Welcome to the Jesuits by James Wiley.
We're starting at the beginning of this work for this reading.
This Reformation MP3 audio resource is a production of Stillwater's Revival Books,
many free Puritan and Reformed resources, as well as our complete online catalog
containing classic and contemporary Reformation books, digital downloads,
MP3s, videos, DVDs, CDs, and a Puritan hard drive at great discounts,
are on the web at puritandownloads.com.
Also, please consider, pray, and act upon the important truths found in the
following quotation by Charles Spurgeon.
Quote, As the Apostle says to Timothy, so also he says to everyone, Give yourself
to reading.
He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains
of his own.
You need to read.
Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible
sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers and expositions of the
Bible.
The best way for you to spend your leisure is to be either reading or praying.
End of quote.
If you'd like to be added to our email list, please send an email to swrb at swrb
.com with the word add in the subject line.
Our email list is a double opt-in list, so once you've sent us your email address,
you'll be asked by email to confirm that you want to join our list using the email
address that you've supplied.
Your email information will be kept confidential, and you can easily remove
yourself from our email list by simply emailing us at swrb at swrb.com with the
word remove in the subject line.
Once you're on our email list, you'll be alerted to all the new free
Reformation resources, free mp3s, free electronic books and texts and so
forth that SWRB makes available on the web, as well as, at times, to our best
discounts and super specials.
We also encourage you to reproduce this audio resource and to pass it on to your
friends, but we only authorize this as long as the full contents of the message,
including the header and trailer, is not altered in any way, and as long as
the audio file is given away for free.
And now to SWRB's reading of The Jesuits by James Wiley, which we hope you find to
be a great blessing, and which we pray draws you nearer to the Lord Jesus Christ,
for he is the way, the truth and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by him.
John 14.6.
This is The Jesuits, chapter 1, by James Wiley.
Protestantism had marshaled its spiritual forces a second time, and placing itself
at the heart of Christendom, at a point where three great empires met,
it was laboring with redoubled vigor to propagate itself on all sides.
It was expelling from the air of the world that ancient superstition born of paganism
and Judaism, which, like an opaque veil, had darkened the human mind.
A new light was breaking on the eyes and a new life stirring in the souls of men.
Schools of learning, pure churches and free nations were springing up in
different parts of Europe, while hundreds of thousands of disciples were ready by
their holy lives or heroic deaths to serve that great cause, which, having broken
their ancient fetters, had made them the heirs of a new liberty and the citizens of
a new world.
It was clear that if let alone for only a few years, Protestantism would achieve a
victory so complete that it would be vain for any opposing power to think of
renewing the contest.
If that power, which was seated in Geneva, was to be withstood and the tide of
victory, which was bearing it to dominion, rolled back, there must be no longer delay
in the measures necessary for achieving such a result.
It was further clear that armies would never affect the overthrow of
Protestantism.
The strength of Popish Europe had been put forth to crush it, but all in vain.
Protestantism had risen only the stronger from the blows which it was hoped would
overwhelm it.
It was plain that other weapons must be forged and other armies mustered than
those which Charles and Francis had been accustomed to lead into the field.
It was now that the Jesuit Corps was embodied.
And it must be confessed that these new soldiers did more than all the armies of
France and Spain to stem the tide of Protestant success and bind victory once
more to the banners of Rome.
We've seen Protestantism renew its energies.
Rome, too, will show what she's capable of doing.
As the tribes of Israel were approaching the frontier of the promised land,
a wizard prophet was summoned from the east to bar the entrance by his
divinations and enchantments, Balaam.
As the armies of Protestantism neared their final victory, there started up the
Jesuit host with a subtler casuistry and a darker divination than Balaam's to dispute
with the reformed, the possession of Christendom.
We shall consider that host in its rise, its equipments, its discipline,
its diffusion, and its successes.
Don Inigo Lopez de Recalde, the Ignatius Loyola of history, was the founder of the
Order of Jesus, or the Jesuits.
His birth was nearly contemporaneous with that of Luther.
He was the youngest son of one of the highest Spanish grandees and was born in
his father's castle of Loyola in the province of Guiposcoa in 1491.
His youth was passed at the splendid and luxurious court of Ferdinand, the
Catholic.
Spain at that time was fighting to expel the Moors, whose presence on her soil she
accounted at once an insult to her independence and an affront to her faith.
She was ending the conflict in Spain but continuing it in Africa.
The naturally ardent soul of Ignatius was set on fire by the religious fervor around
him.
He grew weary of the gaieties and frivolities of the court, nor could even
the dalliances and adventures of Knight Errantree satisfy him.
He thirsted to earn renown on the field of arms.
Embarking in the war, which at that time engaged the religious enthusiasm and
military chivalry of his countrymen, he soon distinguished himself by his feats
of daring.
Ignatius was bidding fair to take a high place among warriors and transmit to
posterity a name encompassed with the halo of military glory, but with that halo
only.
At this stage of his career, an incident befell him, which cut short his exploits
on the battlefield and transferred his enthusiasm and chivalry to another sphere.
It was the year 1521.
Luther was uttering his famous no before the emperor and his princes and summoning
as with trumpet peal Christendom to arms.
It is at this moment the young Ignatius, the intrepid soldier of Spain and about to
become the yet more intrepid soldier of Rome, appears before us.
He is shot up in the town of Pamplona, which the French are besieging.
The garrison are hard pressed, and after some whispered consultations,
they openly propose to surrender.
Ignatius deems the very thought of such a thing dishonor.
He denounces the proposed act of his comrades as cowardice, and re-entering the
citadel with a few companions as courageous as himself, swears to defend it
to the last drop of his blood.
By and by, famine leaves him no alternative save to die within the walls
or to cut his way, sword in hand, through the host of the besiegers.
He goes forth and joins battle with the French.
As he is fighting desperately, he is struck by a musket ball,
wounded dangerously in both legs, and laid senseless on the field.
Ignatius had ended the last campaign he was ever to fight with the sword.
His valor he was yet to display on other fields, but he would mingle no more on
those which resound with the clash of arms and the roar of artillery.
The bravery of the fallen warrior had won the respect of the foe.
Raising him from the ground, where he was fast bleeding to death, they carried him
to the hospital of Pamplona, intended him with care, till he was able to be conveyed
in a litter to his father's castle.
Thrice had he to undergo the agony of having his wounds opened.
Clenching his teeth and closing his fists, he bade defiance to pain.
Not a groan escaped him while under the torture of the surgeon's knife,
but the tardy passage of the weeks and months, during which he waited the slow
healing of his wounds, inflicted on his ardent spirit a keener pain than had the
probing knife on his quivering limbs.
Fettered to his couch, he chafed at the inactivity to which he was doomed.
Romances of chivalry and tales of war were brought to him to beguile the hours.
These exhausted, other books were produced, but of a somewhat different
character.
This time it was the legends of the saints that were brought the bedrid night.
The tragedy of the early Christian martyrs passed before him as he read.
Next came the monks and hermits, the Thebake deserts and the Sinaitic
mountains.
With an imagination on fire, he perused the story of the hunger and cold they had
braved, of the self-conquest they had achieved, of the battles they had waged
with evil spirits, of the glorious vision that had been vouchsafed them,
and the brilliant rewards they had gained in the lasting reverence of earth and the
felicities and dignities of heaven.
He panted to rival these heroes, whose glory was of a kind so bright and
pure that, compared with it, the renown of the battlefield was dim and sordid.
His enthusiasm and ambition were as boundless as ever, but now they were
directed into a new channel.
Henceforward, the current of his life was changed.
He had laid down a knight of the burning sword, to use the words of his biographer
Vieira, but he rose up from it a saint of the burning torch.
The change was a sudden and violent one, and drew after it vast consequences,
not to Ignatius only and the men of his own age, but to millions of the human race
in all countries of the world, and in all the ages that have elapsed
since.
He who lay down on his bed the fiery soldier of the Emperor, rose from it the
yet more fiery soldier of the Pope.
The weakness occasioned by loss of blood, the morbidity produced by long seclusion,
the irritation of acute and protracted suffering, joined to a temperament highly
excitable, and a mind that had fed on miracles and visions, till its enthusiasm
had grown into fanaticism, accounts in part for the transformation which Ignatius
had undergone.
Though the balance of his intellect was now sadly disturbed, his shrewdness,
his tenacity, and his daring remained.
Set free from the fetters of calm reason, these qualities had freer scope than ever.
The wing of his earthly ambition was broken, but he could take his flight
heavenward.
If earth was forbidden him, the celestial domains stood open, and there worthier
exploits and more brilliant rewards awaited his prowess.
The heart of a soldier plucked out, and that of a monk given him, Ignatius
vowed before leaving his sick chamber to be the slave, the champion, the
knight-errant of Mary.
And she was the lady of his soul, and after the manner of dutiful nights,
he immediately repaired to her shrine at Montserrat, hung up his arms before her
image, and spent the night in watching them.
But reflecting that he was a soldier of Christ, that great monarch who had gone
forth to subjugate all the earth, he resolved to eat no other food,
wear no other raiment than his king had done, and endure the same hardships and
vigils.
Laying aside his plume, his coat of mail, his shield and sword, he donned the cloak
of the mendicant.
Wrapped in sordid rags, says Döller, an iron chain and prickly girdle pressing
on his naked body, covered with filth, with uncombed hair and untrimmed nails,
he retired to a dark mountain in the vicinity of Manresa, where was a gloomy
cave in which he made his abode for some time.
There he subjected himself to all the penances and mortifications of the early
Anchorites, whose holiness he emulated.
He wrestled with the evil spirit, talked to voices audible to no ear but his
own, fasted for days on end till his weakness was such that he fell into a
swoon.
One day was found at the entrance of his cave lying on the ground, half dead.
The cave at Manresa recalls vividly to our memory the cell at Erfurt.
The same austerities, vigils, mortifications and mental efforts and
agonies which were undergone by Ignatius Loyola had but a very few years before
this been passed through by Martin Luther.
So far the career of the founder of the Jesuits and that of the champion of
Protestantism were the same.
Both had set before them a high standard of holiness.
Both had all but sacrificed life to reach it.
But at the point to which we have come, the courses of the two men widely diverge.
Both hitherto in their pursuit of truth and holiness had traveled by the same
road.
But now we see Luther turning to the Bible, the light that shines in a dark
place, the sure word of prophecy.
Ignatius Loyola, on the other hand, surrenders himself to visions and
revelations.
As Luther went onward, the light grew only the brighter around him.
He had turned his face to the sun.
Ignatius had turned his gaze inward upon his own beclouded mind and verified the
saying of the wise man, quote, he who wandereth out of the way of
understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead, end of quote.
Finding him half examine it at the mouth of his cave, sympathizing friends carried
Ignatius to the town of Manresa.
Continuing there the same course of penances and self mortifications which he
had pursued in solitude, his bodily weakness greatly increased.
But he was more than recompensed by the greater frequency of those heavenly
visions with which he now began to be favored.
In Manresa, he occupied a cell in the convent.
And as he was then projecting a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he began to qualify himself
for this holy journey by a course of the severest penances.
He scourged himself thrice a day, says Ranke.
He rose up to prayer at midnight and passed seven hours of each day on his
knees.
It will hardly do to say that this marvelous case is merely an instance of an
unstrung bodily condition and of vicious mental stimulants abundantly supplied,
where the thirst for adventure and distinction was still unquenched.
A closer study of the case will show that there was in it an awakening of the
conscience.
There was a sense of sin, its awful demerit, and its fearful award.
Loyola too would seem to have felt the terrors of death and the pains of hell.
He had spent three days in Montserrat in confessing the sins of all his past life.
But on a more searching review of his life, finding that he had omitted many
sins, he renewed and simplified and amplified his confession at Manresa.
If he found peace, it was only for a short while.
Again, his sense of sin would return.
And to such a pitch did his anguish rise that thoughts of self-destruction came
into his mind.
Approaching the window of his cell, he was about to throw himself from it when
it suddenly flashed upon him that the act was abhorrent to the Almighty.
And he withdrew, crying out, Lord, I will not do aught that may offend Thee.
One day he awakened as from a dream.
Now I know, said he to himself, that all these torments are from the
assaults of Satan.
I'm tossed between the promptings of the good spirit, who would have me be at
peace, and the dark suggestions of the evil one, who seeks continually to terrify
me.
I'll have done with this warfare.
I'll forget my past life.
I'll open these wounds not again.
Now Luther, in the midst of tempest as terrible, had come to a similar
resolution.
Awaking as from a frightful dream, he lifted up his eyes and saw one who had
borne his sins upon his cross.
And like the mariner who clings amid the surging billows to the rock, Luther was at
peace because he had anchored his soul on an almighty foundation.
But, says Ranky, speaking of Loyola and the course he had now resolved to pursue,
this was not so much the restoration of his peace as a resolution.
It was an engagement entered into by the will, rather than a conviction to which
the submission of the will is inevitable.
It required no aid from scripture.
It was based on the belief that he entertained of an immediate connection
between himself and the world of spirits.
This would never have satisfied Luther.
No inspirations, no visions, would Luther admit.
All were, in his opinion alike, injurious.
He would have the simple, written, indubitable word of God alone.
From the hour that Ignatius resolved to think no more of his sins, his spiritual
horizon began, as he believed, to clear up.
All his gloomy terrors receded with the past which he had consigned to oblivion.
His bitter tears were dried up and his heavy sighs no longer resounded through
the convent halls.
He was taken, he felt, into more intimate communion with God.
The heavens were opened that he might have a clearer insight into divine mysteries.
True, the spirit had revealed these things in the mourning of the world through
chosen and accredited channels and inscribed them on the page of inspiration
that all might learn them from that infallible source.
But Ignatius did not search for these mysteries in the Bible.
Favored above the sons of men, he received them, as he thought,
in revelations made specially to himself.
Alas, his hour had come and passed, and the gate that would have ushered him
in amid celestial realities and joys was shut, and henceforward he must dwell amid
fantasies and dreams.
It was intimated to him one day that he should yet see the Savior in person.
He had not long to wait for the promised revelation.
At mass, his eyes were opened, and he saw the incarnate God in the host.
What farther proof did he need of transubstantiation, seeing the whole
process had been shown to him?
A short while thereafter, the Virgin revealed herself with equal plainness to
his bodily eyes.
Not fewer than thirty such visits did Loyola receive.
One day, as he sat on the steps of the church of St. Dominic at Manresa,
singing a hymn to Mary, he suddenly fell into a reverie and had the symbol of the
ineffable mystery of the Trinity shown to him under the figure of three keys of a
musical instrument.
He sobbed for very joy, and entering the church, began publishing the miracle.
On another occasion, as he walked along the banks of the Lobregat that waters
Manresa, he sat down, and fixing his eyes intently on the stream, many divine
mysteries became apparent to him, such as other men, says his biographer
Muffrey, can with great difficulty understand after much reading,
long vigils, study.
Well, this narration places us beside the respective springs of Protestantism and
Ultramontanism.
The source from which the one is seen to issue is the word of God.
To it, Luther swore fealty, and before it, he hung up his sword like a true knight
when he received ordination.
The other is seen to be the product of a clouded yet proud and ambitious
imagination and a wayward will, and therewith have corresponded the fruits
as the past three centuries bear witness.
The one principle has gathered around it a noble host clad in the panoply of purity
and truth.
In the wake of the other has come the dark army of the Jesuits.
Chapter 2, Loyola's First Disciples.
Among the wonderful things shown to Ignatius Loyola by special revelation was
a vision of two great camps.
The center of the one was placed at Babylon.
Over it, there floated the gloomy ensign of the Prince of Darkness.
The Heavenly King had erected his standard on Mount Zion and made Jerusalem his
headquarters.
In the war of which these two camps were the symbols and the issues of which were
to be grand beyond all former precedent, Loyola was chosen, he believed,
to be one of the chief captains.
He longed to place himself at the center of action.
The way thither was long.
Wide oceans and gloomy deserts had to be traversed and hostile tribes passed
through, but he had an iron will, a boundless enthusiasm, and what was more,
a divine call.
For such it seemed to him in his delusion.
He set out penniless in 1523, begging his bread by the way he arrived at Barcelona.
There he embarked in a ship which landed him on the shore of Italy.
Thus, traveling on foot after long months and innumerable hardships, he entered in
safely the gates of Jerusalem.
But the reception that awaited him in the holy city was not such as he had fondly
anticipated.
His rags, his uncombed locks, which almost hid his emaciated features, but ill
accorded with the magnificence of the errand which had brought him to that
shore.
Loyola thought of doing in his single person what the armies of the Crusaders
had failed to do by their combined strength.
The head of the Romanists in Jerusalem saw in him rather the mendicant than the
warrior, and fearing doubtless that should he offer battle to the Crescent,
he was more likely to provoke a tempest of Turkish fanaticism than drive back the
hordes of the infidel.
He commanded him to desist under the threat of excommunication.
Thus withstood Loyola, returned to Barcelona, which he reached in 1524.
Derision and insults awaited his arrival in his native Spain.
His countrymen failed to see the grand aims he cherished beneath his rags,
nor could they divine the splendid career and the immortality of fame which were to
emerge from this present squalor and debasement.
But not for one moment did Loyola's own faith falter in his great destiny.
He had the art, but known only to those fated to act a great part of converting
impediments into helps, and extracting new experience and fresh courage from
disappointment.
His repulsion from the holy fields had taught him that Christendom, and not Asia,
was the predestined scene of his warfare, and that he was to do battle not with the
infidels of the East, but with the ever-growing hosts of heretics in Europe.
But to meet the Protestant on his own ground, and to fight him with his own
weapons, was a still more difficult task than to convert the Saracen.
He felt that meanwhile he was destitute of the necessary qualifications, but it was
not too late to acquire them.
Though a man of 35, he put himself to school at Barcelona, and there,
seated amid the youth of the city, he prosecuted the study of Latin.
Having acquired some mastery of this tongue, he removed in 1526 to the
University of Alcala to commence theology.
In a little space, he began to preach.
Discovering a vast zeal in the propagation of his tenets, and no little success in
making disciples, male and female, the Inquisition, deeming both the man and
his aims somewhat mysterious, arrested him.
The order of the Jesuits was on the point of being nipped in the bud, but finding in
Loyola no heretical bias, the Fathers dismissed him on his promise of holding
his peace.
He repaired to Salamanca, but there too he encountered similar obstacles.
It was not agreeable thus to champ the curb of privilege and canonical authority,
but administered to him a wholesome discipline.
It sharpened his circumspection and shrewdness, without in the least abating
his ardor.
Holding fast by his grand purpose, he quitted his native land, and repairing
in 1528 to Paris, entered himself as a student in the College of St. Barbara.
In the world of Paris, he became more practical, but the flame of his enthusiasm
still burned on.
Through penance, through study, through ecstatic visions, and occasional
checks, he pursued with unshaken faith and unquenched resolution, his celestial
calling as the leader of a mighty spiritual army, of which he was to be the
creator, and which was to wage victorious battle with the hosts of Protestantism.
Loyola's residence in Paris, which was from 1528 to 1535, coincides with the
period of greatest religious excitement in the French capital.
Discussions were at that time of hourly occurrence in the streets, in the halls of
the Sorbonne, and at the royal table.
Loyola must have witnessed all the stirring and tragic scenes we've already
described.
He may have stood by the stake of Berquin.
He had seen with indignation, doubtless, the saloons of the Louvre open for the
Protestant sermon.
He had felt the great shock which France received from the placards and taken part,
it may be, in the bloody rites of her great day of expiation.
It's easy to see how amid excitements like these, Loyola's zeal would burn stronger
than every hour, but his ardor did not hurry him into action till all was ready.
The blow he meditated was great, and time, patience, and skill were
necessary to prepare the instruments by whom he was to inflict it.
It chanced that two young students shared with Loyola his rooms in the College of
Saint Barbara.
The one was Peter Fabre from Savoy.
His youth had been passed amid his father's flocks.
The majesty of the silent mountains had sublimed his natural piety into
enthusiasm, and one night on bended knee under the star bestudied vault,
he devoted himself to God in a life of study.
The other companion of Loyola was Francis Xavier of Papaluna in Navarre.
For 500 years his ancestors had been renowned as warriors, and his ambition was
by becoming a scholar to enhance the fame of his house by adding to its glory in
arms the yet pure glory of learning.
These two, the humble Savoyard and the highborn Navarres, Loyola had resolved
should be his first disciples.
As the artist selects his block, and with skillful eye and plastic hand
bestows touch after touch of the chisel, till at last the superfluous parts are
cleared away, and the statue stands forth so complete and perfect in its symmetry
that the dead stone seems to breathe, so did the future general of the Jesuit
army proceed to mold and fashion his two companions, Fabre and Xavier.
The former was soft and pliable, easily took the shape which the master
hand sought to communicate.
The other was obdurate like the rocks of his native mountains, but the patience and
genius of Loyola finally triumphed over his pride of family and haughtiness of
spirit.
He first of all won their affection by certain disinterested services.
He next excited their admiration by the loftiness of his own asceticism.
He then imparted to them his grand project and fired them with the ambition of
sharing with him in the accomplishment of it.
Having brought them thus far, he entered them on a course of discipline,
the design of which was to give them those hearty qualities of body and soul which
would enable them to fulfill their lofty vocation as leaders in an army.
Every soldier in which was to be tried and hardened in the fire as he himself had
been.
He exacted of them frequent confession.
He was equally rigid as regarded their participation in the Eucharist.
The one exercise trained them in submission, the other fed the flame of
their zeal and thus the two cardinal qualities which Loyola demanded in all his
followers were developed side by side.
Severe bodily mortifications were also enjoined upon them.
Three days and three nights did he compel them to fast.
During the severest winters when carriages might be seen to traverse the frozen
Seine, he would not permit Fabre the slightest relaxation of discipline.
Thus it was that he mortified their pride, taught them to despise wealth,
schooled them to brave danger and contend luxury and inured them to cold hunger and
toil.
In short, he made them dead to every passion save that of the holy war in which
they were to bear arms.
A beginning had been made.
The first recruits had been enrolled in that army which was speedily to swell into
a mighty host and unfurl its gloomy ensigns and win its dismal triumphs in
every land.
We can imagine Loyola's joy as he contemplated these two men fashioned so
perfectly in his own likeness.
The same master artificer who had molded these two could form others, in short,
any number.
The list was soon enlarged by the addition of four other disciples.
Their names, obscure then, but in later years to shine with a fiery splendor were
Jacob Lannes, Alfonso Samorin, Nicolas Bobadilla and Simon Rodriguez.
The first three were Spaniards, the fourth was a Portuguese.
They were seven in all, but the accession of two others increased them to nine and
now they resolved on taking their first step.
On the 15th of August, 1534, Loyola, followed by his nine companions,
entered the subterranean chapel of the church of Montmartre at Paris.
And mass being said by Fabre, who had received priest's orders, the company,
after the usual vow of chastity and poverty, took a solemn oath to dedicate
their lives to the conversion of the Saracens, or should circumstances make
that attempt impossible, to lay themselves and their services unreservedly at the
feet of the Pope.
They healed their oath, sealed their oath by now receiving the host.
The day was chosen because it was the anniversary of the Assumption of the
Virgin, the place because it was consecrated to Mary, the Queen of Saints
and Angels, from whom, as Loyola firmly believed, he had received his mission.
The army thus enrolled was little, and it was great.
It was little when counted, it was great when weighed.
In sublimity of aim and strength of faith, using the term in its mundane sense,
it wielded a power before which nothing on earth, one principle accepted,
should be able to stand.
To foster the growth of this infant Hercules, Loyola had prepared beforehand
his book entitled Spiritual Exercises.
This is a body of rules for teaching men how to conduct the work of their
conversion.
It consists of four grand meditations, and the penitent, retiring into solitude,
is to occupy absorbingly his mind on each in succession during the space of the
rising and setting of seven suns.
It may be fitly styled a journey from the gates of destruction to the gates of
paradise, mapped out in stages so that might be gone in the short period of four
weeks.
There are a few more remarkable books in the world.
It combines the self-denial and mortification of the Brahman with the
asceticism of the anchorite, the ecstasies of the schoolmen.
It professes like the Quran to be a revelation, the book of Exercises says a
Jesuit was truly written by the finger of God and delivered to Ignatius by the Holy
Mother of God.
The Spiritual Exercises, we have said, was a body of rules by following which one
could effect upon himself that great change which in biblical and theological
language is termed conversion.
The book displayed on the part of its author great knowledge of the human heart.
The method prescribed was an adroit imitation of that process of conviction,
of alarm, of enlightenment, and of peace through which the Holy Spirit leads the
soul that undergoes that change in very deed.
This divine transformation was at that hour taking place in thousands of
instances in the Protestant world.
Loyola, like the magicians of old who strove to rival Moses, wrought with his
enchantments to produce the same miracle.
Let us observe how he proceeded.
The person was, first of all, to go aside from the world by entirely isolating
himself from all the affairs of life.
In the solemn stillness of his chamber, he was to engage in four meditations each
day, the first at daybreak, the last at midnight.
To assist the action of the imagination on the soul, the room was to be artificially
darkened, and on its walls were to be suspended pictures of hell and other
horrors.
Sin, death, and judgment were exclusively to occupy the thoughts of the penitent
during the first week of his seclusion.
He was to ponder upon them till, in a sense, he beheld the vast
conflagration of hell, its wailings, shrieks, and blasphemies, felt the worm of
conscience, and, fine, touched those fires by whose contact the souls of the
reprobate are scorched.
The second week, he was to withdraw his eye from these dreadful spectacles and fix
it upon the Incarnation.
It's no longer the wailings of the lost that fill the ears.
He sits in his darkened chamber.
It's the song of the angel announcing the birth of the child and Mary acquiescing in
the work of redemption.
At the feet of the Trinity, he's directed to pour out the expression of the
gratitude and praise with which continued meditation on these themes causes his soul
to overflow.
The third week is to witness the solemn act of the soul's enrollment in the army
of that great captain who bowed the heavens and came down in his Incarnation.
Two cities are before the devotee, Jerusalem and Babylon.
In which will he choose to dwell?
Two standards are displayed in his sight.
Under which will he fight?
Here, a broad and brave pennant floats freely on the wind.
Its golden folds bear the motto, Pride, Honor, Riches.
Here is another, but how unlike the motto inscribed upon it, Poverty, Shame,
Humility.
On all sides resounds the cry, To arms!
He must make his choice and he must make it now.
For the seventh son of his third week is hastening to the setting.
It is under the banner of poverty that he elects to win the incorruptible crown.
Now comes the fourth and last week and with it there comes a great change in the
subjects of his meditation.
He is to dismiss all gloomy ideas, all images of terror.
The gates of Hades are to be closed and those of a new life opened.
It is morning with him.
It is a springtime that has come to him and he is to surround himself with light
and flowers and odors.
It's the Sabbath of a spiritual creation.
He is to rest, to taste in that rest the prelude, the everlasting joys.
This mood of mind he is to cultivate while seven sons rise and set upon him.
He's now perfected and fit to fight in the army of the great captain.
Well a not unsimilar course of mental discipline as our history has already
shown did Wycliffe, Luther, and Calvin pass through before they became captains
in the army of Christ.
They began in a horror of great darkness.
Through that cloud there broke upon the revelation of the crucified.
Throwing the arms of their faith around the tree of expiation and clinging to it
they entered into peace and tasted the joys to come.
How like yet how unlike are these two courses?
In the one the penitent finds a savior on whom he leans.
In the other he lays hold on a rule by which he works and works as methodically
and regularly as a piece of machinery.
Beginning on a certain day he finishes like stroke of clock duly as the seventh
son of the fourth week is sinking below the horizon.
We trace in the one the action of the imagination, fostering one over mastering
passion into strength until the person becomes capable of attempting the most
daring enterprises and enduring the most dreadful sufferings.
In the other we behold the intervention of a divine agent who plants in the soul a
new principle and then seduces a new life.
The war in which Loyola and his nine companions enrolled themselves when on the
15th of August 1534 they made their vow in the church of Montmartre was to be waged
against the Saracens of the east.
They acted so far on their original design as to proceed to Venice where they learned
that their project was meanwhile impracticable.
The war which had just broken out between the republic and the port had closed the
gates of Asia.
They took this as an intimation that the field of their operations was to be in the
western world.
Returning on their path they now directed their steps towards Rome.
In every town through which they passed on their way to the eternal city they left
behind them an immense reputation for sanctity by their labors in the hospitals
and their earnest addresses to the populace on the streets.
As they drew nigh to Rome and the hearts of some of his companions were beginning
to despond, Loyola was cheered by a vision in which Christ appeared and said to him,
in Rome will I be gracious unto thee.
The hopes this vision inspired were not to be disappointed.
Entering the gates of the capital of Christendom and throwing themselves at the
feet of Paul the third pope, they met a most gracious reception.
The pope hailed their offer of assistance as most opportune.
Mighty dangers at that hour threatened the papacy and with a half of Europe in revolt
and the old monkish orders become incapable, this new and unexpected aid
seemed sent by heaven.
The rules and constitution of the new order were drafted and ultimately approved
by the pope.
Two peculiarities in the constitution of the proposed order specially recommended
in the eyes of Paul the third.
The first was its vow of unconditional obedience.
The society swore to obey the pope as an army obeys its general.
It was not canonical but military obedience which its members offered him.
They would go to whatsoever place at whatsoever time and on whatsoever errand
he should be pleased to order them.
They were in short to be not so much monks as soldiers.
The second peculiarity was that their services were to be wholly gratuitous.
Never would they ask so much as a penny from the papal sea.
It was resolved that the new order should bear the name of the company of Jesus.
Loyola modestly declined the honor of being accounted its founder.
Christ himself, he affirmed, had dictated to him its constitution in his cave at
Manresa.
He was its real founder.
Whose name then could it so appropriately bear as his?
The bull constituting it was issued on the 27th of September 1540 and was entitled
Regimini Militantes Ecclesiae and bore that the persons it enrolled into an army
were to bear the standard of the cross and to wield the arms of God to serve the only
lord and the Roman pontiff his vicar on earth.
The latin words mean raised to the government of the church militant.
Chapter three.
Organization and training of the Jesuits.
The long-delayed wishes of Loyola had been realized and his efforts abortive in the
past had now at length been crowned with success.
The papal bull had given formal existence to the order.
What Christ had done in heaven his vicar had ratified on the earth.
But Loyola was too wise to think that all had been accomplished.
He knew that he was only at the beginning of his labors.
In the little band around him he saw but the nucleus of an army that would multiply
and expand to one day it should be as the stars in multitude and bear the standard
of victory to every land on earth.
The gates of the east were meanwhile closed against him.
But the western world would not always set limits to the triumphs of his spiritual
arms.
He would yet subjugate both hemispheres and extend the dominion of Rome from the
rising to the setting sun.
Such were the schemes that Loyola who hid under his mendicant's cloak an ambition
vast as Alexander's was at that moment revolving.
Assembling his comrades one day about this time he addressed them his biographer
Uberhorst tells us in a long speech saying ought we not to conclude that we are
called to win to God not only a single nation a single country but all nations
all the kingdoms of the world an army to conquer the world Loyola was forming but
he knew that nothing is stronger than its weakest part therefore the soundness of
every link the thorough discipline and tried fidelity
But first, the company of Jesus had to elect a head.
The dignity was offered to Loyola.
He modestly declined the post as Julius Caesar did the diadem.
After four days spent in prayer and penance, his disciples returned and humbly
supplicated him to be their chief.
Ignatius, viewing this as an intimation of the will of God, consented.
He was the first general of the order.
Few royal scepters bring with them such an amount of real power as this election
bestowed on Loyola.
The day would come when the tiara itself would bow before that yet mightier
authority which was represented by the cap of the general of the Jesuits.
The second step was to frame the constitutions of the society.
In this labor, Loyola accepted the aid of Linnaeus, the ablest of his converts.
Seeing it was at God's command that Ignatius had planted the tree of Jesuitism
in the spiritual vineyard, it was to be expected that the constitutions of the
company would proceed from the same high source.
The constitutions were declared to be a revelation from God, the inspiration of
the Holy Spirit.
This gave them absolute authority over the members and paved the way for the
substitution of the Constitution and canons of the Society of Jesus in the room
of Christianity itself.
These canons and instructions were not published, they were not communicated to
all the members of the Society even.
They were made known to a few only, in all their extent to a very few.
They took care to print them in their own college at Rome or in their college at
Prague, and if it happened that they were printed elsewhere, they secured and
destroyed the edition.
I cannot discover, says M.
de la Chalatais, that the constitutions of the Jesuits have ever been seen or
examined by any tribunal whatsoever, secular or ecclesiastic, by any sovereign,
not even by the Court of Chancery of Prague, when permission was asked to print
them.
They have taken all sorts of precautions to keep them a secret." For a century they
were concealed from the knowledge of the world, and it was an accident which at
last dragged them into the light from the darkness in which they had so long been
buried.
It is not easy, perhaps it is not possible, to say what number of volumes
the constitutions of the Jesuits form.
Louis René de la Chalatais, procurator general of King Louis XV, in his report on
the constitutions of the Jesuits, given in to the Parliament of Bretagne,
speaks of 50 volumes folio.
And that was in the year 1761, or 221 years after the founding of the
order.
This code, then enormous, must be greatly more so now.
Seeing every bull and brief of the Pope addressed to the society, every edict of
its general is so much more added to a legislation that is continually
augmenting.
We doubt whether any member of the order is found bold enough to undertake a
complete study of them, or ingenious enough to reconcile all their
contradictions and inconsistencies.
Prudently abstaining from venturing into a labyrinth from which he may never emerge,
he simply asks, not what do the constitutions say, but what does the
general command?
Practically, the will of his chief is the code of the Jesuit.
We shall first consider the powers of the general.
The original bull of Paul III, constituting the company, gave to Ignatius
de Loyola, with nine priests, his companions, the power to make
constitutions and particular rules, and also to alter them.
The legislative power thus rested in the hands of the general and his company,
that is, in a congregation representing them.
But when Loyola died, and Linnaeus succeeded him as general, one of his first
acts was to assemble a congregation and cause it to be decided that the general
only had the right to make rules, only the general.
This crowned the autocracy of the general, for while he has the power of legislating
for all others, no one may legislate for him.
He acts without control, without responsibility, without law.
It is true that in certain cases the society may depose the general,
but it cannot exercise its powers unless it be assembled, and the general alone can
assemble the congregation.
The whole order, with all its authority, is in fact comprised in him.
In virtue of his prerogative, the general can command and regulate everything in the
society.
He may make special constitutions for the advantage of the society, and he may alter
them, abrogate them, make new ones, dating them, at any time he pleases.
These new rules must be regarded as confirmed by apostolic authority,
not merely from the time they were made, but the time they are dated.
The general assigns to all provincials, superiors, and members of the society of
whatever grade, the powers they are to exercise, the places where they are to
labor, the missions they are to discharge, and he may annul or confirm their acts at
his pleasure.
He has the right to nominate provincials and rectors, to admit or exclude members,
to say what preferred dignity they are or not to accept, to change the destination
of legacies, and though to give money to his relatives exposes him to deposition,
he may, quote, yet give alms to any amount that he may deem conducive to the glory of
God, end quote.
He's invested, moreover, with the entire government and regulation of the colleges
of the society.
He may institute missions in all parts of the world.
When commanding in the name of Jesus Christ and in virtue of obedience,
he commands under the penalty of mortal and venial sin from his orders.
There's no appeal to the Pope.
He can release from vows.
He can examine into the consciences of the members, but it's useless to
particularize.
The general is the society.
The general alone, we have said, has power to make laws, ordinances,
and declarations.
This power is theoretically bounded, though practically absolute.
It's been declared that everything essential, substantia institutionis,
to the society is immutable, therefore removed beyond the power of the general.
But it has never yet been determined what things belong to the essence of the
Institute.
Many attempts have been made to solve this question, but no solution that is
comprehensible has ever been arrived at.
And so long as this question remains without an answer, the powers of the
general will remain without a limit.
Well, let us next attend to the organization of the society.
The Jesuit monarchy covers the globe.
At its head, as we have said, is a sovereign who rules over all, but is
himself ruled over by no one.
First come six grand divisions termed assistanzen, satrapies or princedoms.
These comprehend the space stretching from the Indus to the Mediterranean,
more particularly India, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Italy,
Sicily, Poland, and Lithuania.
Outside this area, the Jesuits have established missions.
The heads of these six divisions act as coadjutors to their general.
They're his staff or cabinet.
These six great divisions are subdivided into 37 provinces.
Over each province is placed a chief, termed a provincial.
The provinces are again subdivided into a variety of houses or establishments.
First come the houses of the professed, presided over by their provost.
Next come the colleges or houses of the novices and scholars, presided over by
their rector or superior.
Where these cannot be established, residences are erected for the
accommodation of the priests who perambulate the district, preaching and
hearing confessions.
Lastly, it may be mentioned mission houses, in which Jesuits live unnoticed as
secular clergy, but seeking by all possible means to promote the interests of
the society.
From his chamber in Rome, the eye of the general surveys the world of Jesuitism to
its farthest bounds.
There's nothing done in it which he does not see.
There's nothing spoken in it which he does not hear.
It becomes us to note the means by which this almost superhuman intelligence is
acquired.
Every year a list of the houses and members of the society, with the name,
talents, virtues and failings of each, is laid before the general.
In addition to the annual report, every one of the 37 provincials must send
him a report, monthly, of the state of his province.
He must inform him minutely of its political and ecclesiastical condition.
Every superior of a college must report once every three months.
The heads of houses of residents and houses of novitiates must do the same.
In short, from every quarter of his vast dominions comes a monthly and a
tri-monthly report.
If the matter reported on has reference to persons outside the society, the
Constitutions direct that the provincials and superiors shall write to the general
and cipher.
Such precautions are taken against enemies, says Chalotes.
Is the system of the Jesuits inimical to all governments?
Thus to the general of the Jesuits the world lies naked and open.
He sees by a thousand eyes.
He hears by a thousand ears.
And when he has a behest to execute, he can select the fittest agent from an
innumerable host, all of whom are ready to do his bidding.
The past history, the good and evil qualities of every member of the society,
his talents, his dispositions, his inclinations, his tastes, his secret
thoughts, have all been strictly examined, minutely chronicled, and laid before the
eye of the general.
It's the same as if he were present in person and had seen and conversed with
each.
All ranks, from the nobleman to the day laborer, all trades, from the opulent
banker to the shoemaker and porter, all professions, from the stolled
dignitary and the learned professor to the cowed mendicant, all grades of literary
men, from the philosopher, the mathematician, and the historian,
to the schoolmaster and the reporter on the provincial newspaper, are enrolled in
a society, marshaled, and in continual attendance before their chief stand this
host, so large in numbers and so various in gifts.
At his word they go, and at his word they come, speeding over seas and mountains,
across frozen steps or burning plains, on his errand.
Pestilence or battle or death may lie on his path.
The Jesuits obedience is not less prompt.
Selecting one, the general sends him to the royal cabinet.
Making choice of another, he opens to him the door of Parliament.
A third he enrolls in a political club.
A fourth he places in the pulpit of a church, whose creed he professes that he
may betray it.
A fifth he commands to mingle in the saloons of the literati.
A sixth he sends to act his part in the evangelical conference.
A seventh he seats beside the domestic hearth.
And an eighth he sends afar off to barbarous tribes, where speaking a strange
tongue and wearing a rough garment, he executes amidst hardships and perils
the will of his superior.
There is no disguise which the Jesuit will not wear, no art he will not employ,
no motive he will not feign, no creed he will not profess, provided only he can
acquit himself as a true soldier in the Jesuit army and accomplish the work on
which he has been sent forth.
We have men, exclaimed a general exaltingly, as he glanced over the long
roll of philosophers, orators, statesmen and scholars who stood before
him, ready to serve him in the state or in the church.
In the camp or in the school, at home or abroad, we have men for martyrdom,
if they be required.
No one can be enrolled in the Society of Jesus till he has undergone a severe and
long-continued course of training.
Let's glance at the several grades of that great army and the preparatory discipline
in the case of each.
There are four classes of Jesuits.
We begin with the lowest.
The novitiates are the first in order of admission, the last in dignity.
When one presents himself for admission into the order, a strict scrutiny takes
place into his talents, his disposition, his family, his former life.
And if it is seen that he is not likely to be of service to the society, he is at
once dismissed.
If his fitness appears probable, he's received into the house of primary
probation.
Here he's forbidden all intercourse with the servants within and his relations
outside the house.
A compend of the institutions is submitted for his consideration, the full body of
laws and regulations being withheld from him as yet.
If he possesses property, he is told that he must give it to the poor, that is to
the society.
His tact and address, his sound judgment and business talent, his health and bodily
vigor are all closely watched and noted.
Above all, his obedience is subjected to severe experiment.
If he acquits himself on the trial to the satisfaction of his examiners,
he receives the sacrament and is advanced to the house of second probation.
Here the discipline is of a yet severer kind.
The novitiate first devotes a certain period to confession of sins, meditation.
He next fulfills a course of service in the hospitals, learning humility by
helping the poor and ministering at the beds of the sick.
To further his advance in this grace, he next spends a certain term in begging
his bread from door to door.
Thus he learns to live on the coarsest fare, to sleep on the hardest couch.
To perfect himself in the virtue of self-abnegation, he next discharges for a
while the most humiliating and repulsive offices in the house in which he lives.
And now, this course of service ended, he's invited to show his powers of
operating on others by communicating instructions to boys in Christian
doctrine, by hearing confessions, and by preaching in public.
This course is to last two years, unless the superior should see fit to
shorten it on the ground of greater zeal or superior talent.
A period of probation.
At an end, the candidate for admission into the order of Jesuits is to present
himself before the superior, furnished with certificates from those under whose
eye he has fulfilled his six experimenta, or trials, as to the manner in which he
has acquitted himself.
If the testimonial should prove satisfactory to the superior, the
novitiate is enrolled, not as yet in the company of the Jesuits, but among the
indifference.
He is presumed to have no choice as regards the place he is to occupy in the
august core he aspires to enter.
He leaves that entirely to the decision of the superior.
He's equally ready to stand at the head of or at the foot of the body, and to
discharge the most menial or the most dignified service.
To play his part in the saloons of the great, encompassed by luxury and splendor,
or to discharge his mission in the hovels of the poor, in the midst of misery and
filth.
To remain at home, or to go to the ends of the earth.
To have a preference, though unexpressed, is to fall into deadly sin.
Obedience is not only the letter of his vow, it is the lesson that his training
has written on his heart.
This further trial gone through, the approved novitiate may now take the
three simple vows, poverty, chastity, and obedience, which with certain
modifications he must ever after renew twice every year.
The novitiate is now admitted into the class of scholars.
The Jesuits have colleges of their own, amply endowed by wealthy devotees,
and to one of these the novitiate is sent to receive instruction in the higher
mysteries of the society.
His intellectual powers are here more severely tested and trained, and according
to the genius and subtlety he may display, and his progress in his studies,
so is the post assigned him in due time in the order.
The qualities to be desired and commended in the scholars, says the Constitutions,
are acuteness of talent, brilliancy of example, and soundness of body.
They are to be chosen men picked from the flower of the troop, and the general has
absolute power in admitting or dismissing them, according to his expectations of
their utility in promoting the designs of the Institute.
Having finished his course, first as a simple scholar, and secondly as an
approved scholar, he renews his three vows, and passes into the third class,
or coagitors.
Stillwater's Revival Books is now located at PuritanDownloads.com.
It's your worldwide online Reformation home for the very best in free and
discounted classic and contemporary Puritan and Reformed books, mp3s,
and videos.
For much more information on the Puritans and Reformers, including the best free and
discounted classic and contemporary books, mp3s, digital downloads, and videos,
please visit Stillwater's Revival Books at PuritanDownloads.com.
Stillwater's Revival Books also publishes the Puritan Hard Drive, the most powerful
and practical Christian study tool ever produced.
All thanks and glory be to the mercy, grace, and love of the Lord Jesus Christ
for this remarkable and wonderful new Christian study tool.
The Puritan Hard Drive contains over 12,500 of the best Reformation books,
mp3s, and videos ever gathered onto one portable Christian study tool.
An extraordinary collection of Puritan, Protestant, Calvinistic, Presbyterian,
Covenanter, and Reformed Baptist resources.
It's fully upgradable and it's small enough to fit in your pocket.
The Puritan Hard Drive combines an embedded database containing many millions
of records with the most amazing and extraordinary custom Christian search and
research software ever created.
The Puritan Hard Drive has been produced to assist you in the fascinating and
exhilarating spiritual, intellectual, familial, ecclesiastical, and societal
adventure that is living the Christian life.
It has been specifically designed so that you might more faithfully know,
serve, and love the Lord Jesus Christ, as well as to help you to do all you can
to bring glory to his great name.
If you want to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind,
then the Puritan Hard Drive is for you.
Visit PuritanDownloads.com today for much more information on the Puritan Hard Drive
and to take advantage of all the free and discounted Reformation and Puritan books,
mp3s, and videos that we offer at Stillwaters Revival Books.
Welcome to the Jesuits by James Wiley.
We're continuing to read at page 17 for this reading.
This Reformation mp3 audio resource is a production of Stillwaters Revival Books.
Many free Puritan and Reformed resources, as well as our complete online catalog
containing classic and contemporary Reformation books, digital downloads,
mp3s, videos, DVDs, CDs, and the Puritan Hard Drive at great discounts are on the
web at PuritanDownloads.com.
Also, please consider, pray, and act upon the important truths found in the
following quotation by Charles Spurgeon, quote, As the Apostle says to Timothy,
so also he says to everyone, give yourself to reading.
He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains
of his own.
You need to read.
Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible
sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers and expositions of the
Bible.
The best way for you to spend your leisure is to be either reading or praying,
end of quote.
If you'd like to be added to our email list, please send an email to swrb at swrb
.com with the word add in the subject line.
Our email list is a double opt-in list, so once you've sent us your email address,
you'll be asked by email to confirm that you want to join our list using the email
address you've supplied.
Your email information will be kept confidential and you can easily remove
yourself from our email list by simply emailing us at swrb at swrb.com with the
word remove in the subject line.
Once you're on our email list you'll be alerted to the all new free Reformation
resources, free mp3s, free electronic books and texts and so forth that SWRB
makes available on the web, as well as at times to our best discounts and super
specials.
We also encourage you to reproduce this audio resource and to pass it on to your
friends, but we only authorize this as long as the full contents of the message,
including the header and trailer, is not altered in any way and as long as
the audio file is given away for free.
And now to SWRB's reading of The Jesuits by James Wiley, which we hope you find to
be a great blessing and which we pray draws you nearer to the Lord Jesus Christ,
for he is the way, the truth, and the life, and no man cometh unto the Father
but by him.
John 14 6.
Well as I said we're on page 17.
The coadjutors are divided into temporal and spiritual.
The temporal coadjutor is never admitted into holy orders.
Such are retained to minister in the lowest offices.
They become college cooks, porters, or purveyors.
For these and similar purposes it is held expedient that they should be lovers of
virtue and perfection and content to serve the society in the careful office of a
Martha.
The spiritual coadjutor must be a priest of adequate learning that he may assist
the society in hearing confessions and giving instructions in Christian doctrine.
It is from among the spiritual coadjutors that the rectors of colleges are usually
selected by the general.
It's a further privilege of theirs that they may be assembled in congregation to
deliberate with the professed members in matters of importance, but no vote is
granted them in the election of a general.
Having passed with approbation the many stringent tests to which he is here
subjected in order to perfect his humility and obedience, and having duly deposited
in the exchequer of the society whatever property he may happen to possess,
the spiritual coadjutor, if a candidate for the highest grade, is admitted to the
oblation of his vows, which are similar in form and substance to those he's already
taken, with this exception, that they assign to the general the place of God.
I promise, so runs the oath, to the omnipotent God, in presence of his virgin
mother, and of all the heavenly hierarchy, and to thee, Father General of the Society
of Jesus, holding the place of God, and so forth.
With this oath sworn on its threshold, he enters the inner circle of the society,
and is enrolled among the professed.
The professed members constitute the society par excellence.
They alone know its deepest secrets, and they alone wield its highest powers,
but perfection in Jesuitism cannot be reached otherwise than by the loss of
manhood.
Will, judgment, conscience, liberty, all the Jesuit lays down at the feet of
his general.
It's a tremendous sacrifice, but to him the general is God.
He now takes his fourth, or peculiar, vow, in which he binds himself to go,
without question, in delay, or repugnance, to whatever region of the earth,
and on whatever errand the Pope may be pleased to send him.
This he promises to the omnipotent God, and to his general, holding the place of
God.
The wisdom, justice, righteousness of the command he is not to question.
He is not even to permit his mind to dwell upon it for a moment.
It is the command of his general, and the command of his general is the
precept of the Almighty.
His superiors are over him in the place of the Divine Majesty.
In not fewer than 500 places in the Constitution, says Mr. Chalotes,
are expressions used similar to the following, quote, we must always see Jesus
Christ in the general, be obedient to him in all his behest, as if they came
directly from God himself, and so forth.
When the command of the superior goes forth, the person to whom it is directed
is not to stay till he has finished the letter his pen is tracing, say the
Constitutions.
He must give instant compliance, so that holy obedience may be perfect in
us in every point, in execution, in will, in intellect.
Obedience is styled the tomb of the will, a blessed blindness, which causes the soul
to see the road to salvation, and the members of the society are taught to
immolate their will, as a sheep is sacrificed.
The Jesuit is to be in the hands of his superior, as the axe is in the hands of
the woodcutter, or as a staff is in the hands of an old man, which serves him
wherever, and in whatever thing he is pleased to use it.
In fine, the Constitutions enjoin that they who live under obedience shall permit
themselves to be moved and directed under divine providence by their superiors,
just as if they were a corpse, which allows itself to be moved and
handled in any way.
The animals of mankind do not furnish another example of a despotism so
finished.
We know of no other instance in which the members of the body are so numerous,
or the ramifications so wide, and yet the centralization and cohesion so perfect.
We have traced at some length the long and severe discipline which every member must
undergo, before being admitted into the select class that by way of eminence
constitute the society.
Before arriving on the threshold of the inner circle of Jesuitism, three times has
the candidate passed through that terrible ordeal, first as a novice, secondly as a
scholar, thirdly as a coadjutor.
Is his training held to be complete when he is admitted among the professed?
No.
A fourth time must he undergo the same dreadful process.
He's thrown back again into the crucible and kept amid its fires till pride and
obstinacy and self-will and love of ease, till judgment, soul, and conscience have
all been purged out of him.
And then he comes forth, fully refined, completely attempered and hardened,
a vessel fully fitted for the use of his general.
Prepared to execute with a conscience that never remonstrates his most terrible
command, and to undertake with a will that never rebels the most difficult and
dangerous enterprises he may assign him.
In the words of an eloquent writer, talk of drilling and discipline?
Why, the drilling and the discipline which gave to Alexander the men that marched in
triumph from Macedon to the Indus, to Caesar, the men that marched in triumph
from Rome to the wilds of Caledonia, to Hannibal, the men that marched in
triumph from Carthage to Rome, to Napoleon, the men whose achievements
surpassed in brilliance the united glories of the soldiers of Macedon, of Carthage,
and of Rome, and to Wellington, the men who smote into the dust the very
flower of Napoleon's chivalry.
Why, the drilling and the discipline of all these combined cannot, in point of
stern, rigid, and protracted severity, for a moment be compared to the drilling
and discipline which fitted and molded men for becoming full members of the militant
institute of the Jesuits.
Such Loyola saw was the core that was needed to confront the armies of
Protestantism and turn back the advancing tide of light and liberty.
Touched with a divine fire, the disciples of the gospel attained at once to a
complete renunciation of self and a magnanimity of soul which enabled them to
brave all dangers and endure all sufferings and to bear the standard of a
recovered gospel over deserts and oceans in the midst of hunger and pestilence of
dungeons and racks and fiery stakes.
It was vain to think of overcoming warriors like these unless by combatants
of an equal temper and spirit, and Loyola set himself to fashion such.
He could not clothe them with the panoply of light.
He could not inspire them with that holy and invincible courage which springs from
faith, nor could he be so able to enkindle their souls with the love of the Savior
and the joys of the life eternal as that they should despise the sufferings of
time, but he could give them their counterfeits.
He could enkindle them with fanaticism, inspire them with a Luciferian ambition,
and so pervert and indurate their souls by evil maxims and long and rigorous training
that they should be insensible to shame and pain and would welcome suffering and
death.
Such were the weapons of the men he sent forth to the battle.
Chapter 4, The Moral Code of the Jesuits.
Probabilism and so forth.
We have not yet surveyed the full and perfect equipment of those troops which
Loyola sent forth to prosecute the war against Protestantism.
Nothing was left unthought of and unprovided for which might assist them in
covering their opponents with defeat, crowning themselves with victory.
They were set free from every obligation, whether imposed by the natural or the
divine law.
Every stratagem, artifice, and disguise were lawful to men in whose favor all
distinction between right and wrong had been abolished.
They might assume as many shapes as Proteus and exhibit as many colors as the
chameleon.
They stood apart and alone among the human race.
First of all, they were cut off from country.
Their vow bound them to go to whatever land their general might send them and to
remain there as long as he might appoint.
Their country was the society.
They were cut off from family and friends.
Their vow taught them to forget their father's house and to esteem themselves
holy only when every affection and desire which nature had planted in their breasts
had been plucked up by the roots.
They were cut off from property and wealth.
For although the society was immensely rich, its individual members possessed
nothing.
Nor could they cherish the hope of ever becoming personally wealthy, seeing they
had taken a vow of perpetual poverty.
If a chance that a rich relative died and left them his heirs, the general relieved
them of their vow, sent them back into the world for so long a time as might enable
them to take possession of the wealth of which they had been named the heirs.
But this done, they returned, laden with their booty and resuming their vow as
Jesuits, laid every penny of their newly acquired riches at the feet of the
general.
They were cut off, moreover, from the state.
They were discharged from all civil and national relationships and duties.
They were under a higher code than the national one.
The institutions, namely, which Loyola had edited and the spirit of God had inspired,
they were the subjects of a higher monarch than the sovereign of the nation,
their own general.
Nay, more, the Jesuits were cut off even from the Pope.
For if their general held the place of the omnipotent God, much more did he hold the
place of his vicar.
So was it in fact.
For soon the members of the Society of Jesus came to recognize no laws but their
own.
And though at their first formation they professed to have no end but the defense
and glory of the papacy, it came to pass when they grew to be strong that instead
of serving the tiara, they compelled the tiara to serve the society and made their
own wealth, power, and dominion the one grand object of their existence.
They were a papacy within the papacy, a papacy whose organization was more
perfect, whose instincts were more cruel, whose workings were more mysterious,
and whose dominion was more destructive than that of the old papacy.
So stood the Society of Jesus.
A deep and wide gulf separated it from all other communities and interests,
set free from the love of family, from the ties of kindred, from the claims
of country, and from the rule of law.
Careless of the happiness they might destroy and the misery and pain and woe
they might inflict, the members were at liberty without control or challenge to
pursue their terrible end, which was the dethronement of every other power,
the extinction of every other interest but their own, and the reduction of mankind
into abject slavery.
That on the ruins of the liberty, the virtue, and the happiness of the world
they might raise themselves to supreme unlimited dominion.
But we have not yet detailed all the appliances with which the Jesuits were
careful to furnish themselves for the execution of their unspeakably audacious
and diabolical design.
In the midst of these abysses there opens to our eye a yet profounder abyss.
To enjoy exemption from all human authority and from every earthly law was
to them a small matter.
Nothing would satisfy their lust for license save the entire abrogation of the
moral law.
And nothing would appease their pride save to trample underfoot the majesty of
heaven.
We now come to speak of the moral code of the Jesuits.
The keynote of their ethical code is the famous maxim that the end sanctifies the
means.
Before that maxim the eternal distinction of right and wrong vanishes.
Not only do the stringency and sanctions of human law dissolve and disappear,
but the authority and majesty of the decalogue are overthrown.
There are no conceivable crime, villainy, and atrocity which this maxim
will not justify.
Nay, such become dutiful and holy provided which the Jesuit means the honor,
interest, and advancement of his society.
In short, the Jesuit may do whatever he has a mind to do, all human and divine
laws not withstanding.
This is a very grave charge, but the evidence of its truth is unhappily too
abundant, and the difficulty lies in making a selection.
What the Popes have attempted to do by the plenitude of their power, namely to make
sin to be no sin, the Jesuit doctors have done by their casuistry.
Quote, the first and great commandment in the law, end of quote, said the same
divine person who proclaimed it from Sinai, is to love the Lord thy God.
The Jesuit casuists have set men free from the obligation to love God.
Escobar collects the different sentiments of the famous divines of the Society of
Jesus upon the question, when is a man obliged to have actually an affection for
God?
And the following are some of those.
Suarez says, it is sufficient a man love him before he dies, not assigning any
particular time.
Vasquez, that it is sufficient even at the point of death.
Others, when a man receives his baptism.
Others, when he is obliged to be contrite.
Others, upon holidays.
But our father Castro Palau disputes all these opinions and that justly.
Hurtado de Mendoza pretends that a man is obliged to do it once every year.
Our father Konink believes a man to be obliged once in three or four years.
Henriquez, once in five years.
Filiusius affirms it to be probable that in rigor a man is not obliged every five
years.
What then?
He leaves the point to the wise.
We are not, says Father Sermon, so much commanded to love him as not to
hate him.
Thus do the Jesuit theologians make void the first and great commandment in the
law.
The second commandment in the law is thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.
This second great commandment meets with no more respect at the hands of the
Jesuits than the first.
Their morality dashes both tables of the law in pieces.
Charity to man, it makes void equally with the love of God.
The methods by which this may be done are innumerable.
The first of these is termed probabilism.
This is a device which enables a man to commit any act, be it ever so manifest a
breach of the moral and divine law, without the least restraint of conscience,
remorse of mind, or guilt before God.
What is probabilism?
By way of answer we shall suppose that a man has a great mind to do a certain act
of the lawfulness of which he is in doubt.
He finds that there are two opinions upon the point.
The one probably true to the effect that the act is lawful.
The other more probably true to the effect that the act is sinful.
Under the Jesuit regimen the man is at liberty to act upon the probable opinion.
The act is probably right but more probably wrong.
Nevertheless he is safe in doing it in virtue of the doctrine of probabilism.
It's important to ask what makes an opinion probable?
To make an opinion probable a Jesuit finds easy indeed.
If a single doctor has pronounced in its favor, although a score of doctors may
have condemned it, or if the man can imagine in his own mind something like a
tolerable reason for doing the act, the opinion that it is lawful becomes
probable.
It'll be hard to name an act for which a Jesuit authority may not be produced.
And harder still to find a man whose invention is so poor as not to furnish him
with what he deems a good reason for doing what he is inclined to.
And therefore it may be pronounced impossible to instance a deed however
manifestly opposed to the light of nature and the law of God which may not be
committed under the shield of the monstrous dogma of probabilism.
We are neither indulging in satire nor incurring the charge of false
witness-bearing in this picture of Jesuit theology.
A person may do what he considers allowable, says Emmanuel Sa of the Society
of Jesus, according to a probable opinion, although the contrary may be the more
probable one.
The opinion of a single grave doctor is all that's requisite.
A yet greater Dr. Felucius of Rome confirms him in this.
It is allowable, says he, to follow the less probable opinion even though it be
the less safe one.
That's the common judgment of modern authors.
Of two contrary opinions, says Paul Lehmann, touching the legality or
illegality of any human action, everyone may follow in practice or in
action that which he should prefer, although he may appear to the agent
himself less probable in theory.
He adds, a learned person may give contrary advice to different persons
according to contrary probable opinions, whilst he still preserves discretion and
prudence, end of quote.
And we may say with Pascal, these Jesuit casuists give us elbow room at all events.
It is and it is not, is the motto of this theology.
It's the true lesbian rule which shapes itself according to that which we wish to
measure by it.
Would we have any action to be sinful?
The Jesuit moralist turns this side of the code to us.
Would we have it to be lawful?
He turns the other side.
Right and wrong are put thus in our own power.
We can make the same action a sin or a duty as we please or as we deem it
expedient.
To steal the property, to slander the character, to violate the chastity or
spill the blood of a fellow creature is most probably wrong, but let us imagine
some good to be got by it and then it is probably right.
The Jesuit writers, for the sake of those who are dull of understanding and slow to
apprehend the freedom they bring them, have gone into particulars and compiled
lists of actions esteemed sinful, unnatural, and abominable by the moral
sense of all nations hitherto, but which, in virtue of this new morality,
are no longer so.
And they have explained how these actions may be safely done with a minuteness of
detail and a luxuriance of illustration in which it were tedious, in some cases
immodest in others, to follow them.
One would think that this was licensed enough.
What more can the Jesuit need or what more can he possibly have, seeing by a little
effort of invention he can overleap every human and divine barrier and commit the
most horrible crimes on the mightiest possible scale and neither feel remorse of
conscience nor fear of punishment.
But this unbounded liberty of wickedness did not content the sons of Loyola.
They panted for a liberty, if possible, yet more boundless.
They wished to be released from the easy condition of imagining some good end for
the wickedness they wished to perpetrate and to be free to sin without the trouble
of assigning even to themselves any end at all.
This they have accomplished by the method of directing the intention.
And this is a new ethical science unknown to those ages which were not privileged to
bask in the illuminating rays of the Society of Jesus and it is as simple as
convenient.
It is the soul, they argue, that does the act so far as it is moral or immoral.
As regards the body's share in it, neither virtue nor vice can be predicated
of it.
If therefore, while the hand is shedding blood or the tongue is calumniating
character or uttering a falsehood, the soul can so abstract itself from what
the body is doing as to occupy itself the while with some holy theme or fix its
meditation upon some benefit or advantage likely to arise from the deed,
which it knows or at least suspects the body is at that moment engaged in doing.
The soul contracts neither guilt nor stain and the man runs no risk of ever being
called to account for the murder or theft or calumny by God or incurring his
displeasure on that ground.
We're not satirizing.
We're simply stating the morality of the Jesuits.
We never,
says the formal intention to sin, with the soul design of sinning.
And if any person whatever should persist in having no other end but evil,
in the evil that he does, we break with him at once.
Such conduct is diabolical.
This holds true without exception of age, sex, or rank.
But when the person is not of such a wretched disposition as this, we try to
put in practice our method of directing the intention, which simply consists in
his proposing to himself as the end of his action some allowable object.
Not that we do not endeavor as far as we can to dissuade men from doing things
forbidden, but when we cannot prevent the action we at least purify the motive and
thus correct the viciousness of the means by the goodness of the end.
Such is the way in which our fathers of the society have contrived to permit those
acts of violence to which men usually resort in vindication of their honor.
They have no more to do than to turn off the intention from the desire of
vengeance, which is criminal, and to direct it to a desire to defend their
honor, which according to us is quite warrantable.
And in this way our doctors discharge all their duty towards God and towards man.
By permitting the action they gratify the world, and by purifying the intention they
give satisfaction to the gospel.
This is a secret, sir, which was entirely unknown to the ancients.
The world is indebted for the discovery entirely to our doctors.
You understand it now, I hope." Well, let's take a few illustrative cases,
but only such as Jesuit casuists themselves have furnished.
A military man, says Reginald, may demand satisfaction on the spot from
the person who has injured him, not indeed with the intention of rendering
evil for evil, but with that of preserving his honor.
Leseus observes that if a man has received a blow on the face, he must on no account
have an intention to avenge himself, but he may lawfully have an intention to
avert infamy, and may with that view repel the insult immediately, even at the point
of the sword.
If your enemy is disposed to injure you, says Escobar, well, you have no right to
wish his death by a movement of hatred, though you may to save yourself from harm.
And, says Hurtado de Mendoza, we may pray God to visit with speedy death those who
are bent on persecuting us, if there is no other way of escaping from it.
An incumbent, says Gaspar de Hurtado, may without any mortal sin desire the
decease of a life renter on his benefits, and a son that of a father, and rejoice
when it happens, provided always it is for the sake of the profit that is to accrue
from the event, and not from personal aversion.
Sanchez teaches that it is lawful to kill our adversary in a duel, or even
privately, when he intends to deprive us of our honor or property unjustly in a
lawsuit or by chicanery, and when there is no other way of preserving them.
It's equally right to to kill in a private way a false accuser, and his witness,
and even the judge who has been bribed to favor them.
A most pious assassination, exclaims Pascal.
And now chapter 5, the Jesuit teaching on regicide, murder, lying, theft,
and so forth.
The three great rules of the code of the Jesuits, which we have stated in the
foregoing chapter, namely, that the end justifies the mean.
Secondly, that it is safe to do any action, if it be probably right,
although it may be more probably wrong.
And three, that if no one know to direct the attention, the intention, a right,
there is no deed, be its moral character what it may, which one may not do.
It may seem to give a license of acting so immense, that to add thereto were an
altogether superfluous, and indeed an impossible task.
But, if the liberty with which these three maxims endow the Jesuit, cannot be made
larger, its particular applications may nevertheless be made more pointed.
And the man who holds back from using it in all its extent, may be emboldened,
despite his remaining scruples, or the dullness of his intellectual
perceptions, to avail himself to the utmost of the advantages it offers for the
greater glory of God.
He is to be taught, not merely by general rules, but by specific examples,
how he may sin, and yet not become sinful.
How he may break the law, but not suffer the penalty.
But further, these sons of Loyola are the kings of the world, and the sole heirs of
all its wealth, honors, and pleasures.
And whatever law, custom, sacred, and venerable office, August and Augustine
kingly authority, may stand between them, and their rightful lordship over mankind,
they are at liberty to throw down, and tread into the dust, as a vile and
accursed thing.
The moral maxims of the Jesuits are to be put in force against kings, as well as
against peasants.
The lawfulness of killing excommunicated, that is, Protestant kings, the Jesuit
writers have been at great pains to maintain, and by a great variety of
arguments, to defend and enforce.
The proof is as abundant as it is painful.
Chalates reports to the Parliament of Britannia, as the result of his
examination of the laws and doctrines of the Jesuits, that on this point there is a
complete and startling unanimity in their teaching.
By the same logical track to the whole host of Jesuit writers arrive at the same
terrible conclusion, the slaughter, namely of the sovereign, on whom the Pope
has pronounced sentence of deposition.
If he shall take meekly his extrusion from power, and seek neither to resist,
nor revenge is being hurled from his throne, his life may be spared.
But should he persist in disobedience, says Chalates, himself a Papist,
and addressing a Popish Parliament, quote, he may be treated as a tyrant,
in which case anybody may kill him.
Such is the course of reasoning established by all authors of the society,
who have written ex-professo on these subjects, Bellarmine, Suarez, Molina,
Mariana, Santorell, all the Ultramontanes without exception, since the establishment
of the society, end of quote.
But have not the writers of this school expressed it in no measured terms their
abhorrence of murder?
Have they not loudly exclaimed against the sacrilege of touching him on whom the
church's anointing oil has been poured as king?
In short, do they not forbid and condemn the crime of regicide?
Yes, this is true.
But they protest with a warmth that is fitted to awaken suspicion.
Rome can take back her anointing, and when she has stripped the monarch of
his office, he becomes the lawful victim of her consecrated dagger.
On what grounds, the Jesuits demand, can the killing of one who is no longer a
king be called regicide?
Suarez tells us that when a king is deposed, he's no longer to be regarded as
a king, but as a tyrant.
He therefore loses his authority, and from that moment may be lawfully
killed.
Nor is the opinion of the Jesuit Mariana less decided.
Speaking of a prince, he says, if he should overthrow the religion of the
country and introduce a public enemy within the state, I shall never consider
that man to have done wrong, who, favoring the public wishes, would attempt
to kill him.
It is useful that princes should be made to know that if they oppress the state and
become intolerable by their vices and their pollution, they hold their lives
upon this tenure, that to put them to death is not only laudable, but a glorious
action.
It is a glorious thing to exterminate this pestilent and mischievous race from the
community of men, end of quote.
Wherever the Jesuits have planted missions, opened seminaries, and
established colleges, they've been careful to inculcate these principles in the minds
of the youth, thus sowing the seeds of future tumults, revolutions, regicides,
and wars.
These evil fruits have appeared sometime sooner sometimes later, but they've never
failed to show themselves to the grief of nations and dismay of kings.
John Chattel, who attempted the life of Henry IV, had studied in the College of
Claremont, in which the Jesuit Guignard was professor of divinity.
In the chamber of the would-be regicide, a manuscript of Guignard was found,
in which besides other dangerous articles, that father approved not only of the
assassination of Henry III by Clement, but also maintained that the same thing
ought to be attempted against Le Bernoy, as he called Henry IV, which occasioned
the first banishment of the order out of France, as a society, the Jesuits,
detestable and diabolical.
The sentence of the Parliament, passed in 1594, ordained that all the
priests and scholars of the College of Claremont, and others calling themselves
the Society of Jesus, as being corruptors of youth, disturbers of the public peace,
and enemies of the king and state, should depart in three days from their
house and college, and in 15 days out of the whole kingdom.
But why should we dwell on those written proofs of the disloyal and murderous
principles of the Jesuits, when their acted deeds bear still more emphatic
testimony to the true nature and effects of their principles?
We have only to look around, and on every hand, the melancholy monuments of these
doctrines meet our afflicted sight.
To what country of Europe shall we turn, where we are not able to track the Jesuit
by his bloody footprints?
What page of modern history shall we open and not read fresh proofs that the papal
doctrine of killing excommunicated kings was not meant to slumber in forgotten
tombs, but to be acted out in the living world?
We see Henry III falling by their dagger.
Henry IV perishes by the same consecrated weapon.
The king of Portugal dies by their order.
The great prince of orange is dispatched by their agent, shot down at the door of
his own dining room.
How many assassins they sent to England to murder Elizabeth, history attests.
That she escaped their machinations is one of the marvels of history.
Nor is it only the palaces of monarchs into which they have crept with their
doctrines of murder and assassination.
The very sanctuary of their own popes they have defiled with blood.
We behold Clement XIV signing the order for the banishment of the Jesuits and soon
thereafter he's overtaken by their vengeance and dies by poison.
In the gunpowder plot we see them deliberately planning to destroy at one
blow the nobility and gentry of England.
To them we owe those civil wars which for so many years drenched with blood the far
and fair provinces of France.
They lay the train of that crowning of horror, the St. Bartholomew massacre.
Philip too and the Jesuits share between them the guilt of the invincible armada
which instead of inflicting the measureless ruin and havoc which its
authors intended by a most merciful Providence became the means of exhausting
the treasures and overthrowing the prestige of Spain.
What a harvest of plots, tumults, seditions, revolutions, torturings,
poisonings, assassinations, regicides, and massacres has Christendom reaped from
the seed sown by the Jesuits.
Nor can we be sure that we have yet seen the last and greatest of their crimes.
We can bestow only the most cursory glance at the teaching of the Jesuits under the
other heads of moral duty.
Let's take their doctrine of mental reservation.
Nothing can be imagined more heinous and at the same time more dangerous.
The doctrine of equivocation, says Blackwell, is for the consolation of
afflicted Roman Catholics and the instruction of all the godly.
It has been of special use to them when residing among infidels and heretics in
heathen countries as China and Malabar.
They've professed conformity to the rites and the worship of paganism while
remaining Roman Catholics at heart and they have taught their converts to
venerate their former deities in appearance on the strength of directing a
right, the intention, the pious fraud of concealing a crucifix under their clothes.
Equivocation they have carried into civil life as well as into religion.
A man may swear, says Sanchez, that he hath not done a thing,
though he really have, by understanding within himself that he did it not on such
and such a day or before he was born or by reflecting on some other circumstance of
the like nature and yet the words he shall make use of shall not have a sense
implying any such thing.
And this is a thing of great convenience on many occasion and is always justifiable
when it's necessary or advantageous in anything that concerns a man's health,
honor, or estate.
Felucius in his moral questions asked, is it wrong to use equivocation in
swearing?
I answer first that it is not in itself a sin to use equivocation in swearing.
This is the common doctrine after soirees.
Is it perjury or sin to equivocate in a just cause, he further asks.
Is it not perjury, he answers, as for example in the case of a man who
was outwardly made a promise without the intention of promising.
If he is asked whether he has promised, he may deny it, meaning that he has not
promised with a binding promise and thus he may swear.
Felucius asks yet again, with what precaution is equivocation to be used?
When we begin, for instance, to say, I swear, we must insert in a subdued tone
the mental restriction, that today, and then continue aloud, I have not eaten
such a thing, or I swear, then insert, I say, then conclude in the same loud
voice, that I have not done this or that thing.
For thus the whole speech is most true.
What an admirable lesson in the art of speaking the truth to oneself and lying
and swearing falsely to everybody else.
We shall offer no comment on the teaching of the Jesuits under the head of the
seventh commandment.
The doctrines of the society which relate to chastity are screened from exposure by
the very enormity of their turpitude.
We pass them as we would the open grave, whose putrid breath kills all who inhale
it.
Let all who value the sweetness of a pure imagination and the joy of a conscience
undefiled shun the confessional as they would the chamber in which the plague is
shut up, or the path in which lurks the deadly scorpion.
The teaching of the Jesuits, everywhere deadly, is here a poison that consumes
flesh and bones and soul.
Which precept of the Decalogue is it that the theology of the Jesuits does not set
aside?
We are commanded to fear the great and dreadful name of the Lord our God.
The Jesuit bounty teaches us to blaspheme it.
Quote, if one has been hurried by passion into cursing and in doing desperate to his
maker, it may be determined that he has only sinned venially, end of quote.
This is much, but Casnetti goes a little farther.
Quote, do what your conscience tells you to be good and commanded, end of quote,
says this Jesuit.
If through invincible error you believe lying or blasphemy to be commanded by God,
blaspheme.
The license given by the Jesuits to regicide we have already seen,
not less ample is the provision their theology makes for the perpetrations of
ordinary homicides and murders.
Reginald says it is lawful to kill a false witness, seeing otherwise one should be
killed by him.
The parents who seek to turn their children from the faith, says Fagundes,
may justly be killed by them.
The Jesuit amicus teaches that it is lawful for an ecclesiastic or one in a
religious order to kill a columniator when other means of defense are wanting.
And Arult extends the same privilege to laymen.
If one brings an impeachment before a prince or judge against another,
and if that other cannot by any means avert the injury to his character,
he may kill him secretly.
He fortifies his opinion by the authority of Banez, who gives the same latitude to
the right of defense with this slight qualification that the columniator should
first be warned and that he desist from his slander, and if he will not,
he should be killed, not openly on account of the scandal, but secretly.
Of a like ample kind is the liberty which the Jesuits permit to be taken with the
property of one's neighbor.
Dishonesty in all its forms they sanction.
They encourage cheats, frauds, purloinings, robberies by furnishing men
with a ready justification of these misdeeds, and especially by persuading
their votaries that if they will only take the trouble of doing them in the way of
directing the intention according to their instructions, they need not fear being
called to a reckoning for them hereafter.
The Jesuit Immanuel Sa teaches that it is not a mortal sin to take secretly from him
who would give it if he were asked, that it is not theft to take a small thing
from a husband or a father, that if one has taken what he doubts to have been his
own, that doubt makes it probable that it is safe to keep it, and that if one,
from an urgent necessity or without causing much loss, takes wood from another
man's pile, he's not obliged to restore it.
One who has stolen small things at different times is not obliged to make
restitution until such time as they amount together to a considerable sum.
But should the purloiner feel restitution burdensome, it may confirm him to know
that some fathers deny it with probability.
The case of merchants, whose gains may not be increasing so fast as they could wish,
has been kindly considered by the fathers.
Francis Tollet says that if a man cannot sell his wine at a fair price,
that is, at a fair profit, he may mix a little water with his wine or diminish his
measure and sell it for pure wine of full measure.
Of course, if it be lawful to mix wine, it's lawful to adulterate all other
articles of merchandise or to diminish the weight and go on vending as if the balance
were just in the article genuine.
Only the trafficker in spurious goods with false balances must be careful not to tell
a lie, or if he should be compelled to equivocate, he must do it in accordance
with the rules laid down by the fathers for enabling one to say what is not true
without committing falsehood.
Domestic servants also have been taken by the fathers under the shield of their
casuistry.
Should a servant deem his wages not enough or the food, clothing, and other
necessaries provided for him not equal to that which is provided for servants of
similar rank in other houses, he may recompense himself by abstracting from his
master's property as much as shall make his wages commensurate with his services.
So has Valerius Reginald decided.
It is fair, however, that the pupil be cautioned that this lesson cannot safely
be put in practice against his teacher.
The story of John d'Alba, related by Pascal, shows that the fathers do not
relish these doctrines in praxi nearly so well as in dici, when they themselves are
the sufferers by them.
And d'Alba was a servant to the fathers in the College of Clermont, in the Rue
Saint-Jacques, and thinking that his wages were not equal to his merits, he stole
somewhat from his masters to make up the discrepancy, never dreaming that they
would make a criminal of him for following their approved rules.
However, they threw him into prison on a charge of larceny.
He was brought to trial on the 16th of April, 1647.
He confessed before the court to having taken some pewter plates, but maintained
that the act was not to be regarded as a theft, on the strength of this same
doctrine of Father Bauny, which he produced before the judges, with
attestation from another of the fathers under whom he had studied these cases of
conscience.
Whereupon the judge, de Montrouge, gave sentence as follows, quote,
that the prisoners should not be acquitted under the writings of these fathers,
containing a doctrine so unlawful, pernicious, and contrary to all laws,
natural, divine, and human, such as might confound all families and authorize all
domestic frauds and infidelities, end of quote.
But that the over-faithful disciple, quote, should be whipped before the
college gate of Clermont by the common executioner, who at the same time should
burn all the writings of those fathers treating of theft, and that they should be
prohibited to teach any such doctrine again under pain of death, end of quote.
But we should swell beyond all reasonable limits our enumeration, were we to quote,
even a tithe of the moral maxims of the Jesuits.
There's not one in the long catalog of sins and crimes which their casuistry does
not sanction.
Pride, ambition, avarice, luxury, bribery, and a host of vices which we
cannot specify, and some of which are too horrible to be mentioned, find in these
fathers their patrons and defenders.
The alchemists of the Middle Ages boasted that their art enabled them to operate on
the essence of things, to change what was vile into what was noble.
But the still darker art of the Jesuits acts to the reverse order.
It changes all that is noble into all that is vile.
Theirs is an accursed alchemy by which they transmute good into evil,
virtue into vice.
There's no destructive agency with which the world is liable to be visited that
penetrates so deep or inflicts so remedy-less a ruin as the morality of the
Jesuits.
The tornado sweeps along over the surface of the globe, leaving the earth naked,
bare as before tree or shrub beautified it.
But the summers of after years re-clothe it with verdure and beautify it with
flowers and make it smile as sweetly as before.
The earthquake overturns the dwelling of man and swallows up the proudest of his
cities.
But his skill and power survive the shock.
And when the destroyer has passed, the architect sets up again the fallen
palace and rebuilds the ruined city.
And the catastrophe is effaced and forgotten in the greater splendor and the
more solid strength of the restored structures.
Revolution may overturn thrones, abolish laws, and break in pieces the
framework of society.
But when the fury of faction has spent its rage, order emerges from the chaos,
law resumes its supremacy, and the institutions which had been destroyed in
the hour of madness are restored in the hour of calm wisdom that succeeds.
But the havoc the Jesuit inflicts is irremediable.
It has nothing in it counteractive or restorative.
It is only evil.
It is not upon the works of man or the institutions of man merely that it puts
forth its fearfully destructive power.
It is upon man himself.
It is not the body of man that it strikes like the pestilence.
It is the soul.
It's not a part but the whole of man that consigns to corruption and ruin.
Conscience it destroys.
Knowledge it extinguishes.
The very power of discerning between right and wrong it takes away and shuts up the
man in a prison whence no created agency or influence can set him free.
The fall defaced the image of God in which man was made.
We say defaced.
It did not totally obliterate or extinguish it.
Jesuitism more terrible than the fall totally effaces from the soul of man the
image of God.
Of the knowledge righteousness and true holiness in which man was made it leaves
not a trace.
It plucks up by its very roots the moral constitution which God gave to man.
The full triumph of Jesuitism would leave nothing spiritual, nothing moral,
nothing intellectual, nothing strictly and properly human existing upon the earth.
Man it would change into the animal impelled by nothing but appetites,
passions and these more fierce and cruel than those of the tiger.
Society would become simply a herd of wolves, lawless, ravenous, greedy of each
other's blood, perpetually in quest of prey.
Even Jesuitism itself would perish devoured by its own progeny.
Our earth at last would be simply a vast sepulcher moving around the sun in its
annual circuit, its bosom as joyless, dreary and waste as are those silent
spaces through which it rolls.
Still Waters Revival Books is now located at PuritanDownloads.com.
It's your worldwide online Reformation home for the very best in free and
discounted classic and contemporary Puritan and Reformed books, MP3s and
videos.
For much more information on the Puritans and Reformers, including the best free and
discounted classic and contemporary books, MP3s, digital downloads and videos,
please visit Still Waters Revival Books at PuritanDownloads.com.
Still Waters Revival Books also publishes the Puritan Hard Drive, the most powerful
and practical Christian study tool ever produced.
All thanks and glory be to the mercy, grace and love of the Lord Jesus Christ
for this remarkable and wonderful new Christian study tool.
The Puritan Hard Drive contains over 12,500 of the best Reformation books,
MP3s and videos ever gathered onto one portable Christian study tool.
An extraordinary collection of Puritan, Protestant, Calvinistic, Presbyterian,
Covenanter and Reformed Baptist resources.
It's fully upgradable and it's small enough to fit in your pocket.
The Puritan Hard Drive combines an embedded database containing many millions
of records with the most amazing and extraordinary custom Christian search and
research software ever created.
The Puritan Hard Drive has been produced to assist you in the fascinating and
exhilarating spiritual, intellectual, familial, ecclesiastical and societal
adventure that is living the Christian life.
It has been specifically designed so that you might more faithfully know,
serve and love the Lord Jesus Christ, as well as to help you to do all you can
to bring glory to His great name.
If you want to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind,
then the Puritan Hard Drive is for you.
Visit Puritan Downloads.com today for much more information on the Puritan Hard Drive
and to take advantage of all the free and discounted Reformation and Puritan books,
MP3s and videos that we offer at Stillwaters Revival Books.
Welcome to the Jesuits by James Wiley.
Today we'll be continuing to read at page 31.
This Reformation MP3 audio resource is a production of Stillwaters Revival Books.
Many free Puritan and Reformed resources, as well as our complete online catalog
containing classic and contemporary Reformation books, digital downloads,
MP3s, videos, DVDs, CDs and the Puritan Hard Drive at great discounts are on the
web at PuritanDownloads.com.
Also, please consider, pray and act upon the important truths found in the
following quotation by Charles Spurgeon.
As the Apostle says to Timothy, so also he says to everyone, give yourself
to reading.
He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains
of his own.
You need to read.
Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible
sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers and expositions of the
Bible.
The best way for you to spend your leisure is to be either reading or praying.
If you'd like to be added to our email list, please send an email to swrb at swrb
.com with the word add in the subject line.
Our email list is a double opt-in list, so once you've sent us your email address,
you'll be asked by email to confirm that you want to join our list using the email
address you've supplied.
Your email information will be kept confidential and you can easily remove
yourself from our email list by simply emailing us at swrb at swrb.com with the
word remove in the subject line.
Once you're on the email list, you'll be alerted to all the new free
Reformation resources, free mp3s, free electronic books and texts and so
forth that SWRB makes available on the web, as well as at times to our best
discounts and super specials.
We also encourage you to reproduce this audio resource and to pass it on to your
friends, but we only authorize this as long as the full contents of the message,
including the header and trailer, is not altered in any way and as long as
the audio file is given away for free.
And now to SWRB's reading of the Jesuits by James Wiley, which we hope you find to
be a great blessing, in which we pray draws you nearer to the Lord Jesus Christ,
for he is the way, the truth and the life, and no man cometh unto the Father but by
him.
John 14 6.
Over on chapter 6, as I said, it's page 31.
So far we have traced the enrollment and training of that mighty army which Loyola
had called into existence for the conquest of Protestantism.
Their leader, who was quite as much the shrewd calculator as the fiery fanatic,
took care before sending his soldiers into the field to provide them with armor,
every way fitted for the combatants they were to meet and the campaign they were to
wage.
The war in which they were to be occupied was one against right and truth,
against knowledge and liberty.
And where could weapons be found for the successful prosecution of a conflict like
this, save in the old established arsenal of sophisms?
The schoolmen, those Vulcans of the Middle Ages, had forged these weapons with the
hammers of their speculation on the anvil of their subtlety, and having made them
sharp of edge and given them an incomparable flexibility, they stored them
up and kept them in reserve against the great coming day of battle.
To this armory, Loyola and the chiefs that succeeded him in command had recourse,
but not content with these weapons as the schoolmen had left them, the Jesuit
doctors put them back again into the fire.
They kept them in a furnace, heated seven times, till every particle of the dross of
right and truth that cleaved to them had been purged out, and they had acquired a
flexibility absolutely and altogether perfect, and a keenness of edge unattained
before, and were now deemed every way fit for the hands that were to wield them,
and every way worthy of the cause in which they were to be drawn.
So attempered they could cut through shield and helmet, through body and soul
of the foe.
Let us survey the soldier of Loyola as he stands in the complete and perfect panoply
his general has provided him with, how admirably harnessed for the battle he
is to fight.
He has his loins girt about with mental and verbal equivocation.
He has on the breastplate of probabilism his feet are shod with the preparation of
the secret instructions.
Above all, taking the shield of intention and rightly handling it, he's able to
quench all the fiery darts of human remorse and divine threatenings.
He takes for a helmet the hope of paradise, which has been most surely
promised him as the reward of his services, and in his hand he grasps the
two-edged sword of a fiery fanaticism, wherewith he's able to cut his way with
prodigious bravery through truth and righteousness.
Verily, the man who has to sustain the onset of soldiers like these, and parry
the thrusts of their weapons, and need to be mindful of the ancient admonition,
take unto you the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the
evil day, and having done all, to stand.
Shrewd, practical, and precise are the instructions of the Jesuits.
First of all, they're told to select the best points in that great field,
all of which they are in due time to subjugate and possess.
That field is Christendom.
They're to begin by establishing convents or colleges in the chief cities,
the great centers of population and wealth secured, the smaller places will be easily
occupied.
Should anyone ask on what errand the good fathers have come, they are instructed to
make answer that their sole object is the salvation of souls.
What a pious errand!
Who would not strive to be the first to welcome to their houses and to seat at
their tables men whose aims are so unselfish and heavenly?
They're to be careful to maintain a humble and submissive deportment.
They're to pay frequent visits to the hospitals, the sick chamber, and the
prisons.
They're to make great show of charity, and as they have nothing of their own to
give to the poor, they're to go far and near to receive even the smallest atoms.
These good deeds will not lose their reward if only they take care not to do
them in secret.
Men will begin to speak of them and say, what a humble, pious, charitable order of
men these fathers of the Society of Jesus are.
How unlike the Franciscans and Dominicans who were wont to care for the sick and the
poor, but have now forgotten the virtues of a former time, and are grown proud,
indolent, luxurious, and rich.
Thus the newcomers, the instructions hint, will supplant the other in older orders,
and will receive the respect and reverence of the best and most eminent in the
neighborhood.
Further, they are enjoined to conduct themselves very deferentially towards the
parochial clergy, not to perform any sacred function till they first have
piously and submissively asked the bishops leave.
This will secure their good graces, and dispose the secular clergy to protect
them.
But by and by, when they have ingratiated themselves with the people, they may abate
somewhat of this subserviency to the clergy.
The individual Jesuit takes a vow of poverty, but the Society takes no such
vow, and is qualified to hold property to any amount.
Therefore, while seeking the salvation of souls, the members are carefully to note
the rich men in the community.
They must first find out who owns the estates in the neighborhood, and what are
their yearly values.
They are to secure these estates by gift, if possible, if not by purchase.
When it happens that they get anything that is considerable, let the purchase be
made under a strange name by some of our friends, that our poverty may still seem
the greater.
And let our provincial assign such revenues to some other colleges,
more remote, that neither prince nor people may discover anything of our
profits, a device that combines many advantages.
Every day their acres will increase.
Nevertheless, their apparent poverty will be as great as ever, and the flow of
benefactions and legacies to supply it will remain undiminished, although the sea
into which all these rivers run will never be full.
Among the multifarious duties laid upon the Jesuits, special prominence was given
to the instruction of youth.
It was by this arm that they achieved their most brilliant success.
Whisper it sweetly in their and the people's ears that they are come to
catechize the children's gratis free.
Wherever the Jesuits came, they opened schools and gathered the youth around
them.
But despite their zeal in the work of education, knowledge somehow did not
increase.
The intellect refused to expand and the genius to open under their tutelage.
Kingdoms like Poland, where they became the privileged and the only instructors of
youth, instead of taking a higher place in the commonwealth of letters, fell back
into mental decrepitude and lost their rank in the community of nations.
The Jesuits communicated to their pupils little besides the knowledge of Latin.
History, philosophy, and science were sealed books.
They initiated their disciples into the mysteries of probabilism and the art of
directing the intention, and the youth trained in these paths when all did not
depart from them.
They dwarfed the intellect and narrowed the understanding, but they gained their
end.
They stamped anew the Roman impress upon many of the countries of Europe.
The second chapter of the instructions is entitled, What must be done to get the ear
and intimacy of great men?
To stand well with monarchs and princes is, of course, a matter of such importance
that no stone is to be left unturned to attain it.
The instructions here, as we should expect them to be, are full and precise.
The members of the Society of Jesus are first of all to imbue princes and great
men with the belief that they cannot dispense with their aid if they would
maintain the pomp of their state and the government of their realms.
Should princes be filled with a conceit of their own wisdom, the fathers must find
some way of dispelling this egregious delusion, and there to be surrounding them
with confessors chosen from their society, but by no means are they to bear hard on
the consciences of their royal penitents.
They must treat them sweetly and pleasantly, oftener administering opiates
than irritants.
There to study their humors, and if in the matter of marriage they should be
inclined, as often happens with princes, to contract alliance with their own
kindred, they are to smooth their way by hinting at a dispensation from the Pope or
finding some palliative for the sin from the pharmacopia of their theology.
They may tell them that such marriages, though forbidden to the commonalty,
are sometimes allowed to princes for the greater glory of God.
If a monarch is bent on some enterprise, a war for example, the issue of which is
doubtful, they are to be at pains so to shape their counsel in the matter,
that if the affair succeeds they shall have all the praise, and if it fails the
blame shall rest with the king alone.
And lastly, when a vacancy occurs near the throne, they are to take care that the
empty post shall be filled by one of the tried friends of the society of whom they
are enjoined to have at all times a list in their possession.
It may be well, in order to still more to advance their interests at courts,
to undertake embassies at times.
This will enable them to draw the affairs of Europe into their own hands and to make
princes feel they are indispensable to them by showing them what an influence
they wield at the courts of other sovereigns, especially how great their
power is at that of Rome.
Small services and trifling presents they are by no means to overlook.
Such things go a great way in opening the hearts of princes.
Be sure, say the instructions, to paint the men whom the prince dislikes
in the same colors in which his jealousy and hatred teach him to view them.
Moreover, if the prince is unmarried, it'll be a rare stroke of policy to choose
a wife for him from among the beautiful and noble ladies known to their society.
This is seen, say the instructions, by experience in the house of Austria and
in the kingdoms of Poland and France and in many other principalities.
We must endeavor, say the instructions, with remarkable plainness but in the
belief, doubtless, that the words would meet the faithful eyes of the members of
the society of Jesus only.
We must endeavor to breed dissension among great men and raise seditions or anything
a prince would have us to do to please him.
If one who is chief minister of state to a monarch, who is our friend, oppose us and
that prince cast his whole favors upon him so as to add titles to his honor,
we must present ourselves before him and court him in the highest degree,
as well by visits as all humble respect.
Having specified the arts by which princes may be managed, the instructions next
prescribe certain methods for turning to account others of great authority in the
commonwealth that by their credit we obtain profit and preferment.
If, say the instructions, these lords be seculars, we ought to have recourse to
their aid and friendship against our adversaries and to their favor in our own
suits and those of our friends and to their authority and power in the purchase
of houses, manors, and gardens, and of stones to build with, especially in
those places that will not endure to hear of our settling in them, because the
authority of these lords serveth very much for the appeasing of the populace and
making our ill willers quiet.
Nor are they less sedulously to make court to the bishops.
Their authority, great everywhere, is especially so in some kingdoms,
as in Germany, Poland, and France.
And the bishops conciliated, they may expect to obtain a gift of new erected
churches, altars, monasteries, foundations, and in some cases,
the benefices of the secular priests and canons, with the preferable right of
preaching in all the great towns.
And when bishops so befriend them, they are to be taught that there is no
less profit than merit in the deed.
Inasmuch as done to the order of Jesus, they are sure to be repaid with most
substantial services, whereas done to the other orders, they'll have nothing in
return for their pains, but a song.
To love their neighbor and speak well of him, while they held themselves in lowly
estimation, was not one of the failings of the Jesuits.
In their own virtues, they were to proclaim as loudly as they did the faults
of their brother monks.
Their instructions commanded them to imprint upon the spirits of those princes
who love us, that our order is more perfect than all other orders.
They are to supplant their rivals by telling monarchs that no wisdom is
competent to counsel in the affairs of state but ours, and that if they wish to
make their realms resplendent with knowledge, they must surrender the schools
to Jesuit teachers.
They are especially to exhort princes that they owe it as a duty to God to consult
them in the distribution of honors and emoluments and in all appointments to
places of importance.
Further, they are ever to have a list in their possession of the names of all
persons in authority and power throughout Christendom, in order that they may change
or continue them in their several posts as may be expedient.
But so covertly must this delicate business be done that their hand must not
be seen in it, nor must it once be suspected that the change comes from them.
While slowly and steadily climbing up to the control of kings and the government of
kingdoms, they are to study great modesty of demeanor and simplicity of life.
The pride must be worn in the heart, not on the brow, and the foot must be set
down softly, that is to be planted at last on the neck of monarchs.
Let hours that are in the service of princes, says the instructions,
keep but a very little money and a few movables, contenting themselves with a
little chamber, modestly keeping company with persons in humble station.
And so being in good esteem, they ought prudently to persuade princes to do
nothing without their counsel, whether it be in spiritual or temporal
affairs." Chapter 7.
Jesuit Management of Rich Widows and the Heirs of Great Families.
The sixth chapter of the instructions treats of the means to acquire the
friendship of rich widows.
On opening this new chapter, the reflection that forces itself on one is
how wide the range of objects to which the society of Jesus is able to devote its
attention.
The greatest matters are not beyond its strength and the smallest are not beneath
its notice.
From counseling monarchs and guiding ministers of state, it turns with equal
adaptability and dexterity to caring for widows.
The instructions on this head are minute and elaborate to a degree, which shows the
importance the society attaches to the due discharge of what it owes to this class of
its clients.
True, some have professed to doubt whether the action of the society in this matter
be wholly and purely disinterested from the restriction it puts upon the class of
persons taken under its protection.
The instructions do not say widows, but rich widows.
But all the more on that account, do widows need defense against the arts of
chicanery and the wiles of avarice?
And how can the fathers better accord them such than by taking measures to convey
their bodies and their goods alike within the safe walls of a convent?
There the cormorants and vultures of a wicked world cannot make them their prey,
but let us mark how they are to proceed.
First, a father of suitable gifts is to be selected to begin operations.
He must not, in point of years, exceed middle age.
He must have a fresh complexion and a gracious discourse.
He is to visit the widow, to touch feelingly on her position and the snares
and injuries to which it exposes her, and to hint at the fraternal care that the
society of which he is a member delights to exercise over all in her condition who
choose to place themselves under its guardianship.
After a few visits of this sort, the widow will probably appear at one of
the chapels of the society.
Should it so happen, the next step is to appoint a confessor of their body for the
widow.
Should these delicate steps be well got over, the matter will begin to be hopeful.
It will be the confessor's duty to see that the wicked idea of marrying again
does not enter her mind.
For this end, he is to picture to her the delightful and fascinating freedom she
enjoys in her widowhood.
And over against it, he is to place the cares, vexations, and tyrannies which a
second matrimony would probably draw upon her.
To second these representations, the confessor is empowered to promise
exemption from purgatory should the holy estate of widowhood be persevered in.
To maintain this pious frame of mind on the part of the object of these
solicitudes, the instructions direct that it may be advisable to have an oratory
erected in her house with an altar and frequent mass and confession celebrated
there at.
The adorning of the altar and the accompanying rites will occupy the time of
the widow and prevent the thoughts of a husband entering her mind.
The matter having been conducted to this stage, it will be prudent now to change
the persons of trust about her and to replace them with persons devoted to the
society.
The number of religious services must also be increased, especially confession,
so that, say the instructions, knowing their former accusations,
manners, and inclinations, the whole may serve as a guide to make them obey our
wills.
End of quote.
These steps will have brought the widow very near the door of a convent.
A continuance a little longer in the same cautious and skillful tactics is all that
will be necessary to land her safely within its walls.
The confessor must now enlarge on the quietude and eminent sanctity of the
cloister, how surely it conducts to paradise, but should she be unwilling to
assume the veil in regular form, she may be induced to enter some religious
order, such as that of Paulina, so that being caught in the vow of
chastity, all danger of her marrying again may be over.
The great duty of alms, that queen of the graces, without which it is to be
represented to her she cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven, is now to be pressed
upon her.
Which alms, notwithstanding, she ought not to dispose to everyone, if it be not by
the advice and with the consent of her spiritual father.
Under this direction, it is easy to see in what exchequer the lands, manners,
and revenues of widows will ultimately be garnered.
But the fathers deemed it inexpedient to leave such an issue the least uncertain,
and accordingly the seventh chapter enters largely into the means of keeping in our
hands the disposition of the estates of widows.
To shut out worldly thoughts, and especially matrimonial ones, the time of
such widows must be occupied with their devotions.
They are to be exhorted to curtail their expenditure and abound yet more in alms to
the church of Jesus Christ.
A dexterous confessor is to be appointed them.
They are to be frequently visited and entertained with pleasant discourse.
They are to be persuaded to select a patron or tutelary saint, say Saint
Francis or Saint Xavier.
Provision is to be made that all they do may be known by placing about them only
persons recommended by the society.
We must be excused for not giving in the words of the fathers, the fourteenth
section of this chapter.
That section gives their protégés great license, indeed all license, provided they
be liberal and well-affected to our society, and that all things be carried
cunningly and without scandal.
But the one great point to be aimed at is to get them to make an entire surrender of
their estates to the society.
This is to reach perfection now, and it may be to attain in future the yet
higher reward of canonization.
But should it so happen, from love of kindred or other motives, that they have
not endowed the poor companions of Jesus with all their worldly goods when they
come to die, the preferable claims of the Church of Jesus Christ to those of kindred
are to be urged upon them, and they are to be exhorted to contribute to the finishing
of our colleges, which are yet imperfect, for the greater glory of God, giving us
lamps and pixes and for the building of other foundations and houses, which we,
the poor servants of the Society of Jesus, do still want, that all things may be
perfected.
Quote, let the same be done with princes, the instructions go on to say,
and our other benefactors, who build us any sumptuous pile or erect any foundation
representing to them in the first place that the benefits they thus do us are
consecrated to eternity, that they shall become thereby perfect models of piety,
that we will have thereof a very particular memory, and that in the next
world they shall have their reward.
But if it be objected that Jesus Christ was born in a stable and had not where to
lay his head, and that we who are his companions ought not to enjoy perishing
goods, we ought to imprint strongly on their spirits that in truth at first the
church was also in the same state, but now that by the providence of God
she's raised to a monarchy, and that in those times the church was nothing but a
broken rock, which has now become a great mountain.
Well, end of quote.
In the chapter that follows, the eighth namely, the net is spread still wider.
It's around the feet of the sons and daughters of devout widows that its meshes
are now drawn.
The scheme of machinations and seduction unfolded in this chapter differs only in
its minor points from that which we have already had disclosed to us.
We pass it therefore, and go on to the ninth chapter where we find the scheme
still widening, and wholesale rapacity and extortion, sanctified of course by the end
in view, still more openly avowed and enjoined.
The chapter is entitled of the means to augment the revenues of our colleges,
and these means in short are the astute and persistent deception, circumvention,
and robbery of every class.
The net is thrown almost without disguise over the whole community in order that the
goods, heritages, and possessions of all ranks, prince, peasant, widow,
and orphan, may be dragged into the convents of the Jesuits.
The world is but a large preserve for the mighty hunters of the society of Jesus.
Above and before all other things, says this instruction, we ought to
endeavor our own greatness by the direction of our superiors, who are the
only judges in this case, and who should labor that the church of God may be in the
highest degree of splendor for the greater glory of God.
In prosecution of this worthy end, the secret instructions enjoin the fathers
to visit frequently at rich and noble houses, and to inform themselves prudently
and dexterously, whether they will not leave something to our churches in order
to the obtaining remission of their sins, and of the sins of their kindred.
Confessors, and only able and eloquent men are to be appointed as confessors to
princes and statesmen, are to ascertain the name and surname of their penitents,
the names of their kindred and friends, whether they have hopes of succeeding to
anything, and how they mean to dispose of what they already have, or may yet have,
whether they have brothers, sisters, or heirs, and of what age, inclination,
and education they are.
And they should persuade them that all these questions do tend much to the
clearing of the state of their conscience.
There is a refreshing plainness about the following instructions.
They're given with the air of men who had so often repeated their plea, quote,
for the greater glory of God, that they themselves had come at last to believe it.
Our provincial ought to send expert men into all those places where there's any
considerable number of rich and wealthy persons, to the end that they may give
their superiors a true and faithful account.
Let the stewards of our college get an exact knowledge of the houses,
gardens, quarries of stone, vineyards, manors, and other riches of everyone who
lives near the place where they reside, and if it be possible, what degree of
affection they have for us.
In the next place, we should discover every man's office, and the revenue of it,
their possessions, the articles of their contracts, which they may surely do by
confessions, by meetings, and by entertainment, or by our trusty friends.
And generally, when any confessor lights upon a wealthy person, from whom he hath
good hopes of profit, he is obliged forthwith to give notice of it,
and deliver it at his return.
They should also inform themselves exactly whether there be any hope of obtaining
bargains, goods, possessions, pious gifts, and the like, in exchange for the
admission of their sons into our society.
If a wealthy family have daughters only, they are to be drawn by caresses to become
nuns, in which case a small portion of their estate may be assigned for their
use, and the rest will be ours.
The last heir of a family is by all means to be induced to enter the society,
and the better to relieve his mind from all fear of his parents, he is to be
taught that it is more pleasing to God that he take this step without their
knowledge or consent.
Such a one ought to be sent to a distance to pass his novitiate.
End of quotes.
These directions were but too faithfully carried out in Spain, and to this among
other causes is owing the depopulation of that once powerful country.
A writer who resided many years in the peninsula, and had the best opportunities
of observing its condition says, quote, if a gentleman has two or three
sons, and as many daughters, the confessor of the family advises the father to keep
the oldest son at home, and send the rest, both sons and daughters, into a convent or
monastery, praising the monastic life and saying that to be retired from the world
is the safest way to heaven.
The fathers of these families, glad of lessening the expenses of the
house, and of seeing their children provided for, do send them into the desert
place of a convent, which is really the middle of the world.
Now observe that it is twenty to one that their heir dieth before he marrieth and
have children.
So the estate and everything else falls to the second, who is a professed friar,
or nun, and as they cannot use the expression of miam or tuam, all goes that
way, and to the society.
And this is the reason why many families are extinguished and their names quite out
of memory.
The convent so crowded, and the kingdom so thin of people, and the friars,
nuns, and monasteries so rich.
End of quote.
Further, the fathers are counseled to raise large sums of money on bond,
the advantage of this method is that when the bond holder comes to die, it will be
easy to induce him to part with the bond in exchange for the salvation of his soul.
At all events, he is more likely to make a gift of the deed than to bequeath the same
amount in gold.
Another advantage of borrowing in this fashion is that their pretense of poverty
may still be kept up.
Owners of a fourth or of a half of the property of a country, they will still be
the poor companions of Jesus.
We make but one other quotation from the secret instructions.
It closes this series of pious advices and is in one respect the most characteristic
of them all.
Quote, let the superior keep these secret advices with great care, and let them not
be communicated but to a very few discreet persons, and that only by parts,
and let them instruct others with them when they have profitably served the
society, and then let them not communicate them as rules they have received but as
the effects of their own prudence.
But if they should happen to fall into the hands of strangers who should give them an
ill sense of construction, let them be assured the society owns them not in that
sense, which shall be confirmed by instancing those of our order who
assuredly know them not.
End of quote.
It was some time before the contingency of exposure here provided against actually
happened, but in the beginning of the 17th century the accidents of war dragged these
secret instructions from the darkness in which their authors had hoped to conceal
them from the knowledge of the world.
The Duke of Brunswick, having plundered the Jesuits' college at Paderborn in
Westphalia, made a present of their library to the Capuchins of the same town.
Among the books which had thus come into their possession was found a copy of the
secret instructions.
Another copy is said to have been discovered in the Jesuits' college at
Prague.
Soon thereafter reprints and translations appeared in Germany, Holland, France,
England.
The authenticity of the work was denied, as was to be expected.
For any society that is astute enough to compile such a book would be astute enough
to deny it.
To only the fourth or highest order of Jesuits were these instructions to be
communicated.
The others who were ignorant of them in their written form were brought forward to
deny on oath that such a book existed, but their protestations weighed very
little against the overwhelming evidence on the other side.
The perfect uniformity of the methods followed by the Jesuits in all countries
favored a presumption that they acted upon a prescribed rule, and the exact
correspondence between their methods and the secret advices showed that this was
the rule.
Greta, a well-known member of the society, affirmed that the Sekreta Moneta was a
forgery by a Jesuit who had been dismissed with ignominy from the society in Poland,
and that he published it in 1616.
But the falsehood of the story was proved by the discovery in the British Museum of
a work printed in 1596, 20 years before the alleged forgery in which the Sekreta
Moneta is copied.
Since the first discovery in Paderborn, copies of the Sekreta Moneta have been
found in other libraries, as in Prague noted above.
Numerous editions have since been published, and in so many languages that
the idea of collusion is out of the question.
These editions all agree, with the exception of a few unimportant variations
in the reading.
These private directions, says M.
L.
Estrange, are quite contrary to the rules, constitutions, and instructions which this
society professeth publicly in those books it hath printed on this subject,
so that without difficulty we may believe that the greatest part of their governors,
if a very few be accepted especially, have a double rule as well as a double
habit, one for their private and particular use, and another to flaunt with
before the world." End of quote.
Now chapter 8, diffusion of the Jesuits throughout Christendom.
The soldiers of Loyola are about to go forth.
Before beginning the campaign we see their chief assembling them and pointing out the
field in which their prowess is to be displayed.
The nations of Christendom are in revolt.
It will be theirs to subjugate them, and lay them once more bound in chains at
the feet of the papal sea.
They must not faint.
The arms he has provided them with are amply sufficient for the arduous warfare
on which he sends them.
Clad in that armor, and wielding it in the way he has shown them, they will expel
knowledge as night chases away the day.
Liberty will die wherever their foot shall tread.
In the ancient darkness they'll be able to rear again the fallen throne of the great
hierarch of Rome.
But if the service is hard, the wages will be ample.
As the saviors of that throne they will be greater than it, and though meanwhile
their work is to be done in great show of humility and poverty, the silver and the
gold of Christendom will in the end be theirs.
They'll be the lords of its lands and palaces, the masters of the bodies and the
souls of its inhabitants, and nothing of all that the heart can desire will be
withheld from them, if only they will obey him.
The Jesuits rapidly multiplied, and were now to follow them in their
peregrinations over Europe.
Going forth in little bands, animated with an entire devotion to their general,
schooled in all the arts which could help to further their mission, they planted
themselves in a few years in all the countries of Christendom, and made their
presence felt in the turning of the tide of Protestantism, which to them had been
on the flow.
There was no disguise they could not assume, and therefore there was no place
into which they could not penetrate.
They could enter unheard in the closet of the monarch, or the cabinet of the
statesman.
They could sit unseen in convocation or general assembly, and mingle unsuspected
in the deliberations and debates.
There was no tongue they could not speak, and no creed they could not profess.
And thus there was no people among whom they might not sojourn, and no church
whose membership they might not enter, and whose function they might not
discharge.
They could execrate the Pope with the Lutheran, swear the solemn league with the
Covenanter.
They had their men of learning and eloquence for the halls of nobles and the
courts of kings, their men of science and letters for the education of youth,
their unpolished but ready orators to harangue the crowd, and their plain
unlettered monks to visit the cottages of the peasantry, the workshops of the
artisan.
I know these men, said Joseph II of Austria, writing to Troisul, the prime
minister of Louis XV.
I know these men as well as as anyone can do.
All the schemes they have carried on, the pains they have taken to spread
darkness over the earth, as well as their efforts to rule and embroil Europe from
Cape Finistere to Spitsbergen.
In China they were mandarins, in France academicians, courtiers and confessors,
in Spain and Portugal grandees, in Paraguay kings.
Had not my grand uncle Joseph become emperor, we had in all probability seen in
Germany too a Malagrida or an Alvieros." End of quote.
In order that they might be at liberty to visit what city and diocese they pleased,
they were exempted from episcopal jurisdiction.
They could come and go at their pleasure and perform all their functions without
having to render account to anyone, save to their superior.
This arrangement was resisted at first by certain prelates, but it was universally
conceded at last and it greatly facilitated the wide and rapid diffusion
of the Jesuit Corps.
Extraordinary success attended their first efforts throughout all Italy.
Designed for the common people, the order found equal acceptance from
princes and nobles.
In Parma the highest families submitted themselves to the spiritual exercises.
In Venice, Linnaeus expounded the Gospel of Saint John to a congregation of nobles.
1542 a Jesuit's college was founded in that city.
The citizens of Montepulciano accompanied Francisco Strada through the streets,
begging.
Their chief knocked at the doors and his followers received the alms.
In Faenza they succeeded in arresting the Protestant movement, which had been
commenced by the eloquent Bernardino Ocino.
By the machinery of schools and societies for the relief of the poor, they brought
back the population to the papacy.
These are but a few instances out of many of their popularity and success.
In the countries of Spain and Portugal, their success was even greater than in
Italy.
A son of the soil, its founder had breathed a spirit into the order which
spread among the Spaniards like an infection.
Some of the highest grandees enrolled themselves in its ranks.
In the province of Valencia, the multitudes that flocked to hear the Jesuit
preacher Arios were such that no cathedral could contain them, and a pulpit was
erected for him in the open air.
From the city of Salamanca, where in 1548 they had opened their establishment in a
small wretched house, the Jesuits spread themselves over all Spain.
Two members of the society were sent to the king of Portugal at his own request.
The one he retained as his confessor, the other he dispatched to the East
Indies.
This was that Francis Xavier, who there gained for himself, says Rankin,
the name of an apostle and the glory of a saint.
At the courts of Madrid and Lisbon, they soon acquired immense influence.
They were the confessors of the nobles and the counselors of the monarch.
The Jesuits found it more difficult to force their way into France, much they
wished to found a college in that city where their first vow had been recorded,
but every attempt was met by the determined opposition of the parliament
and the clergy, who were jealous of their enormous privileges.
The wars between the Guises and the Huguenots at length opened a door for
them.
Linnaeus, who by this time had become their general, saw his opportunity and in
1561 succeeded in effecting his object, although on condition of renouncing the
peculiar privileges of the order and submitting to episcopal jurisdiction.
The promise was made, but with a mental reservation which removed the necessity of
keeping it.
They immediately founded a college in Paris, opened schools, which were taught
by clever teachers, and planted Jesuit seminaries at Avignon, Rhodes,
Lyon, and other places.
Their intrigues kept the nation divided and much inflamed the fury of the civil
wars.
Henry III was massacred by an agent of theirs.
They next attempted the life of Henry IV.
This crime led to their first banishment from France in 1594, but soon they crept
back into the kingdom in the guise of traitors and operatives.
They were at last openly admitted by the monarch, a service which they repaid by
slaughtering him in the streets of his capital.
Under their rule, France continued to bleed and agonize, to plunge from woe into
crime, and from crime into woe, till the crowning wickedness of the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes laid the country prostrate.
And it lay quiet for more than half a century, till recovering somewhat from its
exhaustion, it lifted itself up, only to encounter the terrible blow of its
great revolution.
We turn to Germany.
Here it was that the Church of Rome had suffered her first great losses.
And here, under the arms of the Jesuits, was the destined... she was destined to
make a beginning of those victories, which recovered not a little of the ground
that she had lost.
A generation had passed away since the rise of Protestantism.
It's the year 1550.
The sons of the men who had gathered round Luther occupy the stage when the van of
this great invading host makes its appearance.
They come in silence.
They're plain in their attire, humble and submissive in their deportment.
But behind them are the stakes and scaffolds of the persecutor, and the
armies of France and Spain.
Their quiet words find their terrible reverberations in those awful tempests of
war, which for 30 years desolated Germany.
Ferdinand I of Austria, reflecting on the decay into which Roman Catholic feeling
had fallen in Germany, sent to Ignatius Loyola for a few zealous teachers to
instruct the youth of his dominions.
1551, 13 Jesuits, including Leger, arrived at Vienna.
They were provided with pensions, placed in the university chairs,
and crept upwards till they seized the entire direction of that seminary.
From that hour date the crimes and misfortunes of the house of Austria.
A little colony of the disciples of Loyola had before this planted itself at Cologne.
It was not till some years that they took root in that city, but the initial
difficulties surmounted.
They began to effect a change in public sentiment, which went on till Cologne
became, as it is sometimes called, the Rome of the North.
About the same time the Jesuits became flourishing in Ingolstadt.
They had been driven away on their first entrance into that university seat,
the professors dreading them as rivals.
But in 1556 they were recalled and soon rose to influence, as was to be expected
in a city where the memory of Dr. Eck was still fresh.
Their battles, less noisy than his, were fated to accomplish much for the
papacy.
From these three centers, Vienna, Cologne, and Ingolstadt, the Jesuits
extended themselves over all Germany.
They established colleges in the chief cities for the sons of princes and nobles,
and they opened schools in town and village for the instruction of the lower
classes.
From Vienna they distributed their colonies throughout the Austrian
dominions.
They had schools in the Tyrol and the cities at the foot of its mountains.
From Prague they ramified over Bohemia and penetrated into Hungary.
Their colleges at Ingolstadt and Munich gave them possession of Bavaria,
Franconia, and Swabia.
From Cologne they extended their convents and schools over rainish Prussia,
and planting a college at Spiers, they counteracted the influence of
Heidelberg University, then the resort of the most learned men of the German nation.
Wherever the Jesuits came, there was quickly seen a manifest revival of the
Popish faith.
In the short space of 10 years, their establishments had become
flourishing in all the countries in which they were planted.
Their system of education was adapted to all classes.
While they studied the exact sciences and strove to rival the most renowned of the
Protestant professors, and so draw the higher youth into their schools,
they compiled admirable catechisms for the use of the poor.
They especially excelled as teachers of Latin.
So great was their zeal and their success that even Protestants removed their
children from distant schools to place them under the care of the Jesuits.
The teachers seldom failed to inspire the youth in their schools with their own
devotion to the Popish faith.
The sons of Protestant fathers were drawn to confession and by and by into general
conformity to Popish practices.
Food which the church had forbidden they would not touch on the interdicted days,
although it was being freely used by the other members of the family.
And they began too to distinguish themselves by the use of Popish symbols.
The wearing of crosses and rosaries is recorded by rank as one of the first signs
of the setting of the tide toward Rome.
Forgotten rites began to be revived.
Relics which had been thrown aside, buried in darkness, were sought out and
exhibited to the public gaze.
The old virtue returned into rotten bones and the holiness of faded garments
flourished anew.
The saints of the church came out in bold relief while those of the Bible receded
into the distance.
The light of candles replaced the word of life in the temples.
The newest fashions of worship were imported from Italy and music and
architecture in the style of the restoration were called in to reinforce
the movement.
Customs which had not been witnessed the days of their grandfathers began to be
received by reverend observance of the new generation.
In the year 1560, the youth of Ingolstadt, belonging to the Jesuit school,
walked to and to on a pilgrimage to Eichstatt in order to be strengthened for
their confirmation by the dew that dropped from the tomb of Saint Walpurgis.
The modes of thought and feeling thus implanted in the schools were,
by means of preaching and confession, propagated through the whole population.
While the Jesuits were busy in the seminaries, the Pope operated powerfully
in the political sphere.
He had recourse to various arts to gain over the princes.
Duke Albert V of Bavaria had a grant made him of one-tenth of the property of the
clergy.
This riveted his decision on the side of Rome and he now set himself with earnest
zeal and marked success to restore in its ancient purity and vigor the popery of his
territories.
The Jesuits lauded the of the Duke who was a second Josias, a new Theodosius.
The popes saw clearly that they could never hope to restore the ancient
discipline and rule of their church without the help of the temporal
sovereigns.
Besides Duke Albert, who so powerfully contributed to re-establish the sway of
Rome over all Bavaria, the ecclesiastical princes who governed so large a part of
Germany threw themselves heartily into the work of restoration.
The Jesuit Canisius, a man of blameless life, of consummate address, and whose
great zeal was regulated by an equal prudence, was sent to counsel and guide
them.
Under his management they accepted provisionally the edicts of the Council of
Trent.
They required of all professors in colleges subscription to a confession of
the faith.
They exacted the same pledge from ordinary schoolmasters and medical practitioners.
In many parts of Germany no one could follow a profession until first he had
given public proof of his orthodoxy.
Bishops were required to exercise a more vigilant superintendence of their clergy
than they had done these 20 years past.
The Protestant preachers were banished and in some parts the entire Protestant
population was driven out.
Protestant nobles were forbidden to appear at court.
Many withdrew into retirement, but others purchased their way back by a
renunciation of their faith.
By these and similar arts, Protestantism was conquered on what may be regarded as
its native soil.
If not wholly rooted up, it maintained henceforward but a languishing existence.
Its leaf faded and its fruit died in the mephitic air around it, while Romanism
shot up in fresh strength and robustness.
A whole century of calamity followed the entrance of the Jesuits into Germany.
The troubles they excited culminated at last in the Thirty Years' War.
For the space of a generation the thunder of battle continued to roll over the
fatherland, but the God of their fathers had not forsaken the Germans.
It pleased him to summon from the distant Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, and by his arm
to save the remnants of Protestant liberty in that country.
Thus the Jesuits failed in their design of subjugating the whole of Germany and had
to content themselves with dominating over those portions, unhappily large,
of which the ecclesiastical princes had given them possession at the first.
Still Waters Revival Books also publishes the Puritan Hard Drive, the most powerful
and practical Christian study tool ever produced.
All thanks and glory be to the mercy, grace, and love of the Lord Jesus Christ
for this remarkable and wonderful new Christian study tool.
The Puritan Hard Drive contains over 12,500 of the best Reformation books,
MP3s, and videos ever gathered onto one portable Christian study tool.
An extraordinary collection of Puritan, Protestant, Calvinistic, Presbyterian,
Covenanter, and Reformed Baptist resources.
It's fully upgradable and it's small enough to fit in your pocket.
The Puritan Hard Drive combines an embedded database containing many millions
of records with the most amazing and extraordinary custom Christian search and
research software ever created.
The Puritan Hard Drive has been produced to assist you in the fascinating and
exhilarating spiritual, intellectual, familial, ecclesiastical, and societal
adventure that is living the Christian life.
It has been specifically designed so that you might more faithfully know,
serve, and love the Lord Jesus Christ, as well as to help you to do all you can
to bring glory to his great name.
If you want to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind,
then the Puritan Hard Drive is for you.
Visit PuritanDownloads.com today for much more information on the Puritan Hard Drive
and to take advantage of all the free and discounted Reformation and Puritan books,
MP3s, and videos that we offer at Stillwaters Revival Books.
Welcome to the Jesuits by James Wiley.
We're continuing to read at page 43 for this reading.
This Reformation MP3 audio resource is a production of Stillwaters Revival Books,
many free Puritan and Reformed resources, as well as our complete online catalog
containing classic and contemporary Reformation books, digital downloads,
MP3s, videos, DVDs, CDs, and the Puritan Hard Drive at great discounts are on the
web at PuritanDownloads.com.
Also, please consider, pray, and act upon the important truths found in the
following quotation by Charles Spurgeon, quote, as the apostle says to Timothy,
so also he says to everyone, give yourself to reading.
He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains
of his own.
You need to read.
Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible
sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers and expositions of the
Bible.
The best way for you to spend your leisure is to be either reading or praying,
end of quote.
If you'd like to be added to our email list, please send an email to swrb at swrb
.com with the word add in the subject line.
Our email list is a double opt-in list, so once you've sent us your email address,
you'll be asked by email to confirm that you want to join our list using the email
address that you've supplied.
Your email information will be kept confidential, and you can easily remove
yourself from our email list by simply emailing us at swrb at swrb.com with the
word remove in the subject line.
Once you're on the list, you'll be alerted to all the new free Reformation resources,
free mp3s, free electronic books and texts and so forth that swrb makes available on
the web, as well as at times to our best discounts and super specials.
We also encourage you to reproduce this audio resource and to pass it on to your
friends, but we only authorize this as long as the full contents of the message,
including the header and trailer, is not altered in any way, and as long as
the audio file is given away for free.
And now to SWRB's reading of The Jesuits by James Wiley, which we hope you find to
be a great blessing, in which we pray draws you nearer to the Lord Jesus Christ,
for he is the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but
by him.
John 14 6.
Well, as we said, we're on page 43 of this work, chapter 9, Commercial Enterprises
and Banishments.
Of the entrance of the Jesuits into England, the arts they employed,
the disguises they wore, the seditions they sewed, the snares they laid for the
life of the sovereign, and the plots they concocted for the overthrow of the
Protestant Church.
We shall have an opportunity of speaking when we come to narrate the history of
Protestantism in Great Britain.
Meanwhile, we consider their career in Poland.
Cardinal Hosius opened the gates of this country to the Jesuits.
Till then, Poland was a flourishing country, united at home, powerful abroad.
Its literature and science during the half-century preceding had risen to an
eminence that placed Poland on a par with the most enlightened countries of
Christendom.
It enjoyed a measure of toleration which was then unknown to most of the nations of
Europe.
Foreign Protestants fled to it as a refuge from the persecution to which they were
exposed in their native land, bringing to their adopted country their skill,
their wealth, and their energy.
Its trade increased and its towns grew in population and riches.
Italian, German, French, and Scottish Protestant congregations existed at
Kraków, Vilna, and Postenia.
Such was Poland before the foot of the Jesuits had touched its soil.
But from the hour that the disciples of Loyola entered the country, Poland began
to decline.
The Jesuits became supreme at court.
The monarch Sigismund III gave himself entirely up to their guidance.
No one could hope to rise in the state who did not pay court to them.
The education of youth was wholly in their hands.
The effects became speedily visible in the decay of literature, the growing
decreptitude of the national mind.
At home the popular liberties were attacked in the persons of the
Protestants, and abroad the nation was humiliated by a foreign policy inspired by
the Jesuits, which drew upon the country the contempt and hostility of neighboring
powers.
These evil courses of intrigue and faction within the country, and impotent and
arrogant policy outside of it, persisted in till the natural issue was
reached in the partition of Poland.
It is at the door of the Jesuits that the fall of that once enlightened,
prosperous, and powerful nation is to be laid.
It concerns us less to follow the those countries which lie beyond the boundaries
of Christendom, and less in so far as their doings in these regions may help to
throw light on their principles and tactics.
In following their steps among heathen nations and savage races, it's alike
impossible to withhold our admiration of their burning zeal and intrepid courage,
or our wonder at their prodigiously rapid success.
No sooner had the Jesuit missionary set foot on a new shore, or preached,
by an interpreter it might be, his first sermon in a heathen city,
than his converts were to be counted in tens of thousands.
Speaking of their missions in India, Sakinas, their historian, says that 10,000
men were baptized in the space of one year.
When the Jesuit mission to the East Indies was set on foot in 1559, Torres procured
royal letters to the Portuguese viceroys and governors, empowering them to lend
their assistance to the missionaries for the conversion of the Indians.
This shortened the process wonderfully.
All that had to be done was to ascertain the place where the natives were assembled
for some religious festival, and surround them with a troop of soldiers who,
with leveled muskets, offered them the alternative of baptism.
The rite followed immediately upon the acceptance of the alternative.
Next day the baptized were taught the sign of the cross.
In this excellent and summary way was the evangelization of the island of Goa
effected.
By similar methods did they attempt to plant the Popish faith and establish their
own dominion in Abyssinia, and also at Mozambique, 1560, on the opposite coast of
Africa.
One of the pioneers, Ovido, who had entered Ethiopia, wrote thus to the Pope,
quote, he must be permitted to inform his holiness that with the assistance of 500
or 600 Portuguese soldiers he could at any time reduce the empire of Abyssinia to the
obedience of the pontificate.
And when he considered that it was a country surrounded with territories
abounding with the finest gold and promising a rich harvest of souls to the
church, he trusted his holiness would give the matter further consideration,
end of quote.
The emperor of Ethiopia was gained by flatteries and miracles.
A terrible persecution was raised against the native Christians.
Thousands were massacred.
But at last the king, having detected the authors of these barbarities, plotting
against his own life and throne, they were ignominiously expelled the
country.
Having secured the territory of Paraguay, a Portuguese possession in South America,
the Jesuits founded a kingdom there and became its sovereigns.
They treated the natives at first with kindness and taught them several useful
arts.
But by and by they changed their policy, and reducing them to slavery compelled
them to for their benefit.
Dealing out to the Paraguayan peasant from the produce of his own toil, as much as
would suffice to feed and clothe him, the fathers laid up the rest in large
storehouses which they had erected for the purpose.
They kept carefully concealed from the knowledge of Europe, this seemingly
exhaustless source of wealth that no one else might share its sweets.
They continued all the while to draw from it those vast sums wherewith they carried
on their business in the old world.
With the gold wrung from the Paraguayan peasant's toil, they hired spies,
bribed courtiers, opened new missions, and maintained that pomp and splendor of
their establishments by which the populace were dazzled.
Their establishments in Brazil formed the basis of a great and enriching trade of
which Santa Fe and Buenos Aires were the chief depots.
But the most noted episode of this kind in their history is that of Father Lavalet,
1756.
He was visitor general and apostolic prefect of their missions in the West
Indies.
He organized offices in San Domingo, Granada, San Lucia, San Vincente,
and other islands, and drew bills of exchange on Paris, London, Bordeaux,
Nantes, Lyon, Cadiz, Leghorn, and Amsterdam.
His vessels loaded with riches comprising, besides colonial produce, black slaves,
and crossed the sea continually.
Trading on credit, they professed to give the property of the society as security.
Their methods of business were abnormal.
Treaties obeyed by other merchants they disregarded.
Neutrality laws were nothing to them.
They hired ships which were used as traders or privateers, as suited them,
and sailed under whatever flag was convenient.
At last, however, came trouble to these fathers who were making, as the phrase is,
the best of both worlds.
The brothers Leonci and Giuffre of Marseilles had accepted their bills for a
million and a half of livres, to cover which two vessels had been dispatched for
Martinique with merchandise to the value of two millions.
Unfortunately for the fathers, the ships were captured at sea by the
English.
The house of Leonci and Giuffre asked the superior of the Jesuits in Marseilles for
4,000 livres as past and part payment of their debt to save them from bankruptcy.
The father replied that the society was not answerable, but he offered the
brothers Leonci and Giuffre the aid of their prayers, fortified by the masses
which they were about to save for them.
The masses would not fill the coffers which the Jesuits had emptied,
and accordingly the merchants appealed to Parliament, craving a decree for payment
of the debt.
The appeal was allowed, and the Jesuits were condemned to honor the bills drawn by
their agent.
At this critical moment, the general of the society died.
Delay was inevitable.
The new general sent all the funds he could raise, but before these supplies
could reach Marseilles, Leonci and Giuffre had become bankrupt, involving in their
misfortune their connections in all parts of France.
Well, now that the ruin had come and publicity was inevitable, the Jesuits
refused to pay the debt, pleading that they were protected from the claims of
their creditors by their constitutions.
The cause now came to a public hearing.
After several pleas had been advanced and abandoned, the Jesuits took their final
stand on the argument which, in an evil hour for themselves, they had put forth at
first in their defense.
Their rules, they said, forbade them to trade, and the fault of individual members
could not be punished upon the order.
They were shielded by their constitutions.
The Parliament ordered these documents to be produced.
They had been kept secret until now.
They were laid before Parliament on the 16th of April, 1761.
The result was disastrous for the Jesuits.
They lost their cause and became much more odious than before.
The disclosure revealed Jesuitism to men as an organization based on the most
iniquitous maxims, and armed with the most terrible weapons for the accomplishment of
their purposes, which was to plant their own supremacy on the ruin of society.
The constitutions were one of the principal grounds of the decree for the
extinction of the order in France in 1762.
That political kingdoms and civil communities should feel the order a burden
too heavy to be borne is not to be wondered at when we reflect that even the
popes of whose throne it was, the pillar, have repeatedly decreed its extinction.
Strange as it may seem, the first bolt in later times that fell on the Jesuits was
launched by the hand of Rome.
Benedict IV, by a bull issued in 1741, prohibited them from engaging in trade and
making slaves of the Indians.
In 1759, Portugal, finding itself on the brink of ruin by their intrigues,
shook them off.
This example was soon followed in France, as we've already narrated.
Even in Spain, with all its devotion to the Papal Sea, all the Jesuit
establishments were surrounded one night in 1767 with troops, and the whole
fraternity, amounting to 7,000, were caught and shipped off to Italy.
Immediately thereafter, a similar expulsion befell them in South America.
Naples, Malta, Parma were the next to drive them from their soil.
The severest blow was yet to come.
Clemetha XIII, hitherto their firm friend, yielding at last to the unanimous demands
of all the Roman Catholic courts, summoned a secret conclave for the
suppression of the order.
A step necessary, said the brief of his successor, in order to prevent Christians
rising one against another and massacring one another in the very bosom of our
common mother, the Holy Church.
Clement died suddenly the very evening before the day appointed for the conclave.
Lorenzo Gangagneli was elevated to the vacant chair under the title of Clement
XIV.
Gangagneli was studious, learned of pure morals and of genuine piety.
From the schoolmen, he turned to the fathers.
Forsaking the fathers, he gave himself to the study of the Holy Scriptures,
where he learned on what rock to fix the anchor of his faith.
Clement XIV strove for several years with honest but mistaken zeal to reform the
order.
His efforts were fruitless.
On the 21st of July 1773, he issued the famous bull Dominus Redemptor Noster,
by which he dissolved and forever annihilated the order as a corporate body,
at a moment when it counted 22,000 members.
The bull justifies itself by a long and formidable list of charges against the
Jesuits.
Had this accusation proceeded from a Protestant pen, it might have been
regarded as not free from exaggeration, but coming from the papal chair,
it must be accepted as the sober truth.
The bull of Clement charged them with raising various insurrections and
rebellions, with plotting against bishops, undermining the regular monastic orders,
and invading pious foundations and corporations of every sort, not only in
Europe, but in Asia and America, to the danger of souls and the
astonishment of all nations.
It charged them with engaging in trade, and that instead of seeking to convert the
heathen, they had shown themselves intent only on gathering gold and silver and
precious jewels.
They had interpolated pagan rites and manners with Christian beliefs and
worship.
They had set aside the ordinance of the church and substituted opinions,
which the apostolic chair had pronounced fundamentally erroneous and evidently
subversive of good morals.
Tumults, disturbances, violences had followed them in all countries.
In fine, they had broken the peace of the church, and so incurably that the
pontificates of his predecessors, Urban VIII, Clement IX, X, XI,
and XII, Alexander VII and VIII, Innocent X, XI, XII, and XIII,
and passed in abortive attempts to re-establish the harmony and concord which
they had destroyed.
It was now seen that the peace of the church would never be restored while the
order existed, and hence the necessity of the bull, which dispossessed the Jesuits
of every office, service, and administration, took away from them their
houses, schools, hospitals, estates, withdrew all their statutes, usages,
decrees, customs, and ordinances, and pronounced all the power of the
general, provincial, visitors, and every other head of the same order,
whether spiritual or secular, to be forever annulled and suppressed.
The present ordinance, said the bull in conclusion, shall remain in full force and
operation from henceforth and forever.
Nothing but the most tremendous necessity could have made Clement XIV issue this
bull.
He knew well how unforgiving was the pride and how deadly the vengeance of the
society, and he did not conceal from himself the penalty he should have to pay
for decreeing its suppression.
On laying down his pen, after having put his name to the bull, he said to those
around him that he had subscribed his death warrant.
The Pope was at that time in robust health, and his vigorous constitution and
temperate habits promised a long life.
But now, dark rumors began to be whispered in Italy that the pontiff would die soon.
In April of the following year, he began to decline without any apparent
cause.
His illness increased.
No medicine was of any avail, and after lingering in torture for months,
he died September 22, 1774.
Several days before his death, says Caraccioli, his bones were exfoliated
and withered like a tree which, attacked at its roots, withers away and
throws off its bark.
The scientific men who were called in to embalm his body found the features livid,
the lips black, the abdomen inflated, the limbs emaciated and covered with
violet spots.
The size of the heart was diminished, and all the muscles were shrunk up,
and the spine was decomposed.
They filled the body with perfumed and aromatic substances, but nothing could
dispel mephitic effuvia.
The suppression with which Clement XIV smote the Society of Jesus was eternal.
But the forever of the bull lasted only in actual deed during the brief interval that
elapsed between 1773 and 1814.
That short period was filled up with the awful tempest of the French Revolution.
To the fallen thrones and desecrated alders of which the Jesuits pointed as the
monuments of the divine anger at the suppression of their order.
Despite the bull of Clement, the Jesuits had neither ceased to exist nor ceased to
act.
Amid the storms that shook the world, they were energetically active.
In revolutionary conventions, in clubs, in war councils and committees,
on battlefields they were present, guiding with unseen but powerful touch the
course of affairs.
Their maxim is, if despotisms will not serve them, to demoralize society and
render government impossible, and from chaos to remodel the world anew.
Thus, the Society of Jesus, which had gone out of existence before the Revolution,
as men believed, started up in full force the moment after, prepared to enter on the
work of molding and ruling the nations which had been chastised but not
enlightened.
Scarcely had Pius VII returned to the Vatican when, by a bull dated August 7,
1814, he restored the order of Jesus.
Thaddeus Borzodowski was placed at their head.
Once more the Brotherhood stalked abroad in their black berettas.
In no long time their colleges, seminaries and novitiates began to
flourish in all the countries of Europe, Ireland and England not accepted,
their numbers swelled by the sodalities of Saint Vincent de Paul, brothers of the
Christian doctrine and other societies affiliated with the order became greater,
perhaps, than they ever were at any former period.
And their importance was vastly enhanced by the fact that the contest between the
order and the papal chair ended, temporarily at any rate, in the
enslavement of the popedom of which they inspired the policy, indicted the decrees
and wielded the power.
Chapter 10, Restoration of the Inquisition.
There is one arm of the Jesuits to which we have not yet averted.
The weapon that we refer to was not indeed unknown to former times, but it had fallen
out of order and had to be refurbished and made fit for modern exigencies.
No small part of the success that attended the operations of Jesuits was owing to
their use of it.
That weapon was the Inquisition.
We've narrated in a former chapter the earnest attempt made at the Conference of
Radisbon to find a basis of conciliation between the Protestant and the Popish
churches.
The way had been paved at Rome for this attempted reconciling of the two creeds by
an infusion of new blood into the College of Cardinals.
Gaspar Cantorini, a senator of Venice, who was known to hold opinions on the
doctrine of justification differing very little, if at all, from those of Luther,
was invested with the purple of the cardinalate, the chair of the Doge,
almost within his reach.
Cantorini was induced to come to Rome and devote the influence of his high character
and great talents to the doubtful experiment of reforming the papacy.
By his advice, several ecclesiastics, whose sentiments he approximated to his
own, were added to the sacred college, among others, Saraletto, Gilberto Carafa,
and Reginald Paul.
In the end, these new elections but laid a basis for a more determined and bloody
resistance to Protestantism.
This was in the future as yet.
Meanwhile, the reforming measures for which this change in the cardinalate was
to pave the way were taken.
Deputies were sent to the Ratespon conference with instructions to make such
concessions to the reformers as might not endanger the fundamental principles of the
papacy or strip the tiara of its supremacy.
The issue was what we have announced in a previous part of our history.
When the deputies returned from the diets and told Paul III that all their efforts
to frame a basis of agreement between the two faiths had proved abortive and that
there was not a country in Christendom where Protestantism was not spreading,
the Pope asked in alarm, what then is to be done?
Cardinal Carafa and John Alvarez de Toledo, Bishop of Burgos, to whom the
question was addressed, immediately made answer, re-establish the Inquisition.
The proposal accorded well with the gloomy genius, unbending opinions and stern
bigotry of the men from whom it came.
Carafa and Toledo were old Dominicans, the same order to whom Innocent III had
committed the working of the Holy Tribunal when it was first set up.
Men of pure but austere life, they were prepared to endure in their own persons or
to inflict on the persons of others any amount of suffering and pain rather than
permit the Roman Church to be overthrown.
Re-establish the Inquisition, said Carafa, let the Supreme Tribunal be set up in Rome
with subordinate branches ramifying over all Europe.
Here in Rome must the successors of Peter destroy all the heresies of the whole
world.
The Jesuit historians take care to tell us that Carafa's proposal was seconded by a
special memorial from the founder of their order, Ignatius Loyola.
The bull re-establishing the Inquisition was published July 21st, 1542.
The, quote, holy office revived with terrors unknown to it in former ages.
It had now a plentitude of power.
Its jurisdiction extended over all countries.
Not a man in all Christendom, however, exalted in rank or dignity, but was liable
to be made answerable at its bar.
The throne was no protection.
The altar was no shield.
Withered age and blooming youth, matron and maiden, might any hour be
seized by its familiars and undergo the question in the dark underground chamber
where behind a table with its crucifix and taper sat the Inquisitor, his stern
pitiless features surmounted by his black cow and all around the instruments of
torture.
Till the most secret thought had been wrung out of the breast, no mercy was to
be shown.
For the Inquisitor to feel the least pity for his writhing victim was to debase
himself, as such were the instructions drafted by Carapha.
The history of the man who restored the Inquisition is one of great interest,
more than ordinary instruction, but it is touchingly sad.
Carapha had been a member of the Oratory of Divine Love, which was a little circle
of moderate reformers that held its sittings in the Trastevere at Rome and
occupied, as regarded the reform of the Roman Church, a position midway between
the champions of things as they were and the company of decided adherents of the
Gospel, which held its reunions at Jaha in Naples and of which we shall speak below.
Carapha had tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come,
but the gracious stirrings of the Spirit and the struggles of his own conscience he
had quelled, and from the very threshold of rest which he was seeking in the
Gospel, he had cast himself again into the arms of an infallible Church.
With such a history, it was not possible that Carapha could act a middle part.
He threw himself with sterner zeal into the dreadful work of reviving the
Inquisition than did even Paul III, under whom he served and whom he was
destined to succeed.
Carapha, says the historian Ranke, lost not a moment in carrying this edict
into execution.
He would have thought it waste of time to wait for the usual issue of means from the
apostolic treasury, and though by no means rich, he hired a house for immediate
proceedings at his own expense.
This he fitted up with rooms for the officers and prisons for the accused,
supplying the latter with strong bolts and locks, with dungeons, chains, blocks,
and every other fearful appurtenance of his office.
He appointed commissioner generals for the different countries.
The resolution to restore the Inquisition was taken at a critical moment for Italy
and all the countries south of the Alps.
The dawn of the Protestant day was breaking around the very throne of the
Pope.
From the city of Ferrara in the north, where the daughter of Louis XII,
the correspondent of Calvin, sheltered in her palace the disciples of the gospel,
to the ancient Parthenon, which looks down from its fig and aloe-covered heights upon
the calm waters of its bay, the light was breaking in a clearness and fullness that
gave promise that, in proportion to the depth of the previous darkness,
so would be the splendors of the coming day.
Distinguished as the land of the Renaissance, Italy seemed about to become
yet more distinguished as the land of Protestantism.
At the foot of Fiesco and in that Florence on which Cosimo and the brilliant group of
scholars around him had so often looked down while they talked of Plato,
there were men who had learned a better knowledge than that which the Greek sage
had taught.
In Padua, in Bologna, in Lucca, in Modena, in Rome, and in other cities of
classic fame, some of the first families had embraced the gospel.
Men of rank in the state and of eminence in the church, persons of mark in the
republic of letters, orators, poets, and some noble ladies as eminent for their
talents as for their birth, were not ashamed to enroll themselves among the
disciples of that faith which the Lutheran princes had confessed at Augsburg,
and which Calvin was propagating from the little town on the shores of the Le Mans,
then beginning to attract the notice of the world.
But of all the Protestant groups now forming in Italy, none equaled in respect
of brilliance, of rank, luster of talent, and devotion of faith than that which had
gathered around Juan de Valdez, on the lovely shore of Naples.
This distinguished Spaniard had been forced to leave the court of Charles V and
his native land for the sake of the gospel.
On the western arm of the bay of Naples, hard by the tomb of Virgil, looking down
on the calm sea and the picturesque island of Capri with the opposite shore on which
Vesuvius, with its pennant of white vapor atop, kept watch over the cities which
1400 years before it had wrapped in a winding sheet of ashes and enclosed in a
tomb of lava, was placed the villa of Valdez.
There his friends often assembled to discuss the articles of the Protestant
creed and confirm one another in their adherence to the gospel.
Among these was Peter Martyr Vermigli, prior of Saint Peter's Adarum.
In the wilderness of Romanism, the prior had become parched with thirst,
for no water could he find that could refresh his soul.
Valdez led him to a fountain, whereat martyr drank and thirsted no more.
In his turn, he zealously led others to the same living stream.
Another member of that Protestant band was Caserta, a Neapolitan nobleman.
He had a young relative, then wholly absorbed in the gaieties and splendors of
Naples.
Him Caserta introduced to Valdez.
This was Galeazzo Caraccioli, only son of the Marquis of Vico, who embraced the
gospel with his whole heart.
And when the tempest dispersed the brilliant company to which he had joined
himself, leaving his noble palace, his rich patrimony, his virtuous wife,
his dear children, and all his flourishing honors, he cleaved to the cross.
And repairing to Geneva, was there, in the words of Calvin, content with our
littleness, and lives frugally according to the habits of the common commonality,
neither more nor less than any one of us.
In 1536, this select society received another member, Bernardino Ocino,
the great orator of Italy, came at that time to Naples to preach the Lent sermons.
A native of Siena, he assumed the cowl of St. Francis, which he afterwards exchanged
for the frock of the more rigid order of the Capuchins.
He was so eloquent that Charles V said of him, that man is enough to make the stones
weep.
His discourses were impregnated with the great principles of the Protestant faith,
and his eloquence drew overwhelming crowds to the church of St. Giovanni Maggiore,
where he was now preaching.
His accession to the society around Valdez gave it great additional strength,
for the preacher was daily scattering the seeds of divine truth among the common
people.
And not among these only, for persons of all ranks crowded to hear the eloquent
Capuchin.
Among his audience might be seen Gilia de Gonzaga, widow of the Duke of Trageto,
reputed the most beautiful woman in Italy, and what was higher praise, one of the
most humble and sincere of its Christians.
And there was Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescaro, also renowned for
the loveliness of her person, and not less renowned for her talents and virtues.
And there was Pietro Carnesetti, the Patrician of Florence, and a former
secretary of Clement VII, now a disciple, and afterwards to be a martyr of the
gospel.
Such were the illustrious men and the high-born women that formed this
Protestant propaganda in Naples.
It comprehended elements of power which promised brilliant results in the future.
It formed a galaxy of rank, talent, oratory, genius, and tact, adapted to all
classes of the nation, and constituted, one would have thought, such an
organization or bureau as was sure to originate, and in due time accomplish,
the Reformation of Italy.
The ravages the Gothic nations had inflicted, and the yet greater ravages of
the papacy, were on the point of being repaired.
The physical loveliness which Italy had known in her first days, and a moral
beauty greater than she had ever known, were about to be restored to her.
It was during those same years that Calvin was beginning his labors at Geneva,
and fighting with the pantheistic libertines for a secure foothold on which
to place his Reformation, that this little phalanx of devoted Protestant champions
was formed on the shores of Naples.
Of the two movements, the southern one appeared at that hour by much the more
hopeful.
Contemplated from a human point of view, it had all the elements of success.
Here the flower of an ancient nation was gathering on its own soil, to assay the
noble task of evoking into a second development those mighty energies which
had long slumbered, but were not dead, in the bosom of a race that had given arts
and letters and civilization to the West.
Every need for power and gift was present.
And the little company here, Confederate, for the glorious enterprise, though small
in numbers, this little host was great in names, comprehending as it did men of
ancient lineage, of noble birth, of great wealth, of accomplished
scholarship, of potential genius, and poetical genius, and of popular
eloquence.
They could appeal, moreover, to a past of renown, the traditions of which had not
yet perished, indeed memory of which might be helpful in the struggle to shake off
the yoke of the present.
These were surpassing advantages compared with the conditions of the movement at
Geneva, a little town which had borrowed glory from neither letters nor arms,
with a population rude, lawless, insolent, a diminutive territory,
overshadowed on all sides by powerful and hostile monarchs, who stood with arm
uplifted to strike down Protestantism should it here raise its head.
And most discouraging of all, the movement was guided by but one man of note,
and he a stranger, an exile, without the prestige of birth, or rank, or wealth.
The movement at Geneva cannot succeed, and that at Naples cannot fail,
so would we have said.
But the battle of Protestantism was not to the strong.
The world needs to have the lesson often repeated, that it is the truth of
principles and not the grandeur of names that gives assurance of victory.
The young vine planted beneath the towers of the ancient Parthenope, in which was
shooting forth so hopefully in the golden air of that classic region, was to wither
and die, while that which had taken root beneath the shadow of the Alps was to
expand amid the rude blast of the Swiss mountains and stretch its boughs over
Christendom.
Chapter 11.
The Tortures of the Inquisition.
The reestablishment of the Inquisition decided the question of the Reformation of
Italy.
The country, struck with this blow as it was lifting itself up, instantly fell back
into the old gulf.
It had become suddenly apparent that religious reform must be won with a great
fight of suffering.
Italy had not strength to press on through chains and dungeons and scaffolds to the
goal she wished to reach.
The prize was glorious, she saw, but the price was great.
Pallavicino has confessed that it was the Inquisition that saved Italy from lapsing
into Protestantism.
The religious question had divided the Italians of that day into three classes.
The bulk of the nation had not thought on the question at all and harbored no
purpose of leaving the Church of Rome.
To them, the restoration of the Inquisition had no terrors.
There was another enlarged class who had abandoned Rome but who had not clearness
to advance to the open profession of Protestantism.
They were most to be pitied of all should they fall into the hands of the
Inquisitors, seeing they were too undecided either to decline or to face the
horrors of the Holy Office.
The third class were in no doubt as to the course they must pursue.
They could not return to a church which they held to be superstitious and they had
no alternative before them but provide for their safety by flight or await death and
the fires of the Inquisition.
The consternation was great, for the Protestants had not dreamed of their
enemies having recourse to such violent measures.
Numbers fled and these fugitives were to be found in every city of Switzerland and
Germany.
Among these was Bernardino Ocino, on whose eloquent orations all ranks of
his countrymen had been hanging but a few months before, and in whose audience the
Emperor himself might be seen when he visited Italy.
Not, however, until he had been served with a citation from the Holy Office at
Rome did Ocino make his escape.
Flight was almost as bitter as death to the orator.
He was leaving behind him the scene of those brilliant triumphs which he could
not hope to renew on a foreign soil.
Pausing on the summit of the great Saint Bernard, he devoted a few moments to those
feelings of regret which were so natural on abandoning so much that he could not
hope ever again to enjoy.
He then went forward to Geneva, but alas, the best days of the eloquent
monk were past.
At Geneva, Ocino's views became tainted and obscured with the new philosophy which
was beginning to air itself at that young school of pantheism.
Peter Martyr Vermigli soon followed.
He was presiding over the convent of his order in Lucca.
When the storm came with such sudden violence, he set his house in order and
fled, but it was discovered after he was gone that the heresy remained,
although the heretic had escaped, his opinions having been embraced by many
of the Lucci's monks.
The same was found to be the case with the order to which Ocino belonged,
the Capuchins namely, and the Pope at first meditated as the only cure the
suppression of both orders.
Peter Martyr went ultimately to Strasbourg and a place was found for him in its
university where his lamp continued to burn clearly to the close.
Juan de Valdez died before the tempest burst which drove beyond the Alps so many
of the distinguished group that had formed itself around him at Pasolipo and saw not
the evil days which came on his adopted country, but the majority of those who had
embraced the Protestant faith were unable to escape.
They were immured in the prisons of the various holy offices throughout Italy.
Some were kept in dark cells for years in the hope they would recant, others were
quickly relieved by martyrdom.
The restorer of the Inquisition, the once reforming Caraffa, mounted the
papal chair under the name of Paul IV.
The rigors of the holy office were not likely to be relaxed under the new Pope.
The 20 years were needed to enable the torture and the stake to annihilate the
Protestants of Italy.
Of those who suffered martyrdom we shall mention only two.
Amolio, a Bolognese professor renowned throughout Italy for his learning and his
pure life and Tiserano, a native of Perugia.
On the 15th of September 1553, an assembly of the Inquisition,
consisting of six cardinals with their episcopal assessors, was held with great
pomp at Rome.
A train of prisoners with burning tapers in their hands was led in before the
tribunal.
All of them recanted, save Amolio and Tiserano.
On leave being given them to speak, Amolio broke out, as says Macri,
in a strain of bold and fervid invective which chained them to their seats at the
same time that it cut them to the quick.
He rebuked his judges for their lewdness, their avarice, and their bloodthirsty
cruelty and concluded as follows.
Wherefore, I appeal from your sentence and summon you cruel tyrants and murderers to
answer before the judgment seat of Christ at the last day, where your pompous titles
and gorgeous trappings will not dazzle, nor your guards and torturing apparatus
terrify us.
And in testimony of this, take back that which you have given me.
And in saying this, he threw the flaming torch which he held in his hand on the
ground and extinguished it.
Galled and gnashing upon him with their teeth like the persecutors of the first
Christian martyrs, the cardinals ordered Amolio, together with his companion who
approved of the testimony he had borne, to instant execution.
They were conveyed accordingly to the Campo del Fiore, where they died with the
most pious fortitude.
The eight years that elapsed between 1534 and 1542 are notable ones in the annals of
Protestant Christianity.
That epoch witnessed the birth of three movements which were destined to stamp a
character upon the future of Europe and powerfully to modify the conflict then in
progress in Christendom.
In 1534, the Jesuits recorded their first vow in the church of Montmantre in Paris.
In 1540, their society was regularly launched by the papal edict.
In 1542, Paul III issued the bull for the re-establishment of the Inquisition.
And in 1541, Calvin returned to Geneva to prepare that spiritual army that was to
wage battle with Jesuitism backed by the Inquisition.
The meeting of these dates, the contemporaneous rise of these three
instrumentalities, is sufficiently striking and is one of the many proofs
which we meet in history that there is an eye watching all that is done on earth.
That never does an agency start up to destroy the world, but there's set over
against it a yet more powerful agency to convert the evil it would inflict into
good.
It is one of these great epics at which we have arrived.
Jesuitism, the consummation of error, the Inquisition, the maximum of force,
stand up and array themselves against a now developed, fully developed,
Protestantism.
In following the steps of the combatants, we shall be led in succession to the
mountains of the Waldenses, to the cities of France, to the swamps of Holland,
to the plains of Germany, to Italy, to Spain, to England and Scotland.
Round the whole of Christendom will roll the tide of this great battle,
casting down one nation into the darkness of slavery, lifting up another into the
glory of freedom, and causing the gigantic crimes of the persecutor and the despot to
be forgotten in the excelling splendor of the patriot and the martyr.
This is the struggle with the record of which we shall presently be occupied.
Meanwhile, we proceed to describe one of those few Inquisitions that remain to this
day in almost the identical state in which they existed when the Holy Office was
being vigorously worked.
This will enable us to realize more vividly the terror of that weapon which
Paul III prepared for the hands of the Jesuits, and the divine power of that
faith which enabled the confessors of the Gospel to withstand and triumph over it.
Turn we now to the town of Nuremberg in Bavaria, the zeal with which Duke Albert,
the sovereign of Bavaria, entered into the restoration of Roman Catholicism we've
already narrated.
To further the movement, he provided every one of the chief towns of his dominions
with a Holy Office, and the Inquisition of Nuremberg still remains an anomalous and
horrible monument in the midst of a city where the memorials of an exquisite art
and the meetings of an unrivaled genius meet one at every step.
We shall first describe the Chamber of Torture.
The house so-called immediately adjoins the imperial castle, which from its lofty
site looks down on the city, whose Gothic towers, sculptured fronts, and curiously
ornamented gables are seen covering both banks of the pennix, which rolls below.
The house may have been the guard room of the castle.
It derives its name, the Torture Chamber, not from the fact that the torture was
here inflicted, but because into this one chamber has been collected a complete set
of the instruments of torture gleaned from the various Inquisitions that formerly
existed in Bavaria.
A glance suffices to show the whole dreadful apparatus by which the
inheritance of Rome sought to maintain her dogmas.
Placed next to the door and greeting the site as one enters is a collection of
hideous masks.
These represent creatures monstrous of shape and malignant and fiendish of
nature.
It is in beholding them that we begin to perceive how subtle was the genius that
devised this system of coercion, and that it took the mind as well as the
body of the victim into account.
In gazing on them one feels as if he had suddenly come into polluting and debasing
society, and had sunk to the same moral level with the creatures here figured
before him.
He suffers a conscious abatement of dignity and fortitude.
The persecutor had calculated, doubtless, that the effect produced upon
the mind of his victim by these dreadful apparitions would be that he would become
morally relaxed, less able to sustain his cause, and less of strong mind.
Indeed, the unfortunate prisoner on entering such a place and seeing himself
encompassed with such unearthly and hideous shapes must have felt as if he
were the vile heretic which the persecutor styled him, and as if already the infernal
den had opened its portals and sent forth its venomous swarms to bid him welcome.
Yourself accursed with accursed beings are you henceforth to dwell.
Such was the silent language of these abhorred images.
We pass on into the chamber where more dreadful sights meet our gaze.
It is hung round and round with instruments of torture so numerous that it
would take a long while even to name them, and so diverse that it would take a much
longer time to describe them.
We must take them in groups, for it were hopeless to think of going over them one
by one and particularizing the mode in which each operated, and the ingenuity and
art with which all of them have been adapted to their horrible end.
These were instruments for compressing the fingers, for example, until the bones
should be squeezed to splinters.
There were instruments for probing below the fingernails till an exquisite pain
like a burning fire would run along the nerves.
There were instruments for tearing out the tongue, for scooping out the eyes,
for grubbing up the ears.
There were bunches of iron cords with a spiked circle at the end of every whip for
tearing the flesh from the back till bone and sinew were laid bare.
There were iron cases for the legs which were tightened upon the limb placed in
them by means of a screw till flesh and bone were reduced to a jelly.
There were cradles set full of sharp spikes in which victims were laid and
rolled from side to side, the wretched occupant being pierced at each movement of
the machine with innumerable sharp points.
There were iron ladles with long handles for holding molten lead or boiling pitch
to be poured down the throat of the victim and convert his body into a burning
cauldron.
There were frames, frames with holes to admit the hands and feet so contrived that
the person put into them had his body bent into unnatural and painful positions and
the agony grew greater and greater by moments and yet the man did not die.
There were chestfuls of small but more ingeniously constructed instruments for
pinching, probing, or tearing the more sensitive parts of the body and continuing
the pain up to the very verge where reason or life gives way.
On the floor and walls of the apartment were other and larger instruments for the
same fearful end, lacerating, mangling, and agonizing living men.
But these we shall meet in other dungeons we are yet to visit.
The first impression on entering the chamber was one of bewildering horror.
A confused procession of mangled, mutilated, agonizing men, speechless in
their great woe, the flesh peeled from off their livid sinews, the sockets where eyes
had been, hollow and empty, seemed to pass before one.
The most dreadful scenes which the great genius of Dante has imagined appeared tame
in comparison with the spectral groups which this chamber summoned up.
The first impulse was to escape, lest images of pain, memories of tormented
men who were made to die a hundred deaths in one should take hold of one's mind,
never again to be effaced from it.
The things we have been surveying are not the mere models of the instruments made
use of in the holy office.
They are the veritable instruments themselves.
We see before us the actual implements by which hundreds and thousands of men and
women, many of them saints and confessors of the Lord Jesus, were torn, mangled,
and slain.
These terrible realities the men of the 16th century had to face and endure or
renounce the hope of the life eternal.
Painful they were to flesh and blood, nay, not even endurable by flesh and blood
unless sustained by the spirit of the mighty God.
We leave the torture chamber to visit the Inquisition proper.
We go eastward about half a mile, keeping close to the northern wall of the
city, till we come to an old tower styled in the common parlance of Nuremberg,
the Max Tower.
We pull the bell, the iron handle and chain of which are seen suspended beside
the doorpost.
The Ciceroan appears, carrying a bunch of keys, a lantern, and some half a dozen
candles.
The lantern is to show us our way, and the candles are for the purpose of
being lighted and stuck up at the turnings in the dark underground passages which
we're about to traverse.
Should mischance befall our lantern, these tapers, like beacon lights in a
narrow creek, will pilot us safely back into the day.
The Ciceroan, selecting the largest from the bunch of keys, inserts it in the lock
of the massy portal before which we stand.
Bolt after bolt is turned, and the door, with horse heavy groan as it turns on its
hinge, opens slowly to us.
We begin to descend.
We go down one flight of steps.
We go down a second flight.
We descend yet a third.
And now we pause a moment.
The darkness is intense, for here never came the faintest glimmer of day,
but a gleam thrown forward from the lantern showed us that we were arrived at
the entrance of a horizontal narrow passage.
We could see by the flickering of the light upon its sides and roof that the
corridor we were traversing was hewn out of the rock.
We had gone only a few paces when we were brought up before a massy door.
As far as the dim light served us, we could see the door, old, powdery with
dust, and partly worm-eaten.
Passing in, the corridor continued, and we went forward other three paces or
so when we found ourselves before a second door.
We opened and shut it behind us as we did the first.
Again, we began to thread our way.
A third door stopped us.
We opened and closed it in like manner.
Every step was carrying us deeper into the heart of the rock, multiplying the
barriers between us and the upper world.
We were shut in with the thick darkness and the awful silence.
We began to realize what must have been the feelings of some unhappy disciple of
the gospel, surprised by the familiars of the holy office, led through the midnight
streets of Nuremberg, conducted to Max Tower, led down flight after flight of
stairs, and along this horizontal shaft in the rock, and at every few paces a massy
door with its locks and bolts closing behind him.
He must have felt how utterly he was beyond the reach of human pity and human
aid.
No cry, however piercing, could reach the ear of man through these roofs of rock.
He was entirely in the power of those who had brought him thither.
At last we came to a side door in the narrow passage.
We halted, applied the key, and the door with its ancient mold creaking harshly as
if moving on a hinge, long disused, opened to let us in.
We found ourselves in a rather roomy chamber.
It might be about 12 feet square.
This was the chamber of question.
Along one side of the apartment ran a low platform, and there sat of old the
inquisitors, three in number, the first a divine, the second a casuist, the third a
civilian.
The only occupant of that platform was the crucifix, or image of the savior on the
cross, which still remained.
The six candles that usually burned before the holy fathers, quote-unquote,
were of course extinguished, but our lanterns supplied their place and showed
us the grim furnishings of the apartment.
In the middle was the horizontal rack, or bed of torture, on which the victim was
stretched till bones started from bone, and his dislocated frame became the seat
of agony, which was suspended only when it had reached a pitch that threatened death.
Leaning against the wall of the chamber was the upright rack, which is simpler,
but as an instrument of torture not less effectual than the horizontal one.
There was the iron chain which wound over a pulley and hauled up the victim to the
vaulted roof, and there were the two great stone weights which, tied to his feet and
the iron cord let go, brought him down with a jerk that dislocated his limbs,
while the spiky rollers which he grazed in his descent cut into and excoriated his
back, leaving his body a bloody, dislocated mass.
Here too was the cradle of which we have made mention above, amply garnished within
with cruel knobs, on which the sufferer, tied hand and foot, was thrown at every
movement of the machine to be bruised all over and brought forth discolored,
swollen, bleeding, but still living.
All around, ready to hand, were hung the minor instruments of torture.
There were screws and thumbkins for the fingers, spiked collars for the neck,
iron boots for the legs, gags for the mouth, claws to cover the face and permit
the slow percolation of water drop by drop down the throat of the person undergoing
this form of torture.
There were rollers set round with spikes for bruising the arms and back.
There were iron scourges, pincers and tongs for tearing out the tongue,
slitting the nose and ears and otherwise disfiguring and mangling the body till it
was horrible and horrifying to look upon it.
There were other things of which an expert only could tell the name and the use.
Had these instruments a tongue and could the history of this chamber be written,
how awful the tale.
We shall suppose that all this has been gone through, that the confessor has been
stretched on the bed of torture, has been gashed, broken, mangled and yet
by power given him from above has not denied his savior.
He's been tortured, not accepting deliverance.
What further punishment has the holy office in reserve for those from whom its
torments have failed to extort a recantation?
These dreadful dungeons furnish us with the means of answering this question.
We return to the narrow passage and go forward a little way.
Every few paces there comes a door, originally strong and massy and garnished
with great iron knobs but now old and moldy and creaking while open with a noise
painfully loud in the deep stillness.
The windings are numerous but at every turning of the passage a lighted candle is
placed lest peradventure the way should be missed and the road back to the living
world be lost forever.
A few steps are taken downwards very cautiously for a lantern can barely show
the ground.
Here there is a vaulted chamber entirely dug out of the living rock except the roof
which is formed of hewn stone.
It contains an iron image of the Virgin and on the opposite wall suspended by an
iron hook is a lamp which when lighted shows the goodly proportions of Our Lady.
On the instant of touching a spring the image flings open its arms which resemble
the doors of a cupboard and which are seen to be stuck full on the inside with
poignards each about a foot in length.
Some of these knives are so placed as to enter the eyes of those whom the image
enfolded in its embrace.
Others are set so as to penetrate the ears and brain.
Others to pierce the breast and others again to gore the abdomen.
The person who had passed through the terrible ordeal of the questioned chamber
but had made no recantation would be led along the torturous passage by which he
had come, by which we had come, and ushered into this vault were the first
object that would greet his eye.
The pale light of the lamp falling on it would be the iron Virgin.
He would be bidden to stand right in front of the image.
The spring would be touched by the executioner.
The Virgin would fling open her arms and the wretched victim would straightway be
forced within them.
Another spring was then touched.
The Virgin closed upon her victim.
A strong wooden beam fastened at one end to the wall by a movable joint.
The other, placed against the doors of the iron image, was worked by a screw.
As the beam was pushed out, the spiky arms of the Virgin slowly but irresistibly
closed upon the man, cruelly goring him.
When the dreadful business was ended, it needed not that the executioner should
put himself to the trouble of making the Virgin unclasp the mangled carcass of her
victim.
Provision had been made for its quick and secret disposal.
At the touching of a third spring, the floor of the image would slide aside.
The body of the victim dropped down the mouth of a perpendicular shaft in the
rock.
We look down this pit and can see at a great depth the shimmer of water.
A canal had been made to flow underneath the vault where stood the Iron Virgin.
And when she had done her work upon those who were delivered over to her tender
mercies, she let them fall with quick descent and sullen plunge into the canal
underneath, where they were floated to the Pegnitz, from the Pegnitz to the Rhine,
and by the Rhine to the ocean, there to sleep beside the dust of Hus and
Jerome.
This ends the Jesuits by James Wiley.
MP3s, digital downloads, and videos, please visit Still Waters Revival Books at
PuritanDownloads.com.
Still Waters Revival Books also publishes the Puritan Hard Drive, the most powerful
and practical Christian study tool ever produced.
All thanks and glory be to the mercy, grace, and love of the Lord Jesus Christ
for this remarkable and wonderful new study tool.
The Puritan Hard Drive contains over 12,500 of the best Reformation books,
MP3s, and videos ever gathered onto one portable Christian study tool.
An extraordinary collection of Puritan, Protestant, Calvinistic, Presbyterian,
Covenanter, and Reformed Baptist resources.
It's fully upgradable and it's small enough to fit in your pocket.
The Puritan Hard Drive combines an embedded database containing many millions
of records with the most amazing and extraordinary custom Christian search and
research software ever created.
The Puritan Hard Drive has been produced to assist you in the fascinating and
exhilarating spiritual, intellectual, familial, ecclesiastical, and societal
adventure that is living the Christian life.
It has been specifically designed so that you might more faithfully know,
serve, and love the Lord Jesus Christ, as well as to help you to do all you can
to bring glory to His great name.
If you want to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind,
then the Puritan Hard Drive is for you.
Visit PuritanDownloads.com today for much more information on the Puritan Hard Drive
and to take advantage of all the free and discounted Reformation and Puritan books,
mp3s, and videos that we offer at Stillwaters Revival Books.