A SKETCH OF THEIR HISTORY AND PRINCIPLES.
(Continued from page 256.)
WE return to the history of the counter-Reformation, and of Jesuit activity in connection therewith. There were three men whom the Jesuits found supremely serviceable to them at this crisis. These were Philip II. of Spain, Henry II. of France, and Ferdinand II. of Bohemia. They were all bigoted Roman Catholics, and the last of them is said to have taken a solemn vow before the altar that, at whatever cost, he would re-establish the Roman Catholic religion throughout his estates. But the designs of the Jesuits had not always the effect they anticipated. It was through William the Silent, who, up to this time, had not declared himself a Protestant, coming to learn from Henry II. that there was a treaty formed between himself and Philip II., to exterminate, by fire and sword, all Protestants in Spain, France, and the Netherlands, that William espoused the Protestant cause; and the result was that Holland was lost, not only to the Roman Catholic Church, but also to the King of Spain. French arms sent to assist the Roman Catholic party in Scotland, Spanish forces (say, the Armada of 1588) sent to subdue England to the See of Rome, resulted only in making the people of Great Britain more sturdily Protestant than otherwise they might possibly have proved. In Ireland, however, Jesuit intrigue proved the apparently endless ruin of that unhappy country. Not content with the spiritual subjugation of Ireland, the Jesuits, with only too great success, have ever aimed at the separation of Roman Catholic Ireland from Protestant Britain. At their door must be laid the responsibility not only of the long spiritual darkness of that nation but also much of the blood which, through rebellion after rebellion, was shed in that land. Let me refer, in illustration, to the great rebellion of 1641, a rebellion which it took a Cromwell to quell. In connection with this rebellion, Mr. Walter Walsh (Protestant Dictionary, p. 329) quotes Con O’Mahony, an Irish Jesuit, who, in the year 1645, wrote from Portugal to the following effect:— “My dear Irish, go on and perfect the work of your liberty and defence, which is so happily begun by you; and kill all the heretics, and all that do assist and defend them. You have in the space of four or five years—that is, between the year 1641 and the year 1645, wherein I write this—killed 150,000 heretics, as your enemies do acknowledge; neither do you deny it. And for my own part, as I verily believe that you have killed more of them, so I would to God you had killed them all.” Will anyone say after that that Cromwell’s Ironsides were not urgently needed in Ireland at the time? There ought to be no question that Ireland’s discontent at the present moment is, above all things, due to the aim of the Jesuits to have the Church of Rome supreme there in Church and State. Pity it is that our rulers should be duped by them!
Germany became in the long run at least preponderatingly Protestant. But it cost that country, for thirty years, one of the bloodiest wars in history in order to retain its Protestantism. There can be no question that the intention of the Papists was, failing the conversion, the extermination of the Protestants of Germany. Ferdinand, already referred to, by whom hostilities were commenced, was a pupil of the Jesuits, and a fanatical enemy of Protestantism.
Up to 24th August, 1572, it was questionable whether the Protestant party, known in France as Huguenots, or the Roman Catholic party were to have ultimate ascendancy in that country. But on that memorable night, when there were between five and six thousand Huguenots slaughtered in cold blood in Paris alone, the ascendancy of the Roman Catholic party was assured. In the course of a few days twenty-five thousand more Huguenots were similarly slaughtered throughout the French cities. Protestantism was never again in France what it was before St. Bartholomew’s Day. “As soon as the news was received in Rome the cannons of St. Angelo were fired, a solemn Te Deum was sung, and the Pope struck a medal, bearing on the one side his own portrait, and on the other a picture rudely representing the massacre.”—(Schaff-Herzog.) The Huguenots were influential enough to obtain the passing of the Edict of Nantes in their favour in the year 1598. By this edict, while they were by no means granted equal rights with Roman Catholics, they were secured freedom of conscience. This edict was revoked in 1685, and if 17th October, 1685, did not prove as disastrous to the Huguenots as did 24th August, 1572, it was not because the Jesuits had not so intended it. There is extant a letter from Father Lachaise, Jesuit Confessor to Louis XIV. of France, by whom the Edict of Nantes was revoked, written to Father Peters, Jesuit Confessor to King James II. of England, which proves that, had it not been for the timely and intrepid action of the Prince of Conde, 17th October, 1685, would have proved a second St. Bartholomew. As it was, over 300,000 Huguenots, including the most industrious and thrifty part of the French population, fled to foreign lands. It is only a wonder that Protestantism has at all survived in France.
The only noteworthy person in the Greek Church who showed sympathy with the Reformation was Cyril Lucas, Patriarch of Constantinople (born, 1558; died, 1638). He wished to reform the Greek Church along Calvinistic lines. His end was to be strangled, by order of the Sultan, and his body thrown into the Bosphorus. Both Schaff and Lindsay assert that the Jesuits stirred up the Turks to perpetrate this foul deed.
When we charge the Jesuits with being responsible for the bloodshed in Europe in connection with the counter-reformation movement as for much else beside, we don’t mean to assert that when we have spoken the word “Jesuit,” all the elements that contributed to these troubles have been fully explained. All we assert is, that the Jesuits were at the root of all this shedding of blood, and that all this blood-shedding was the natural outcome of the principles they held, and of the means they used to further Church interests. Dr. Littledale, one of the best authorities on the subject, although himself a Ritualist, has said, “The Jesuits alone rolled back the tide of Protestant advance when that half of Europe which had not already shaken off its allegiance to the papacy was threatening to do so, and the whole honours of the counter-reformation are theirs singly.” And the verdict of Dr. Dollinger, the brave and erudite leader of the old Catholics in 1870, deserves much consideration—”I know,” he said, before his excommunication, “that the persistent endeavour to realise this [Jesuit] theory of a kingdom of the world, has cost Europe rivers of blood.”
The counter-reformation movement may be said to have closed with the rise of Cromwell to power. From his time on to the end of the 18th century, the influence of the Jesuits was on the wane. To begin with, Pascal was made, under the hand of God, a powerful instrument for their chastisement. Jesuit theology has all along been Pelagian or semi-Pelagian. Now, notwithstanding the exodus of the most Christian portion of the Western Church from the Church of Rome in the great reform movement of the 16th century, there were still in the 17th century, in the Roman Catholic Church, theologians holding Augustinian sentiments. Jansen, bishop of Ypres, was one of these. He died in 1638, and his great work Augustinus appeared shortly after his death. The Jesuits as Pelagians or semi-Pelagians felt that by this book they were themselves condemned. On that account they set about its condemnation, and in 1653 the reading of Augustinus was by a Papal censure condemned. The nunnery of Port Royal (Paris) had associated with it at this time several capable theologians in thorough sympathy with Jansen. They took the view that the Pope had been taken by surprise by the Jesuits, and went on maintaining that Jansen was after all quite orthodox. On this account nothing less than the entire demolition of Port Royal would satisfy Jesuit revenge. In the end they were successful, but the effort to put down Port Royal cost them a good deal, for it was this that called forth Pascal’s famous Provincial Letters, in which the morally corrupt maxims of the Jesuits are exposed with a keen satire which for skill and power is, perhaps, unequalled in literature. Pascal’s letters cut the Jesuits to the quick, and in one sense there is truth in the saying that they never recovered from this blow. Pascal’s ideas—such was his genius—have percolated through society, and are accountable, there is reason to think, in larger measure than is generally supposed for the tolerably correct idea which people in general attach to the word, Jesuit. Towards the end of the 16th century, Pope Gregory XIII. licensed the Jesuits to engage in commerce. That in the end, too, turned to their discomfiture. About the middle of the 18th century, F. Lavalette, the Jesuit administrator of Martinique, failed for 2,400,000 francs, and ruined some French commercial houses of note. Ricci, the Jesuit General, for the time being, repudiated the debt, and appealed to the Parliament of Paris. The consequence was that the Constitution of the Society was thoroughly investigated, with the result that the France of that time was filled with indignation against the Jesuits, and in 1767 the Order was expelled from the Kingdom of France. A decree suppressing the Society in every part of his dominions was in the same year passed by Charles III. of Spain. It is said that nearly 6000 priests were deported from Spain in that year and were landed in Italy. This indignation against the Jesuits became so contagious in the Latin countries, that shortly after the accession of Clement XIV. to the Papedom (1769), France, Portugal and Sicily, presented a note to the Pope demanding the suppression of the Society. This demand could not be refused, and although, as is said, the Pope knew that it would cost him his life, the Society was suppressed by the Pope on the 21st July, 1773. Nothing more strongly condemnatory of the Jesuits has ever been written than the brief Dominus ac Redemptor by which they were suppressed. The Pope declares that his “dearly beloved sons in Christ, the Kings of France, Portugal, and Sicily, found themselves reduced to the necessity of expelling and driving from their states, kingdoms, and provinces, these very companions of Jesus, persuaded that there remained no other remedy to so great evils; and that this step was necessary in order to prevent the Christians from rising one against another, and from massacring each other in the very bosom of our common mother, the Holy Church.” In the following year Clement XIV. died, and, to put it mildly, many distinguished Roman Catholics thought his death was the penalty of his opposition to the Jesuits. At this time the Jesuits assumed in some places, where the Pope’s word was law, other names than that of their own order, and thus escaped detection. In large numbers they moved on to Russia and Prussia, regions in which the Pope’s word was not of equal consequence. Russia, however, found it necessary to expel them from the whole empire in 1820, and their expulsion by decree of the German Parliament, 19th June, 1872, rendered their Society illegal in Germany until, sad to say, that decree was revoked by Germany three years ago. There is scarcely a country in Europe but, for its own peace, has found it necessary time and again to pass laws to suppress the Jesuit order. But, somehow, they manage to outlive these laws.
In 1814, Pope Pius VII. revoked the brief whereby Clement XIV. had suppressed the Order, and at the same time restored the Jesuits to corporate legal existence within the Church of Rome. Since that time it may be said that, whatsoever disappointments they have met with along other lines, they have met with nothing but success in their endeavour to make the whole Roman Catholic Church their tool. It is not quite accurate to identify, in every case, Roman Catholics with Jesuits, but it is not too much to say, that the essence of Roman Catholicism is now Jesuitism. It is also true that Jesuitism represents the true spirit of Roman Catholicism from its beginnings. The man of sin—of whose appearance within the bosom of the professing Church, believers were warned by the Apostle Paul (2 Thess. ii.), came to full stature on 18th July, 1870, when the dogma of the infallibility of the Pope became a fundamental article of belief in the Church of Rome. This, as well as the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin, which Pius IX. decreed in 1854, was altogether due to Jesuit craft and power. But that mystery of iniquity whereby this man of sin “exalteth himself above all that is called God, so that he as God, sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God” had been long working itself to assertion within the Roman Catholic Church. It was in the interests of it that so many decreals were in the dark ages forged with the intentions of establishing Papal supremacy. On this ultramontane conception the Jesuits set their heart from the first. Laynez, who succeeded Loyola in the generalship, was one of the leading men in the Council of Trent, and he is reported to have there contended for Papal infallibility, and to have demanded the reference of all questions of reform to the sole decision of the Pope. As an incidental proof of the continuity through the centuries of the aims of the Jesuits, it interested me recently in looking over the Diary of Alexander Brodie of Brodie, to find him recording in the year 1662, being then in London, “that he heard that some Jesuits had put out the thesis that the Pope in cathedra could not err, and there was answer given against it by some Papists.” And when, in 1870, the dogma of Papal infallibility became a fundamental statute in the Church of Rome, and the Jesuits, in respect of the Church of Rome, realised the aim of centuries, Lord Acton, reputed to have been a man of great learning, but one who not having the courage of Dollinger, died but a short time since in the Roman Church, could with truth write as he did from Rome in that same year—”Their Order is now, really and in the fullest sense, the Urim and Thummim and breastplate of the High Priest—the Pope, who can only then issue an oracular utterance when he has consulted the breastplate, the Jesuit Order.” It has thus come about that “the Jesuits”—I quote Neatby in his useful Programme of the Jesuits—”give the law to the 230 million souls that render allegiance to the See of Rome.”
A word about contemporary Jesuitism. The recent action of France in throwing off the Papal yoke, makes one think that the time when the nations which had once supported this spiritual Babylon should “eat her flesh” has already come. Spain bids fair to follow the example of France. But the picture is not all so pleasing. In the German Reichstag, or Parliament, the extreme Roman Catholic party occupy a position something like that often occupied by the Irish party in the British Parliament—they hold the balance of power. The German Emperor has large schemes of his own which he is anxious to carry, but which he cannot carry without the help of this clerical party. He appears at the present time ready to buy the Roman Catholic vote at any cost. Hence the significance of the recent legalising of Jesuits in Germany. Hence, also, the significance of the recent appointment of Wernz, a German Professor of the same University as Marianus de Luca, already referred to, to the generalship of the Jesuit Order. An article by Robert Dell, an English Roman Catholic, in the October number of the Fortnightly Review, shows what reasons thoughtful men have for fearing that, by way of revenge on France, Jesuit intrigue will involve Germany in a second war with it, and not with France alone this time.
I have already extended this paper to such a length that I refrain from alluding to contemporary Jesuitism in Great Britain, in the United States, and in Canada, although the subject is extremely important. My design has been to urge our readers to prayer, that the Lamb, who is in the midst of the throne, may exercise His great power, and overcome those our enemies. “He is the Lord of lords, and King of kings, and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.”
J. R. M.