of colleges and of the religious houses; he admitted or dismissed, dispensed or punished, at his pleasure.  There was no complaint; all obeyed his orders, and saw in him the representative of Divine Providence.  Complaint was sin; resistance was ruin.  It is hard for us to understand how any man could be brought voluntarily to submit to such a despotism.  But the novice entering the order had to go through terrible discipline,—­to be a servant, anything; to live according to rigid rules, so that his spirit was broken by mechanical duties.  He had to learn the virtues of obedience before he could be fully enrolled in the Society.  He was drilled for years by spiritual sergeants more rigorously than a soldier in Napoleon’s army:  hence the efficiency of the body; it was a spiritual army of the highest disciplined troops.  Loyola had been a soldier; he knew what military discipline could do,—­how impotent an army is without it, what an awful power it is with discipline, and the severer the better.  The best soldier of a modern army is he who has become an unconscious piece of machinery; and it was this unreflecting, unconditional obedience which made the Society so efficient, and the General himself, who controlled it, such an awful power for good or for evil.  I am only speaking of the organization, the machinery, the regime, of the Jesuits, not of their character, not of their virtues or vices.  This organization is to be spoken of as we speak of the discipline of an army,—­wise or unwise, as it reached its end.  The original aim of the Jesuits was the restoration of the Papal Church to its ancient power; and for one hundred years, as I think, the restoration of morals, higher education, greater zeal in preaching:  in short, a reformation within the Church.  Jesuitism was, of course, opposed to Protestantism; it hated the Protestants; it hated their religions creed and their emancipating and progressive spirit; it hated religious liberty.

I need not dwell on other things which made this religious order so successful,—­not merely their virtues and their mechanism, but their adaptation to the changing spirit of the times.  They threw away the old dresses of monastic life; they quitted the cloister and places of meditation; they were preachers as well as scholars; they accommodated themselves to the circumstances of the times; they wore the ordinary dress of gentlemen; they remained men of the world, of fine manners and cultivated speech; there was nothing ascetic or repulsive about them, out in the world; they were all things to all men, like politicians, in order to accomplish their ends; they never were lazy, or profligate or luxurious.  If their Order became enriched, they as individuals remained poor.  The inferior members were not even ambitious; like good soldiers, they thought of nothing but the work assigned to them.  Their pride and glory were the prosperity of their Order,—­an intense esprit de corps, never equalled by any body of men.  This, of course,