This disagreeable subject will not be pursued further.  To say less than has been said would be to ignore one of the most prominent causes of the Jesuits’ ruin.  To say more than this, even though the facts might warrant it, would incur the liability of being classed among those malicious fomentors of religious strife, for whom the writer has mingled feelings of pity and contempt.  The Society of Jesus is not the Roman Catholic Church, which has suffered much from the burden of Jesuitism—­wounds that are scarcely atoned for by the meritorious and self-sacrificing services on her behalf in other directions.  The Protestant foes have never equaled the Catholic opponents of Jesuitism, either in their fierce hatred of the system or in their ability to expose its essential weakness.  A writer in the “Quarterly Review,” September, 1848, says:  “Admiration and detestation of the Jesuits divide, as far as feeling is concerned, the Roman Catholic world, with a schism deeper and more implacable than any which arrays Protestant against Protestant.”

The Mission of the Jesuits

The Society of Jesus has been described as “a naked sword, whose hilt is at Rome, and whose point is everywhere.”  It is an undisputed historical fact that Loyola’s consuming passion was to accomplish the ruin of Protestantism, which had twenty years the start of him and was threatening the very existence of the Roman hierarchy.  It has already been shown that the destruction of heresy was the chief aim of the Dominicans.  What the friars failed to attain, Loyola attempted.  The principal object of the Jesuits was the maintenance of papal authority.  Even to-day the Jesuit does not hesitate to declare that his mission is to overthrow Protestantism.  The Reformation was inspired by a new conception of individual freedom.  The authority of tradition and of the church was set at naught.  Loyola planted his system upon the doctrine of absolute submission to authority.  The partial success of the Jesuits, for they did beat back the Reformation, is no doubt attributable to their fidelity, virtue and learning.  Their devotion to the cause they loved, their willingness to sacrifice life itself, their marvelous and instantaneous obedience to the slightest command of their leaders, made them a compact and powerful papal army.  Their methods, in many particulars, were not beyond question, and, whatever their character, the order certainly incurred the fiercest hostility of every nation in Europe, and even of the church itself.

Professor Anton Gindely, in his “History of the Thirty Years’ War,” shows that Maximilian, of Bavaria, and Ferdinand, of Austria, the leaders on the Catholic side, were educated by Jesuits.  He also fixes the responsibility for that war partly upon them in the plainest terms:  “In a word, they had the consciences of Roman Catholic sovereigns and their ministers in their hands as educators, and in their keeping as confessors.  They led them in the direction of war, so that it was at the time, and has since been called the Jesuits’ War.”