from Sarpi’s Letters, which prove that this keen-sighted observer believed the Society to be governed in its practice by statutes inaccessible to all but its most trusted members.  ’I have always admired the policy of the Jesuits,’ he writes in 1608, ’and their method of maintaining secrecy.  Their Constitutions are in print, and yet one cannot set eyes upon a copy.  I do not mean their Rules, which are published at Lyons, for those are mere puerilities; but the digest of laws which guide their conduct of the order, and which they keep concealed.  Every day many members leave, or are expelled from the Company; and yet their artifices are not exposed to view.’[170] In another letter, of the date 1610, Sarpi returns to the same point.  ’The Jesuits before this Aquaviva was elected General were saints in comparison with what they afterwards became.  Formerly they had not mixed in affairs of state or thought of governing cities.  Since then, they have indulged a hope of controlling the whole world.

[Footnote 169:  A book with this title was published in 1612 at Cracow.  It was declared a forgery at Rome by a congregation of Cardinals.]

[Footnote 170:  Lettere, vol. i. p. 100.]

And I am sure that the least part of their Cabala is in the Ordinances and Constitutions of 1570.  All the same, I am very glad to possess even these.  Their true Cabala they never communicate to any but men who have been well tested, and proved by every species of trial; nor is it possible for those who have been initiated into it, to think of retiring from the order, since the congregation, through their excellent management of its machinery, know how to procure the immediate death of any such initiated member who may wish to leave their ranks.’[171] Probably the mistake which Sarpi and the world made, was in supposing that the Jesuits needed a written code for their most vital action.  Being a potent and life-penetrated organism, the secret of their policy was not such as could be reduced to rule.  It was not such as, if reduced to rule, could have been plastic in the affairs of public importance which the Company sought to control.  Better than rule or statute, it was biological function.  The supreme deliberative bodies of the order created, transmitted, and continuously modified its tradition of policy.  This tradition some member, partially initiated into their counsels, may have reduced to precepts in the published Monita Secreta of 1612.  But the quintessential flame which breathed a breath of life into the fabric of the Jesuits through two centuries of organic activity, was far too vivid and too spiritual to be condensed in any charter.  A friar and a jurist, like Sarpi, expected to discover some controlling code.  The public, grossly ignorant of evolutionary laws in the formation of social organisms, could not comprehend the non-existence of this code.  Adventurers supplied the demand from their knowledge of the ruling policy.  But like the Liber Trium Impostorum we may regard the Monita Secreta of the Jesuits as an ex post facto fabrication.