The Sun.
London, England, 1863-08-06 00:00:00

JESUITS AND JESUITRY.

What was it Carlyle once wrote of some reptile
antagonist ? " Squelch it, by heavens, squelch it !'
Precisely in this summary fashion has the pitiless
Saturday Review acted by Mr. M'Gbee's transla-
tion of M. Cretineau-Joly's History of the Jesuits.
Saith the critic, coming down upon the Exeter
Hallite with a pancake-making weight of ridicule
in every sentence:—
Whether piqued at being turned into a waste-paper
basket, or desirous to furbish up his old pamphlets afresh,
Mr. M'Ghee has thought proper to add to the injury he
has done M. Cretineau-Joly by his queer translation, by
swamping him, fore and aft, with 23 pages of preface and
136 of notes, besides peppering the text all along with
amenities such as the following :—" The notes (to the Irish
Bible) teem with intolerance and treason ;" "the silent
stealthy movements of that body are like the noiseless tread
of the tiger as he steals to spring on his prey : "here it is
demonstrated that the whole Repeal movement in Ireland
was the work of the General,d the Jesuits,and that O'Con-
nell, the bishops, and the priests were their tools" (the un-
fortunate sentence that " demonstrates" this being the
rather harmless assertion that the separation of the Jesuits
in Ireland from those in England "promised to produce
fruitful results") ; " whenever they volunteer the profes-
sion of any apparent good, is merely a cloak to cover the
evil exactly opposite ;" " there are certain historians who
ought proverbially to have good memories," and the like
ad nauseam. What imaginable enemy he hopes to con-
quer, or what friend t 3 warn, by the Ares literarum, Mr.
M.Ghee must he the best judge. Our own feeling is simply
that, if the Jesuits did all the good that is reported of them
in the text, and if nothing more reliable can be said
against them than is stated in this writer's notes, the work
is so well calculated to serve their cause—if only there were
any chance of its being read—that we could imagine the
book written by one of the order.
Into his " notes and commentaries" we simply decline to
enter. They remind us of nothing so much as a school
playground after a sth of November, with its spent squibs,
disembodied crackers, blackened cases of extinct Roman
candles, and an unpleasant smell of burnt powder all around.
In 136 pages we at least expected some contradiction of M.
Cretineau-Joly's facts, or some correction of his inferences.
Nothing of the sort is to be found. Long quotations from
Nicolini, a Mr. Grinfield, Mr. Steinmetz, and weary twaddle
of his own composition, fill up the dreary pages ; and the
chief effort of his logic is expended in showing that for the
whisky-shops within convenient distance of the Roman
Catholic chapels, and for the temporary success of Father
Matthew's crusade against whisky drinking, the Jesuits
are alike responsible.
And here we take leave of Mr. M'Ghee in his own open-
ing words :—" We cannot present this translation to the
public without anticipating, with not unnatural sympathy,
the sentiments of indignation which must pervade the breast
of every honest Englishman when he shall have arrived at
its conclusion." A more entirely trashy book it has never
been our lot to review; but we must qualify the statement
by adding that we never had the misfortune to read any
other of this gentleman's productions.