232 



JESUITS. 



taincd of their having had a share in the murder of 

 Henry III. They were banished, indeed, in 1594, 

 on account of the attempt upon Henry's life by tiieir 

 pupil, John Chatcl ; yet they still remained undis- 

 turbed in Toulon, and Bourdeaux, and, at the inter- 

 cession of the pope, were again received by Henry 

 IV. in 1003. They soon, in their office of court-con- 

 fessors, carried on the same intrigues as before. 

 Their participation in the crime of Havaillac, though 

 exceedingly probable, could not be proved against 

 ill em ; they themselves joined in condemning (lie 

 book in which the Spanish Jesuit Mariana defends 

 the king's assassination, and, by cunning and obse- 

 quiousness towards the court, preserved themselves 

 undisturbed. They made themselves still more impor- 

 tant to the German empire, when they became the 

 confidential advisers of Ferdinand II. and III. They 

 discovered remarkable political talent in the thirty 

 years' war ; the league of the Catholics could do 

 nothing without them. Father Lamormaim, a 

 Jesuit, and confessor to the emperor, effected the 

 downfall of U'allenstein, and, by means of his 

 agents, kept the jealous Bavarians in their alliance 

 with Austria. But, while they were thus success- 

 ful as statesmen, in this part of Europe (though 

 they failed in preventing the triumph of toleration 

 at tlie peace of Westphalia), a new storm burst 

 upon them, in France and the Netherlands, from 

 the Jansenist controversy. The ancient hostility of 

 the university of Paris, which had always been 

 strongly averse to the admission of the Jesuits as 

 teachers, rose up, in union with the rigid morality 

 of the Jansenists, against the notorious semi-Pelagi- 

 anism of Molina and his brother Jesuits. (See 

 Grace, and Jansenius.) The character of the Jesuits 

 received a fatal wound from the pen of Pascal, whose 

 famous Provincial Letters exposed the mischievous 

 doctrines and practices of the Jesuits with admirable 

 wit and argument, to which they opposed little but 

 abuse and violence. These letters, which have been 

 published in numerous editions since 1656, were read 

 through all Europe, and their testimony quoted in the 

 sentence of condemnation pronounced by Innocent 

 IX., in 1679, against sixty-five offensive propositions, 

 mostly of Jesuit casuists. But it availed them little 

 that royal decrees and papal bulls, procured by the 

 Jesuit confessors of Louis XIV. (La Chaise and Le 

 Tellier), were levelled against Jansenism, and its 

 ruin completed by the well-known constitution Uni- 

 genilus. In the minds of reflecting and well-disposed 

 persons, they still remained suspected of an attach- 

 ment to the principles of their most eminent casuists, 

 attacked by Pascal principles which afforded the 

 most startling solution of their crafty and ambiguous 

 conduct. A lax morality, accommodated to the 

 inclinations of a licentious age, which made interest 

 and external circumstances the rule of conduct, and 

 consecrated the worst means for a good end ; their 

 probabilism, a system of principles and rules of life 

 which tolerated every thing that could be defended 

 as probably admissible; their excuses for perjury and 

 crimes of all kinds, sometimes by arbitrary perversion 

 of language, sometimes by ambiguous expressions 

 and perplexing interpretations, sometimes, too, by 

 mental reservations, according to which a man had 

 only to think differently from what he said and did, 

 to be justified, in his own sight, from the greatest 

 crimes ; these, and other traits of a like nature, may 

 be more fully and accurately learnt from the letters- 

 of Pascal, or the writings of the Jesuits, Sanchez, 

 Bauny, Escobar, Suarez, and Busembaum. Their 

 own defences against these charges only confirmed 

 the suspicion excited against their system of morals, 

 while they palliated and conceded a part where the 

 whole was culpable. Other accusations were now 



brought against them, which they were still less able 

 to repel. Their superficial mode of instruction, and 

 the theatrical disorders of their schools, had been 

 already condemned by Mariana, a learned Spanish 

 Jesuit; the gross selfishness of the order had been 

 publicly exposed in Sciotti's Monarchiu solipsorum ; 

 the indifference with which they permitted their 

 heathen converts to continue their old worship ot 

 idols, on condition of their mentally adoring, at the 

 same time, Christ and the virgin Mary; and their 

 want of agreement with the other missionaries in 

 China, had been warmly, but ineffectually, censured 

 by several papal bulls. Their conduct, too, was 

 now and then discovered to harmonize too well with 

 their indulgent code of ethics, as they were not 

 always prudent enough in the commission of their 

 excesses; and it was for this reason that the Iroquois, 

 who had been converted by them, expressly stipulated 

 in a treaty of peace (1682) for the removal of these 

 licentious brethren, who did every thing that Jesus 

 did not do. It was even found necessary to expel 

 them from some of the Italian states for their licen- 

 tiousness ; and the horror which was felt through 

 Europe at the trial of the Jesuit Girard, for the 

 alleged violation of Cadiere, an innocent girl, at the 

 time of confession, is hardly yet forgotten. It was 

 now becoming, every day, more evident to the world, 

 that the Jesuits were not aiming to promote virtue 

 and religion, but their own interests. This was 

 confirmed by the complaints of merchants at the 

 extensive traffic of the society of Jesus in the pro- 

 ducts of their foreign missionary stations. It cannot 

 be denied that the republic of natives, formed by 

 them, under the authority of Spain, in Paraguay and 

 Uraguay, in which they ruled with absolute power, 

 and which, in 1753, contained nearly 100,000 sub- 

 jects, was conducted by them with consummate 

 policy and skill, and was, perhaps, the best means 

 for civilizing those savages ; but that they made it 

 also a trafficking establishment for the emolument 

 of the order, was shown on occasion of a treaty of 

 commerce, by which Spain, in 1750, gave up seven 

 districts of this country to Portugal. The resistance 

 which the natives made to the Portuguese, with an 

 army of 14,000 men, commanded by Jesuits, finally 

 obliged the contracting powers to annul the treaty. 

 The Portuguese Jesuits, though they disclaimed all 

 concern in this affair, underwent a prosecution, 

 which was not terminated, when an attempt upon 

 the life of the king of Portugal hastened their down- 

 fall. The minister Pombal made out their agency in 

 this attempt to a high degree of probability, and 

 finally succeeded, in 1759, in expelling them from 

 Portugal, and confiscating their possessions, by an 

 edict, in which the king declared them guilty of 

 high treason. Before this first blow, the order con- 

 sisted of twenty-four professed-house:;, 669 colleges, 

 176 seminaries, sixty-one novitiate-houses, 335 resi. 

 dences, and 273 missions in heathen and Protestant 

 countries, and 22,589 members of all ranks, half of 

 whom were ordained priests. In France, where 

 Choiscul and Pompadour were unfavourably disposed 

 towards them, their ruin was occasioned by the trade 

 which they continued to carry on, in spite of all the 

 pope's orders to the contrary. In 1743, they had 

 established a trading-house at Martinique, by their 

 deputy, father La Valette, under pretence of a mis- 

 sion, which soon monopolized nearly the whole trade 

 of that and the neighbouring islands, and had com- 

 mercial connexions with the principal merchants of 

 France. It happened that two ships, with a cargo 

 valued at two millions of francs, sent over by La 

 Valette to pay the house of Lioncy, at Marseilles, 

 , fell into the hands of the British. The Jesuits 

 ; refusing to make any indemnification for the loss, the 



