A Candid History of the Jesuits

PREFACE

It is the historic custom
of the Church of Rome to enlist in its service monastic or quasi-monastic
bodies in addition to the ordinary clergy. In its hour of greatest need, at the
very outbreak of the Reformation, the Society of Jesus was formed as one of these
auxiliary regiments, and in the war which the Church of Rome has waged since
that date the Jesuits have rendered the most spirited and conspicuous service.
Yet the procedure of this Society has differed in many important respects from
that of the other regiments of the Church, and a vast and unceasing controversy
has gathered about it. It is probable that a thousand times, or several
thousand times, more books and pamphlets and articles have been written about
the Jesuits than about even the oldest and most powerful or learned of the
monastic bodies. Not a work of history can be opened, in any language, but it
will contain more references to the Jesuits than to all the other religious
orders collectively. But opinions differ as much to-day as they did a hundred
or two hundred years ago about the character of the Jesuits, and the warmest
eulogies are chilled by the most bitter and withering indictments.

What is a Jesuit? The question is asked still in
every civilised land, and the answer is a confusing mass of contradictions. The
most learned historians read the facts of their career so differently, that one
comes to a verdict expressing deep and criminal guilt, and another acquits them
with honour. Since the foundation of the Society these drastically opposed
views of its action have been taken, and the praise and homage of admirers have
been balanced by the intense hatred of an equal number of Catholic opponents.
It would seem that some impenetrable veil lies over the history and present
life of the Society, yet on both sides its judges refuse to recognise
obscurity. Catholic monarchs and peoples have, time after time, driven the
Jesuits ignominiously over their frontiers; Popes have sternly condemned them.
But they are as active, and nearly as numerous, in the twentieth century as in
the last days of the old political world.

No marshalling of historical facts will change
the feeling of the pronounced admirers and opponents of the Jesuits, and it
would be idle to suppose that, because the present writer is neither Roman
Catholic nor Protestant, he will be awarded the virtue of impartiality. There
seems, however, some need for an historical study of the Jesuits which will aim
at impartiality and candour. On one side we have large and important works like
Crétineau-Joly’s Histoire religieuse, politique, et
littéraire de la Compagnie de Jésus, and a number of smaller works,
written by Catholics of England or America, from the material, and in the
spirit, of the French historian’s work. Such works as these cannot for a moment
be regarded as serious history. They are panegyrics or apologies: pleasant
reading for the man or woman who wishes to admire, but mere untruth to the man
or woman who wishes to know. Indeed, the work of M. Crétineau-Joly, written in
conjunction with the Jesuits, which is at times recommended as the classical
authority on the Society, has worse defects than the genial omission of
unedifying episodes. He makes the most inflated general statements on the
scantiest of material, is seriously and frequently inaccurate, makes a very
generous use of the “mental reserve” which his friends advocate, and sometimes
embodies notoriously forged documents without even intimating that they are
questioned.

Such works naturally provoke an antagonistic
class of volumes, in which the unflattering truths only are presented and a
false picture is produced to the prejudice of the Jesuits. An entirely neutral
volume on the Jesuits does not exist, and probably never will exist. The
historian who surveys the whole of the facts of their remarkable and romantic
career cannot remain neutral. Nor is it merely a question of whether the writer
is a Roman Catholic or no. The work of M. Crétineau-Joly was followed in France
by one written by a zealous priest, the Abbé Guettée, which tore its
predecessor to shreds, and represented the Society of Jesus as fitly condemned
by Pope and kings.

It will be found, at least, that the present
work contains an impartial account both of the virtue and heroism that are
found in the chronicles of the Jesuits, and the scandals and misdeeds that may
justly be attributed to them. It is no less based on the original Jesuit
documents, as far as they have been published, and the work of Crétineau-Joly,
than on the antagonistic literature, as the reader will perceive. Whether or no
it seems to some an indictment, it is a patient endeavour to give all the
facts, within the compass of the volume, and enable the reader to form a
balanced judgment on the Society. It is an attempt to understand
the Jesuits: to understand the enthusiasm and fiery attachment of one half of
the Catholic world no less than the disdain or detestation of the other, to
employ the white and the black, not blended into a monotonous grey but in their
respective places and shades, so as to afford a truthful picture of the
dramatic fortunes of the Society during nearly four centuries, and some insight
into the character of the men who won for it such ardent devotion and such
intense hostility.

J. M.