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 fishion. 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, ∏e 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 circumceUions, 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 tobe 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 diffèrent 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 patemal 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 tobe 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 “indifferente” 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 J esuits 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 ybt 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 everywhere.”

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...

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 fishion. 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, ∏e 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 circumceUions, 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 tobe 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 diffèrent 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 patemal 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 tobe 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 “indifferente” 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 J esuits 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 ybt 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 everywhere.”

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 XL, 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 oncé; 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. Ata 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 Epistolae 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—

“Quae 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 th

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 fishion. 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, ∏e 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 circumceUions, 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 tobe 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 diffèrent 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 patemal 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 tobe 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 “indifferente” 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 J esuits 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 ybt 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 everywhere.”

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...