close of the last century, and where, practically unaffected by the clause directed against them in the Emancipation Act of 1829, their chief settlement has been at Stonyhurst in Lancashire, an estate conferred on them by Mr Weld in 1795, they have been unmolested; but there has been little affinity to the order in the British temperament, and the English province has consequently never risen to numerical or intellectual importance in the society. In Rome itself, its progress after the restoration was at first slow, and it was not till the reign of Leo XII. (1823-29) that it recovered its place as the chief educational body there. It advanced steadily under Gregory XVI., and, though it was at first shunned by Pius IX., it secured his entire confidence after his return from Gaeta in 1849, and obtained from him a special brief erecting the staff of its literary journal, the Civiltà Cattolica, into a perpetual college under the general of the Jesuits, for the purpose of teaching and propagating the faith in its pages. How, with this pope's support throughout his long reign, and the gradual filling of nearly all the sees of Latin Christendom with bishops of their own selection, they contrived to stamp out the last remains of independence everywhere, and to crown the Ultramontane triumph with the Vatican decrees, is matter of familiar knowledge.
The society has been ruled by twenty-two generals and four vicars from its foundation to the present day; and the most notable fact to signalize with reference to them is that, of all the various nationalities represented in the company, France, its original cradle, has never given it a head, while Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Poland were all represented. The numbers of the society at present are not accurately known, but are estimated at about 6000 in all parts of the world.
The generals of the Jesuits have been as follows: —
| 1. | Inigo de Loyola (Spaniard) | 1541-1556 |
| 2. | Diego Laynez (Spaniard) | 1558-1565 |
| 3. | Francisco Borgia (Spaniard) | 1565-1572 |
| 4. | Eberhard Mercurian (Belgian) | 1573-1580 |
| 5. | Claudio Acquaviva (Neapolitan) | 1581-1615 |
| 6. | Mutio Vitelleschi (Roman) | 1615-1645 |
| 7. | Vincenzio Caraffa (Neapolitan) | 1646-1649 |
| 8. | Francesco Piccolomini (Florentine) | 1649-1651 |
| 9. | Alessandro Gottofredi (Roman) | 1652 |
| 10. | Goswin Nickel (German) | 1652-1664 |
| 11. | Giovanni Paolo Oliva (Genoese) vicar-general and coadjutor, 1661; general | 1664-1681 |
| 12. | Charles von Noyelle (Belgian) | 1682-1686 |
| 13. | Tirso Gonzalez (Spaniard) | 1687-1705 |
| 14. | Michele Angelo Tamburini (Modenese) | 1706-1730 |
| 15. | Franz Retz (Bohemian) | 1730-1750 |
| 16. | Ignazio Visconti (Milanese) | 1751-1755 |
| 17. | Alessandro Centurioni (Genoese) | 1755-1757 |
| 18. | Lorenzo Ricci (Florentine) | 1758-1775 |
| | a. Stanislaus Czerniewicz (Pole), vicar-general | 1782-1785 |
| | b. Gabriel Lienkiewicz (Pole), vicar-general | 1785-1798 |
| | c. Franciscus Xavier Karen (Pole), (general in Russia, 7th March 1801) | 1799-1802 |
| | d. Gabriel Gruber (German) | 1802-1805 |
| 19. | Thaddæus Brzozowski (Pole) | 1805-1820 |
| 20. | Aloysio Fortis (Veronese) | 1820-1829 |
| 21. | Johannes Roothaan (Dutchman) | 1829-1853 |
| 22. | Peter Johannes Beckx (Belgian) | 1853 |
The bibliography of Jesuitism is of enormous extent, and it is impracticable to cite more than a few of the most important works. They are as follows: — Institutum Societatis Jesu, 7 vols., Avignon, 1830-38; Orlandini, Historia Societatis Jesu, Antwerp, 1620; Imago Primi Sæculi Societatis Jesu, Antwerp, 1640; Nieremberg, Vida de San Ignacio de Loyola, 9 vols. fol., Madrid, 1645-1736; (Genelli, Life of St Ignatius of Loyola, London, 1872; Backer, Bibliothèque des Ecrivains de la Compagnie de Jésus, 7 vols., Paris, 1853-61; Crétineau Joly, Histoirc de la Compagnie de Jésus, 6 vols., Paris, 1844; Guettée, Histoire des Jesuites,3 vols., Paris, 1858-59; Stewart Rose, Ignatius Loyola and the Early Jesuits, London, 1871; Wolff, Allgemeine Geschichte der Jesuiten, 4 vols., Zurich, 1789-92; Packman, Pioneers of France in the New World, and The Jesuits in North America, Boston, 1868; Lettres Édifiantes et Curieuses, écrites des Missions Etrangères, arec les Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, 40 vols., Lyons, 1819-54; Saint-Pries, Histoire de la Chute des Jesuites au XVIIIe Siècle, Paris, 1844; Ranke, Römische Päpste, 3 vols., Berlin, 1838; and Cartwright, The Jesuits, their Constitution and Teaching, London, 1876. (R. F. L.)