The strictures of Carlyle, Macaulay, Thackeray, and Lytton have been repeatedly denounced by the Jesuits, but even their shrewd, sophistical defences of their order afford ample justification for the attitude of their foes.  For example, in a masterful oration, previously quoted from, in which the virtues of the Jesuits are extolled and defended, Father Sherman says:  “We are expelled and driven from pillar to post because we teach men to love God.”  He describes Loyola as “the knightly, the loyal, the true, the father of heroes, and the maker of saints, the lover of the all-good and the all-beautiful, crowned with the honor of sainthood, the best-loved and the best-hated man in all the world, save only his Master and ours.” “’Twas he that conceived the daring plan of forging the weapon to beat back the Reformation.”  No one but a Jesuit could reconcile the aim of “preaching the love of God” with “beating back the Reformation,” especially in view of the methods employed.

Numerous gross calumnies have been circulated against the Society of Jesus.  The dread of a return to that deplorable intellectual and moral slavery of the pre-Reformation days is so intense, that a calm, dispassionate consideration of Jesuit history is almost impossible.  But after all just concessions have been made, two indisputable facts confront the student:  first, the universal antagonism to the order, of the church that gave birth to it, as well as of the states that have suffered from its meddling in political affairs; and second, the complete failure of the order’s most cherished schemes.  France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Great Britain and other nations, have been compelled in sheer self-defence to expel it from their territories.  Such a significant fact needs some other explanation than that the Jesuit has incurred the enmity of the world merely for preaching the love of God.

Clement XIV., when solemnly pronouncing the dissolution of the order, at the time his celebrated bull, entitled “Dominus ac Redemptor Noster” which was signed July 21, 1773, was made public, justified his action in the following terms:  “Recognizing that the members of this society have not a little troubled the Christian commonwealth, and that for the welfare of Christendom it were better that the order should disappear,” etc.  When Rome thus delivers her ex cathedra opinion concerning her own order, an institution which she knows better than any one else, one cannot fairly be charged with prejudice and sectarianism in speaking evil of it.

But while there is much to be detested in the methods of the order, history does not furnish another example of such self-abnegation and intense zeal as the Jesuits have shown in the prosecution of their aims.  They planted missions in Japan, China, Africa, Ceylon, Madagascar, North and South America.