‘They were so madly bent,’ says Galluzzi, ’upon filling the ranks of their Company with individuals of wealth and birth, that in 1584, in the single city of Siena, under the pretense of devotion, they seduced thirty youths of the noblest and richest houses, not without great injury to their families and grief to their parents.  The most notorious of these cases Was that of two sons of Pandolfo Petrucci, whose name indicates his high position in the aristocracy of Siena.  These young men they got into their power by inducing them to commit a theft, and then compelled them to pledge fealty to the Society.  Escaping by night in the direction of Rome, the lads were arrested by the city guards, and confessed that they had agreed to meet two Jesuits, who were waiting to conduct them on their journey.’[173]

[Footnote 173:  Storia del Granducato di Toscana, vol. iv. p. 275.]

It was, indeed, not the propagation of sound principles or liberal learning, but the aggrandizement of the order and the enforcement of Catholic usages, at which the Jesuits aimed in their scheme of education.  This was noticeable in their attitude toward literature and science.  Michelet has described their method in a brilliant and exact metaphor, as the attempt to counteract the poison of free thought and stimulative studies by means of vaccination.  They taught the classics in expurgated editions, history in drugged epitomes, science in popular lectures.  Instead of banning what M. Renan is wont to style etudes fortes, they undertook to emasculate these and render them innocuous.  While Bruno was burned by the Inquisition for proclaiming what the Copernican discovery involved for faith and metaphysics, Father Koster at Cologne vulgarized it into something pretty and agreeable.  While Scaliger and Casaubon used the humanities as a propaedeutic of the virile reason, the Jesuits contrived to sterilize and mechanize their influences by insipid rhetoric.  Everywhere through Europe, by the side of stalwart thinkers, crept plausible Jesuit professors, following the light of learning like its shadow, mimicking the accent of the gods like parrots, and mocking their gestures like apes.  Their adroit admixture of falsehood with truth in all departments of knowledge, their substitution of veneer for solid timber, and of pinchbeck for sterling metal, was more profitable to the end they had in view than the torture-chamber of the Inquisition or the quarantine of the Index.  Mediocrities and respectabilities of every description—­that is to say, the majority of the influential classes—­were delighted with their method.  What could be better than to see sons growing up, good Catholics in all external observances, devoted to the order of society and Mother Church, and at the same time showy Latinists, furnished with a cyclopaedia of current knowledge, glib at speechifying, ingenious in the construction of an epigram or compliment?  If some of the more sensible sort grumbled that Jesuit learning was shallow,