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A CANDID HISTORY OF THE JESUITS




  A CANDID HISTORY
  OF
  THE JESUITS

  BY
  JOSEPH McCABE

  AUTHOR OF
  "THE DECAY OF THE CHURCH OF ROME" ETC.

  LONDON
  EVELEIGH NASH
  1913




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