ambitious, avaricious, and worldly.  They were as elegant, as scholarly, and as luxurious as the Fellows of Oxford University, and the occupants of stalls in the English cathedrals,—­that is all:  as worldly as the professors of Yale and Cambridge may become in half-a-century, if rich widows and brewers and bankers without children shall some day make those universities as well endowed as Jesuit colleges were in the eighteenth century.  That is the old story of our fallen humanity.  I would no more abuse the Jesuits because they became confessors to the great, and went into mercantile speculations, than I would rich and favored clergymen in Protestant countries, who prefer ten per cent for their money in California mines to four per cent in national consols.

But the prosperity which the Jesuits had earned during their first century of existence excited only envy, and destroyed the reverence of the people; it had not made them odious, detestable.  It was the means they adopted to perpetuate their influence, after early virtues had passed away, which caused enlightened Catholic Europe to mistrust them, and the Protestants absolutely to hate and vilify them.

From the very first, the Society was distinguished for the esprit de corps of its members.  Of all things which they loved best it was the power and glory of the Society,—­just as Oxford Fellows love the prestige of their university.  And this power and influence the Jesuits determined to preserve at all hazards and by any means; when virtues fled, they must find something else with which to bolster themselves up:  they must not part with their power; the question was, how should they keep it?  First, they are accused of having adopted the doctrine of expediency,—­that the end justifies the means.  They did not invent this sophistry,—­it is as old as our humanity.  Abraham used it when he told lies to the King of Egypt, to save the honor of his wife; Caesar accepted it, when he vindicated imperialism as the only way to save the Roman Empire from anarchy; most politicians resort to it when they wish to gain their ends.  Politicians have ever been as unscrupulous as the Jesuits, in adopting expediency rather than eternal right.  It has been a primal law of government; it lies at the basis of English encroachments in India, and of the treatment of the aborigines in this country by our government.  There is nothing new in the doctrine of expediency.

But the Jesuits are accused of pushing this doctrine to its remotest consequences, of being its most unhesitating defenders,—­ so that jesuitism and expediency are popularly convertible terms.  They are accused too of perverting education, of abusing the confessional, of corrupting moral and political philosophy, of conforming to the inclinations of the great.  They even went so far as to inculcate mental reservation,—­thus attacking truth in its most sacred citadel, the conscience of mankind,—­on which Pascal was so severe.