The Press.
London, England, 1858-08-07 00:00:00

JESUITISM.

IT is perhaps not surprising that there should be
great difficulty in bringing common people to see
religion in any other light than a simply religious
one—to see it as anything else than a matter
which rests between the individual and his
Maker. It is hard for them to understand how
religion can be grafted on to politics ; how
humble faith and piety can be made use of for
the tortuous purposes of State or party, and
regarded merely as the fuel which keeps some
great worldly machinery agoing. But it certainly
is wonderful that there should still continue to be
found a race of statesmen who attach no conse-
quence to the political character or the political
uses of a dogma. Many and many a public
man by no means blind to the power of religious
convictions over men individually or in masses,
and sharpsighted enough in dealing with any
popular current of religious feeling, yet often
seems quite blind to the fact that religious differ-
ences are by no means of necessity merely pole-
mical, that the religion of any large class of people
never can be merely a religion, and that, so long
as there are found men able, ambitious, and un-
scrupulous enough to work it, religion must
always be the readiest and the surest lever to
move men by, the strongest bond to bind men
together with for political as well as for social
purposes. It is no less strange than true that
while ideas or theories become every day more
and more spreading and more and more influen-
tial, practical men seem often more and more to
affect the old contempt for them. And in this
contempt for theories, the dogmas of faith and the
schemes of discipline set up by any church or
sect come in for a large, perhaps for the very
largest share. It might be well enough to despise
theories if they could only be kept theories, and
were never to be developed into something else—
if they never bred Reformations with decades of
years of war, massacres like the St. Bartholomew,
or Revolutions such as that of 1688 or of 1789 ;
but what the mind perceives the man will act
upon when time and place are given, and what
men call theories work as terrifically and accord-
ing to as firmly established laws in politics, as
what men call nature does in physics, only there
are no barometers to tell us when moral thunder-
storms are nigh, and when they come we attribute
them to any other cause than some such theory
as moral electricity. GUICEIARDINI, LUTHER'S
contemporary, was one of the ablest, most dispas-
sionate, and best informed statesmen of his day,
but he could not be persuaded the Reformation
was a religious movement. And FREDERICK
THE GREAT himself worked away as steadily but
as unsuspectingly at the French Revolution as if
he had been only engaged at chess.
There is no need, however, of Revolutions or
Reformations, of civil wars or massacres, to show
us what religious theories can do in the hands of
those who know how to wield them. We have
only to open our eyes and look around in any
quarter of the habitable globe. The vast ruins
of old monasteries, the majestic cathedrals still
scattered through our land, the still more varied
forms of enduring religious architecture on the
Continent, the towers of Cologne, the marble
fields of St. Peter's, the gorgeous simulachres of
the Garter or the Golden Fleece, the solemn
ceremonial by which kings and emperors borrow
veneration from the clergy,—all these creations