The Press.
London, England, 1858-08-14 00:00:00

JESUITISM.

WE all know well enough, or we ought to know
well enough, what the world is; and we ought to
know well, too, what sort of a moral atmosphere
it is which surrounds the world. That moral
atmosphere may be as variable as the climate or
the weather ; it may be better or it may be
worse in one day and in one place than in others :
it is always changing, but it never can be good.
The actions and the lives, however, of men in
general depend upon the condition and the cha-
racter of the moral atmosphere they live in. Not
that the moral law, either natural or revealed,
changes for individuals or for nations, but that
men by quiet consent agree to act as if it did
change, and they agree to talk as if they were
acting right. This quiet agreement of what is
called " society " does not, then, really represent
the conscience of anybody. The courts of Roman
emperors or barbarian Attilas may agree to live
just as they please, and may agree to talk just as
they live, but there is a silent reasoner, a divine
word within, which gives other decisions to the
man when he is in his chamber communing with
himself and still. The moral atmosphere within
these tiny precincts is never the same as the
moral atmosphere which floats around us in the
world. Courts and " society" lose their preten-
sions there, and there is nothing which Courts
and society hate so heartily or dread so justly as
to hear spoken what each individual can very
hardly keep from thinking. This conscience, this
moral sense of mankind, makes all men judges,
and makes all men judge righteous judgment ;
and wisdom alone is justified.

So, then, they who would keep down the world
must take in hand individual mankind, and
manage to wield the moral sense. As honour is
in the breath of kings, religion and duty must be
in the will of priests : no immutable rule of right
even in secret, no fixed vile of faith after ages
and ages of Christianity.
And this brings us to the difference between
modern and ancient Rome—to the characteristic
which makes the corruption of Papal Christianity
so much more durable and more enduringly
mischievous than the domination of Pagan Rome.
It is not merely the customs of courts and the
notions of societies that lose their authority before
the bar of conscience. Civil laws may be im-
moral, and, if immoral, they are unbinding
there. But the sanctions of religion are of Got).
Laws which are to be vindicated in a future life,
bind everywhere. To have dominion over the
thoughts of men is to have dominion over con-
science even. To be authorized to make doubts
a sin is truly to be as Gon. And jets divinum
claims this authority and this dominion. A jam
divinum vested in a perpetual priesthood sets up
the hole moral authority of GOD on earth. If
this be a reality, the moral sense becomes a
shadow, and must follow it : the supremacy of
conscience topples down before this new tribunal.
Without any help from established Govern-
ments, with established Governments in hostility
to it, it is not difficult to see how mightily the
scheme would work, if it were once organized
into a polity and had its adequate machinery.
And, as we have seen in former articles, it soon
was organized into a polity, long before CON•
STANTINE. There were those among the blessed
Apostles who saw the beginnings of it even with
the natural eye. And the first great enterprize
of that polity, once organized, was against the
supremacy of conscience: its first struggle was
to bring into captivity the moral sense of
mankind.

To have attempted boldly to sanction vice, to
have set up adultery and treachery and murder
for virtues in an emperor or his wife, would have
been stupidity,—it would have been as idle as
atrocious. It was neither possible nor necessary
for the success of Jesuitry that men's habits of

774

love and admiration for what is lovely and gene- I
rous, or of contempt and hatred for what is vile
and execrable, should be forgotten or abandoned.
And it is a strange mistake to think it ever was
the object of the Papacy to make men socially or
individually wicked, or that it was ever generally
regarded as a necessary means to gain the great
end which the Papacy has ever had in view.
That end was always and is always simply poli-
tical ; it was to keep men in helpless and de-
pendent tutelage. And it is not necessary utterly
to demoralize a community in order to make or
keep it politically degraded. Virtues can never
cease to be venerable and lovely, nor vices to be
hateful ; but our admiration and our love of
virtues may be modified, and so may our natural
abhorrence of vice. Constructive vices may
lessen the heinousness of real ones, and virtues
may be turned aside from their fair scope and
defrauded of all their worth and efficacy.

To attend devotedly to one's own private
business is on all hands justly held to be a virtue;
but, as PLATO tells us, he that breeds his children
up only, or even firstly, to look always after his
own private business, breeds them up not to be
citizens but slaves. The simple distribution of
natural virtues into independent, unconnected
specialities is degradation : it is like confining a
mechanic to makmg the wheels or linking the
chains of watches, without ever allowing him to
combine them into a useful motive instrument,
or even know the final destination and capacity
of what he spends his whole life in constructing.
These specialities in virtue stop the man from
being a complete man, instead of enabling him
more perfectly to be one, as the specialities in
mechanism prevent the man from being in any
true sense a watchmaker.

This mimicking of manhood, this making of
men into pieces, as it were, of men—a citizen of
one, a husband of another—giving one the part
of poverty to play, another that of magnificence
and wealth—segregating some in solitude and
gathering together others into the multitude and
discipline and irresponsibility of armies—was the
way to do the work of Jesuitry. It was a coun-
termanding of the whole primeval order of our
creation. But it was only a logical prerogative
of jus divinum.