The early Franciscans & Jesuits; a study in contrasts

THE EARLY
FRANCISCANS & JESUITS

STUDIES IN CHURCH HISTORY

THE EARLY
FRANCISCANS & JESUITS

A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

BY

ARTHUR S. B. FREER, M.A.

VICAR OF GUSSAGE ALL SAINTS

BOSTON COLLEGE L!r
CHLSTNUT HILL. Mfl

LONDON
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING
CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE

NEW YORK AND TORONTO: THE MAC.MILLAN CO.
1922

nO

^

TO

FRANCIS B. SOWTER

CANON OF HIGHWORTH IN SALISBURY CATHEDRAL

THESE STUDIES OF ECCLESIASTICAL LIFE

ARE DEDICATED

IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION

OF A LONG AND INSPIRING FRIENDSHIP

CONTENTS

Preface
I. St. Francis of Assisi .
II. The Early Franciscans in Italy

III. The Early Franciscans in England

IV. Ignatius Loyola

V. The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits
VI. The Jesuits in Europe

Bibliography .

Index

PAGE

vii

23

46

67

93
117

139

142

VI

PREFACE

The Franciscan lectures in this volume were delivered
in Salisbury Cathedral during the war ; those on the
Jesuits at various centres of study in the diocese.
They are now presented to a larger public, in the hope
of deepening the interest of the average reader in the
religious enthusiasms of the thirteenth and sixteenth
centuries.

It has long been the conviction of the writer that the
study of ecclesiastical history in this country is pursued
in too insular a spirit and that it would be a great
gain to the Anglican student to investigate those
wider movements which swept like an incoming tide
over every part of Western Europe.

The Franciscan and Jesuit Orders present two very
different attitudes of mind within the Church ; the
former tending to freedom, the latter to the exaltation
of external authority. They both have lessons to
teach us, but there can be little doubt which of the
two is nearer to the spirit of Christ. St. Francis,
the most romantic figure of the Middle Ages, presents
a type of mind well worth the consideration of a
democratic age. The friend of all men, free from the
trammels of conventionality, he incarnated the spirit
of humility and brotherly love without which all our
doings are little worth. Loyola, on the other hand, is
admirable in his fervent search for truth, but he
deteriorated under the hardening impact of autocracy

vii

viii Preface

and success. Determined at all costs to save a falling
Church, he combined the narrow outlook of a mili-
tant Churchman with the unscrupulous methods of
Machiavellian statesmanship. Born and bred in a
country where the Church had been for centuries
at war with alien beliefs, his motto on all doctrinal
issues was no compromise ; yet his morality was
elastic in the extreme when the end to be gained
was the acquisition of power. Had he been succeeded,
as was his intention, by Francis Xavier, the fortunes
of his society might have been strangely different and
nearer to the ethos of Gospel perfection ; but in the
hands of Lainez and Aquaviva it assumed a more
worldly tone, with the sinister results familiar to the
student of history.

Dogma and organisation have dominated many
ecclesiastical histories ; in these brief studies the
stress has been laid elsewhere — on the Christian
character and temper.

My sincere thanks are due to the Very Rev. Dr.
Burn, Dean of Salisbury, for reading through the
lectures, and for advice and encouragement.

THE EARLY

rnAMPTCPAMC ^7 TP^T TTT.^

ERRATA.

On page 5 line 6, for "just," read " first "

On page 5 line 26, for " looks," read "locks "

On page 38 line 19, for "even," read "ever"

On page 38 line 32, for " He," read " it "

On page 138, line 9, for "disingenuously," read "ingenuously"

The Early Franciscans.

science in Roger Bacon. It was the century of great
personalities and great movements, of St. Louis,
Innocent III, and Frederick II, of chivalry, rising
nationality, and of a great struggle for civic freedom.
At no period of history was the Church more powerful,
yet more seriously menaced by hostile forces which
daily gathered momentum. The towns, increasing
rapidly in wealth and independence, were violently
anti-feudal and anti-clerical. That they possessed the
religious spirit is proved by the cathedrals which they
built, but they were at the same time hotbeds of
religious and social discontent. The influence of the

viii Preface

and success. Determined at all costs to save a falling
Church, he combined the narrow outlook of a mili-
tant Churchman with the unscrupulous methods of
Machiavellian statesmanship. Born and bred in a
country where the Church had been for centuries
at war with alien beliefs, his motto on all doctrinal
issues was no compromise ; yet his morality was
elastic in the extreme whpn +hp pnri +^ v.^ ««;rn«i

THE EARLY
FRANCISCANS & JESUITS

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI

The century of St. Francis is the most creative of the
Middle Ages. It gave us the Gothic cathedrals of
Northern Europe, the sculpture of Pisano, the paint-
ing of Giotto, the poetry of Dante. It gave us Magna
Charta, Parliamentary Institutions, and the Italian
Republics. It witnessed the foundation of seventy
new Universities, the culmination of scholastic theology
in St. Thomas Aquinas, the beginnings of modern
science in Roger Bacon. It was the century of great
personalities and great movements, of St. Louis,
Innocent III, and Frederick II, of chivalry, rising
nationality, and of a great struggle for civic freedom.
At no period of history was the Church more powerful,
yet more seriously menaced by hostile forces which
daily gathered momentum. The towns, increasing
rapidly in wealth and independence, were violently
anti-feudal and anti-clerical. That they possessed the
religious spirit is proved by the cathedrals which they
built, but they were at the same time hotbeds of
religious and social discontent. The influence of the

2 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

monasteries was mainly confined to the country ; the
secular clergy in the towns, few in number, were
corrupt and out of touch with the spirit of the age.
It was customary for the Bishops alone to preach, and
as many of these lived in baronial splendour, careless
of their spiritual responsibilities, the Church in the
cities was left to perish from neglect.

Never, therefore, was there a greater need for a man
of faith and spiritual power to direct and elevate the
forces of a new age.

Such a man appeared, at the beginning of the
century, in Francis of Assisi. Inspired by the Christ
of the Gospels, in sympathy with the poor, overflowing
with the love of God, Nature and his fellow-men, he
breathed a new spirit into Church and State and was
the Saviour of his time. " European society," says
Bishop Creighton, " was on the verge of a complete
collapse, when Francis stepped in and saved it."

Francis was born at Assisi in 1182. The town has
altered little in seven centuries. Then, as now, the
massive houses of rosy-tinted stone clambered along
the steep sides of Monte Subasio, peering " like children
on tiptoe " into the valley beneath. Francis was born
during the absence of his father, a wealthy cloth mer-
chant, in France ; from which country he derived not
only his name, but a love of French poetry which never
forsook him. The ballads of the Troubadours, the
legends of King Arthur's Round Table, and the story
of the Holy Grail were among the formative influences
of his life. Francis learned, too, a little Latin from
the priest of St. Giorgio, but not much else. Writing
was an art in which he never excelled and his only
extant autograph shows extreme awkwardness. But
the very paucity of his education saved Francis from

St. Francis of Assisi 3

the pedantry of the schools, leaving unimpaired that
perfect simplicity and spontaneity which constitute
the chief charm of his character.

As a child his days were spent in the sunny squares
of Assisi. As he grew up he associated on terms of
equality with the gentry of his native city and shared
with them a brief imprisonment at Perugia, during a
compaign against the nobles of that place. Up to
the age of twenty-two Francis lived an idle and ex-
travagant life, popular with all classes on account
of his courtesy and high spirits, but with no aim
beyond that of social enjoyment. Yet, though Francis
lived carelessly, we have the testimony of his earliest
biographer to show that he maintained " great rever-
ence for the mysteries of life."

In his twenty-third year a serious illness brought
Francis to death's door. On gaining convalescence
he made his way with the help of a stick to the hill-
side above the town. Before him in the bright sun-
shine stood the cloudlike hills of Umbria, below him
the clustering farms of his native valley. But the
beauty of Nature only increased his disquietude,
making him realise the emptiness of a purposeless life,
filling him with self-disgust and depression. From
this time Francis lived more alone, taking long
rambles among the hills and learning in a lonely cave
the meaning and solace of prayer. At banquets he
was sometimes so abstracted that he became a puzzle
to his friends. Rushing out one night into the street
these uproarious companions missed Francis. When
they discovered him, he was holding in his hand his
sceptre as King of Misrule, but plunged in a deep
reverie. " What is the matter with you ? " they
cried. " Don't you see he is thinking of taking a

4 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

wife ? ' said one. " Yes," replied Francis smiling,
"I am thinking of taking a wife, richer, purer and
more beautiful than you could imagine." It was his
first dream of Poverty, the bride whom Giotto has
pictured as his lifelong spouse upon the walls of the
Church of Assisi ; about whose feet are briars, blossom-
ing into roses about her head. In the ages of chivalry
every knight dedicated himself to the service of some
fair lady. Francis, by a stroke of religious genius,
chose Poverty for his fair lady and dedicated his life
to her faithful service.

Shortly after this time, Francis was riding on
horseback when, at a sudden turn of the road, he came
unexpectedly on a leper. The sight of these poor
outcasts filled him at all times with a deep sense
of loathing. Instinctively he turned his horse's head
and rode off in the opposite direction. But he had
not gone far before he began to reproach himself with
great bitterness. To be a Knight of Christ and to
turn his back at the first check was intolerable. Re-
tracing his steps, therefore, he sprang from his horse,
bestowed on the sufferer all his money, then stooped
and kissed his hand reverently and departed. This
schooling of himself to do what was naturally repug-
nant to his sensitive nature proved a turning-point in
his career, and is thus commemorated in his will :
" See in what manner God gave it to me, Brother
Francis, to begin to do penitence : when I lived in
sin, it was very painful to me to see lepers, but God
Himself led me into their midst and I remained there
a little while. When I left them, that which had
seemed to me bitter had become sweet and easy."

One of the signs of the Church's decay at this time
was the ruinous state of many of her sanctuaries.

St. Francis of Assisi 5

Among these the little Church of St. Damien was a
favourite haunt of Francis. The interior was entirely
unfurnished save for a plain stone altar and a large
Byzantine crucifix. It was while kneeling before
this crucifix, in dejection and bewilderment, that
Francis just lost himself in the Divine Presence and
felt himself encircled by the Divine Love. " Great
and glorious God, and Thou Lord Jesus, I pray you
shed abroad your light in the darkness of my mind.
Be found of me, Lord, so that in all things I may act
only in accordance with Thy holy will." " Thus,"
says Sabatier, " he prayed and was aware of a voice
speaking to him an ineffable language. Jesus accepted
his oblation, Jesus desired his labour, his life, his
whole being ; and the heart of the poor solitary was
already bathed in light and strength."

Hard upon this inward vision followed the outward
crisis. Francis, desiring to restore St. Damien and to
keep a light always burning before the Crucifix, un-
warrantably sells some of his father's goods ; and
the poor priest refusing the money, Francis flings it
down on a window-sill of the church. Soon after as
he passes through the streets of Assisi with pale face
and tattered clothes, the children call out after him,
" Madman, madman." Bernardone, seeing his son in
this plight and hearing of the theft, is furious, looks
him up in his cellar and applies to the Bishop for his
disinheritance. The Bishop advises Francis to restore
his father's money. The young man's rejoinder was
startling and dramatic and opens a new chapter of
mediaeval history. After a minute's retirement he
emerges stark naked, holding in his hand a packet
into which he has rolled his clothes. This, with his
father's money, he lays down at the Bishop's feet

6 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

with these words : " Listen all of you and understand
it well : until this time I have called Pietro Bernardone
my father, but now I desire to serve God. This is
why I return to him this money for which he has given
himself so much trouble : from this time I desire to
say nothing else than Our Father which art in heaven."
Struck dumb with amazement, his father hastily
gathers up his property and departs ; while the
Bishop covers the naked body of Francis with his
mantle.

Now what is the inner meaning of this extravagant
action ? " It would seem," says Bishop Creighton,
" that by this strange proceeding Francis felt that
he had at last worked his way to freedom ; but he
knew that freedom had to be paid for. If he desired
to detach himself from the world and rise above it,
he knew that he must demand nothing of the world.
Poverty therefore was of the essence of the position
of Francis. It seemed impossible for him to express
himself under the ordinary conditions of life ; to
obtain that power of self-expression he must first free
himself of the ordinary conditions of life ; and, if he
was to do that, it must not be on his own terms. If
he showed himself willing to give up father and mother
and all family obligations, then he must be prepared
to give up everything else. From all this, therefore,
Francis became conscious that he had purchased for
himself spiritual freedom ; the liberty to live his own
life according to the conditions of his inner soul without
interference on the part of society or of the world
even in its highest forms."

It is evident at any rate that from this time the
mind of Francis was filled with an unspeakable joy,
a joy which he was able to communicate to thousands

CHI

St. Francis of Assist J

of his fellow-creatures, a joy which thrills his century
as with a new Evangel. Leaving the city by the
nearest gate, Francis made his way into the forest,
inhaling the fresh odours of the spring, and singing
with all his might one of the songs of French
chivalry.

On his return, he devoted himself to the care of
lepers, and the restoration of ruined churches with his
own hands. Day by day he would stand in the squares
of Assisi, and after singing a few hymns, would ask
the help of those present in rebuilding St. Damien,
promising them in return his grateful prayers. Not to
burden the poor priest who gave him hospitality, he
begged his food from door to door. The first time he
sat down to eat the scraps so collected, he felt an
uncontrollable disgust ; but, remembering in Whose
service he was now engaged and Who gives to each
their daily bread, he overcame his repugnance.

From St. Damien he descended the hill of Assisi to
restore the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, com-
monly called the Portiuncula. Here, without any
seeking on his part, came disciples from Assisi and
the neighbourhood. Nothing, indeed, could be more
informal than the tie which held together the early
Franciscans. It was simply personal devotion to Our
Lord, and personal affection for St. Francis. When
the need for a Rule presented itself, Francis entered
the nearest church and, opening the Gospels three
times out of reverence for the Blessed Trinity, read
out three texts to his followers as their commission.
" If thou wilt be perfect, sell all thou hast and give
to the poor." " Take nothing for your journey." " If
any man will come after Me, let him take up his Cross
and follow Me."

8 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Thomas of Celano has left us a contemporary
description of St. Francis. " He was of middle stature,
with an oval face, and full but low forehead, his eyes
dark and clear, his voice soft yet keen and fiery, his
lips modest yet subtle, his beard black but not thickly
grown, his hands thin with long fingers ; roughly
clothed, sleeping little, his hand ever open in charity."

The dress of the early Franciscans did not differ
much from that still worn by the shepherds of the
Apennines, being of a brown shade known among
Italians as " beast colour." Francis sent them out
two and two, for his conception of the Gospel was the
following of Christ in absolute literalness, the bringing
in of men from the highways and hedges, the realisation
of the Pauline maxim " as poor, yet making many
rich ; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things."
" Go," he said to these first disciples, " proclaim peace
to men, preach repentance for the remission of sin?.
Be patient in tribulation, watchful in prayer, strong in
labour, moderate in speech, grave in conversation,
thankful for benefits." Adding to each brother
separately the injunction, " Cast thy care upon the
Lord, and He will sustain thee."

The freshness, informality, and ardour of these early
days remind us vividly of the Galilaean revival thirteen
centuries before. It was essentially the proclamation
of the Gospel to the Poor, the practical assurance
that the life is more than meat, and the body than
raiment.

These early disciples, twelve in number, made their
first missionary journeys among the villages of eastern
and central Italy. Their welcome was general^ of a
cordial character, for they did not go as mendicants
but worked their way from village to village, helping

St. Francis of Assist g

the peasants make their hay or hoe their roots, sleeping
with the field hands in some barn, or in the porch of the
nearest church. They showed the greatest reverence
for all priests and churches and carried with them
everywhere a contagious spirit of good humour and
cheerfulness. Their lightheartedness constituted one
of their chief charms and contributed materially to
their rapid success. Francis had, in truth, more than a
doctrine to preach ; he had a Life to communicate, a
life which made the good tidings of great joy a reality
to all those who yielded themselves to its fascination.
When asked, in later years, how amid so many dis-
tractions he preserved his serenity, he replied :
" Sometimes my sins are very bitter to me, some-
times the devil attempts to fill me with a sadness which
leads to indifference and sleep, for my joy is a vexation
to him and he is jealous of the blessings I receive from
God. But when I am tempted to sadness or slothful-
ness, I look at the cheerful air of my companion, and,
seeing his spiritual joy, I shake off the temptation and
the idle sorrow and am full of joy within and gaiety
without."

It was in the towns, where the failure of the Church
had been most conspicuous, that the early Franciscans
gained their greatest successes. St. Francis was a
lover of civil and religious freedom and in complete
sympathy with the poor. The very name which he
chose for his followers the Brothers Minor, was the
term applied to the poor of a city in contrast with the
wealthy or Majores. At Assisi, he himself succeeded
in reconciling nobles and townsmen and, in like
manner, throughout the towns of Western Europe his
followers preached peace and goodwill and were the
heralds of a better time.

io The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

The Friars came, in the first place, not as ecclesiastics
but as men. They chose by preference the more
squalid quarters of the towns, where they ministered
to the sick and poor and especially to the lepers. Their
chief house in London was in " Stinking Lane," close
to the shambles of Newgate. " If the Gospel net,"
says Professor Brewer, " woven out of purple and
fine linen, had hitherto rather scared than caught
the fish it was intended to enclose, the founder of
the mendicant orders took care that it should be
as coarse and homespun as poverty itself could
make it."

The preaching of the Friars was graphic, homely
and direct, inspired by sympathy, and commended
by the life. At the street corners where all could
hear, in the common tongue which all could under-
stand, Francis pleaded the claims of the Divine
Redeemer and His care for those who had no care
for themselves.

His practical instincts were directed to the human
side of Our Lord's life and teaching ; to His fulfilment
of social relationships, His generosity, truth and self-
sacrifice. Nor is it a matter of surprise that the Friars,
appalled by the immorality of the towns, dwelt with
increasing devotion on the purity of the Virgin Mother
and upon her sympathy with the sorrows of woman-
hood. The celibacy of the clergy had not acted
beneficially on the lives of the people, consequently
the Friars laboured to restore to marriage its true
dignity and honour. The sympathy of the Friar with
young lovers is finely portrayed by Shakespeare in
" Romeo and Juliet," where the Friar's love of Nature
and knowledge of medicine is also suggested. Chaucer,
too, though as a Wyclifite he was prejudiced against

St. Francis of Assist n

the Friars, speaks in his Prologue to the "Canterbury
Tales " of their encouragement of marriage :

" A frere ther was, a wantoun and a merye,
A lymitour a ful solempne man.
In alle the ordres foure is noon that can
So moche of daliaunce and fair langage.
He hadde i-made many a fair mariage
Of yonge wymmen, at his owne cost.
At yeddynges he bar utturly the prys."

In many ways the Friars fought the deadly Manichaeism
of their age and sought to establish the health of the
body as well as that of the soul. We owe to them the
mitigation if not extinction of leprosy in Western
Europe and the direction of men's minds to medical
science and natural philosophy. The strictest injunc-
tions were given by St. Francis to his followers to
qualify themselves for service in the leper hospitals ;
and thus the scientific study of the human body
and of the healing properties of herbs and minerals
naturally grew out of the social ministrations of the
Friars.

We must now return to the year 1210, when Francis
sought the Pope's permission for his lay brothers to
preach. The sun was setting on the palace of the
Lateran when Francis arrived in Rome and was
ushered into the presence of Innocent III. In twelve
years this austere prelate had raised the Papacy to the
greatest height it ever attained and from which it was
so soon to fall. Yet the poor man of Assisi was to
accomplish by love what this supreme statesman was
unable to accomplish by sagacity and the power of the
keys, a real revival of the spiritual life throughout
Western Christendom.

Innocent received the Friars kindly, but his answer

12 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

to their request was bitterly disappointing. " My
dear children," he said, " your life appears to me too
severe : I see indeed that your fervour is too great for
any doubt of you to be possible ; but I ought to
consider those who come after you, lest your mode of
life should be beyond their strength." St. Francis,
thus dismissed, took refuge in prayer and the following
morning returned with a parable closing with these
sarcastic words : " the King of kings has told me that
He will provide for all the sons that He may have of
me ; for if He sustains bastards, how much more
legitimate sons ? " These pointed words were not
without their effect on the Pope, especially when he
found their cause warmly supported by Cardinal
Colonna. " If we hold," said the Cardinal, " that to
imitate Gospel perfection and make profession of it
is an irrational and impossible innovation, are we not
convicted of blasphemy against Christ the author of the
Gospel ? " This unanswerable argument turned the
scale ; authority to preach was given to the Friars,
through Francis, who was formally recognised as their
responsible head.

The next few years were spent by Francis in the
evangelisation of Italy. The following stories illustrate
the spirit in which the work was undertaken, and help
to explain the secret of its success.

When asked one day by Brother Masseo why such
crowds followed him, seeing that he was neither hand-
some, learned, nor high-born. Francis replied : "It
is because the Most High has not found among sinners
any smaller man, anyone more insufficient, more sinful ;
therefore He has chosen me to accomplish this marvel-
lous work."

Once, when Francis was too ill to walk, his com-

St. Francis of Assist 13

panion borrowed for him an ass, confiding to the
peasant for whom it was borrowed. After leading the
animal a little way the peasant said, " Is it true that
you are Brother Francis of Assisi ? " and on receiving
a reply in the affirmative, " Very well, apply yourself
to be as good as folk say you are that they may not be
deceived in their expectation of you, that is my
advice." Francis immediately dismounted, prostrated
himself before the peasant, thanking him with great
warmth for his counsel.

On another occasion he entered the courtyard of
Montefeltro Castle when a fete was being held for the
reception of a new knight. Francis at once began to
speak, taking as his text two lines of Italian, " the
happiness that I expect is so great that all pain is
joyful to me." His words so moved his hearers that
Count Orlando of Chiusi drawing Francis aside, said
to him, " Father, I desire much to converse with you
about the salvation of my soul." " Very willingly,"
replied Francis, " but for this morning, go, do honour
to your friends, and after that we will converse as
much as you please." Francis reckoned courtesy one
of the chief characteristics of God.

In the eyes of St. Francis, the world of his day was
afflicted by two grievous evils, " the arrogance of
wealth and the arrogance of academic learning."

Yet, unlike many of the mediaeval heretics, he did not
abuse the rich but he sprinkled ashes over his food and
would not allow his followers even to touch money
except in trust for the sick. If this peculiarity is to be
regarded as a species of madness, it is, as a modern
writer has said, " a kind of madness of which one need
not fear the contagion."

In the inflexible maintenance of Evangelical poverty,

14 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Francis found no more whole-hearted supporter than
Santa Clara, who became the founder of the Second
Order of St. Francis known as the poor Clares. This
young girl, moved by his exhortations in Assisi
Cathedral, surrendered wealth and position to follow
the Franciscan ideal and, despite severe persecution
from her parents, was soon followed by her two
sisters. Francis installed them at St. Damien, where
they prayed, worked embroidery for the Church and
nursed the sick. Clara through a long life observed
the Franciscan rule in all its severity and, only two
days before her death, succeeded in getting it sanc-
tioned by a Papal Bull. When Cardinal Ugolino
endeavoured to persuade her that it was necessary
that she should possess certain properties, adding, " if
it is your vows which prevent you, we will release you
from them," Clara replied, " Holy Father, absolve me
from my sins, but I have no desire for a dispensation
from following Christ." No one rendered to Francis
wiser or more loyal service than this indomitable
woman. " In those dark hours of discouragement,"
says Sabatier, " which so often and so profoundly
disturb the noblest souls and sterilise the grandest
efforts, she was beside him to show him the way.
When he doubted his mission and thought of fleeing to
the heights of repose and solitary prayer, it was she
who showed him the ripening harvest with no reapers
to gather it in, men going astray with no shepherd to
lead them, and drew him once again into the train of
the Galilaean, into the number of those who give their
lives a ransom for many."

St. Francis was one of the very few Churchmen of
the Middle Ages who desired to convert Moslems
not by the sword, but by love and service. When

St. Francis of Assisi 15

expostulated with by the Cardinal Ugolino for thus
exposing his brethren to starvation and violence, he
replied : "Do you think that God raised up the
brethren for the sake of this country alone ? Verily
I say unto you, God raised them up for the awakening
and salvation of all men and they shall win souls in the
very midst of the infidels." In 1219 St. Francis him-
self visited Egypt and Palestine, and preached before
the Soldan. Jacques de Vitry, an eye-witness, thus
alludes to his missionary labours in Egypt : " the
master of these brothers is named Brother Francis, he
is so lovable that he is venerated by everyone. Having
come into our army, he has not been afraid in his zeal
for the faith to go to that of our enemies. For days
together he announced the word of God to the Saracens,
but with little success."

No failure, however, daunted the followers of
St. Francis in their missionary labours. In Germany
the first Friars appear to have known nothing of the
language except the word " Ja." When asked if they
wanted food, they replied " Ja," when asked if they
were heretics, they again replied " Ja," with the most
disastrous results. Many were stripped and cruelly
beaten by the peasants. After their first failure, there-
fore, Francis would not order any more Friars to go to
Germany but asked if any would volunteer. There-
upon ninety at once offered themselves, and were
rewarded with a far larger measure of success.

The return of St. Francis from the East marks an
important crisis in his Order, and the beginning of the
tragedy of his later life. During his absence property
began to be acquired by the Friars and learning to be
patronised. These changes, unwelcome to Francis,
were favoured by Rome, while the persecution of some

1 6 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

of his Friars as heretics made it imperative for him to
obtain Apostolic credentials for his Order.

It was at this time that Francis dreamed of the little
black hen, who in spite of her efforts was unable to
spread her wings over the whole of her brood. It was
a true parable of his increasing powerlessness to control
his widespread family. After much painful self-
questioning, Francis sought for a Protector of the
Order in Cardinal Ugolino, afterwards Pope Gregory IX.
This step, though inevitable in the interests of dis-
cipline and efficiency, marked the parting of the ways.
It meant the end of the reign of Love and Freedom,
the beginning of Law and the assimilation of Francis'
ideal to that of the Papacy. The change was followed
by a Papal Bull of Honorius III insisting on a year's
noviciate for new members of the Order and by
St. Francis' resignation of the post of Minister-General.
His place was taken by Elias of Cortona, the ablest
representative of those Franciscans who wished for
property, learning and power. Thus Francis saw the
rapid fading of his ideal into the light of common day,
and his spiritual family metamorphosed into an official
order.

Francis was no less bitterly opposed to the inroads
of academic study. " There are so many in our days,"
he said, " who want to seek wisdom and learning ;
happy is he who, out of love for the Lord our God,
makes himself ignorant and unlearned." When told
with pride that a learned Parisian doctor had been
received as a Franciscan, he replied : " Such doctors,
my sons, will be the destruction of my vineyard.
A man has no more knowledge than he works and he
is a wise man only in the degree in which he loves God
and his neighbour." One day, as he sat by the fire, a

St. Francis of Assist 17

novice requested of him leave to possess a Psalter.
"When," replied Francis with a gleam of humour,
" you have got a Psalter, then you'll want a Breviary
and, when you've got a Breviary, you will sit in your
chair as great as a lord and you will say to your brother,
' Friar, fetch me my Breviary.' "

It was at this time, worn by excessive labour, half
blind and saddened by fears regarding the future of
his flock, that Francis retired with Brother Leo to the
hermitage of Vernia. Soothed by the quiet of Nature,
he sought solitude in prayer and meditation, request-
ing that he might not be disturbed by any intrusion on
his privacy. Into the mysterious struggles of those
days it is not possible to enter. They were the Geth-
semane of a holy and sensitive life, of a wounded and
suffering soul. One thing we know. The Passion of
Christ, realised with an absorbing literalness and
fervour, was the subject of his constant meditation.
It was while thus employed that he received, accord-
ing to the unanimous witness of his companions, the
stigmata, or marks of Our Lord's Passion, in his
hands and side. The fact is physically possible,
and has been accepted as such by critical historians.
" His companion, Brother Leo, who was present when
they washed his body before burial, told me," says Fra
Salimbene, " that he looked precisely like a man taken
down from the cross."

But as in Nature calm follows storm, so the mysteri-
ous sufferings of Vernia were followed by more tranquil
days in the life of St. Francis. All his life he had been
in intimate sympathy with Nature. His conception of
a redeemed world extended beyond men to the creatures.
" He could not doubt that where God had put life He
had also put the consciousness of Himself." This side

1 8 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

of the saint's life, to which there is no parallel in the
Middle Ages, is illustrated by his sermon to the birds.
" It was on one of the happy days of his life. He
was walking to Bevagna, when he sighted some flocks
of birds at a little distance from the road. Turning
aside to reach them, they flew around him, as if to bid
him welcome to their society. ' Brother birds,' said
he, ' you ought to love and praise your Creator very
much. He has given you feathers for clothing, wings
for flying and all that is needful for you. He has made
you the noblest of His creatures, He permits you to live
in the pure air, you have neither to sow nor reap and
yet He takes care of you, watches over you and guides
you.' As he closed this brief discourse, the birds
fluttered sympathetically round him as though to
thank him, and after stroking them, he dismissed them
with his blessing." It was during a period of almost
total blindness, in a house overrun by rats and mice,
but under the care of Santa Clara, that he composed his
famous Canticle of the Creatures. It was the profound
expression of his gratitude for Life and Love, the out-
come of his deep sympathy with all the creatures of
God. " A single sunbeam," he was wont to say, " is
enough to drive away many shadows." The story of
the composition of an additional verse to the Canticle
is eminently characteristic. Finding the Bishop and
Podesta of Assisi in open feud, Francis asked them to
meet him on the Piazza del Vescovado. On their
arrival he caused his Canticle of the Creatures to be
sung by two Friars with this additional verse :

" Praised be Thou, O Lord, for those who give pardon for Thy
Love,
And endure infirmity and tribulation :
Blessed be those who endure in peace,
Who will be, Most High, crowned by Thee."

St. Francis of Assist 19

At the conclusion of the song, the Podesta cast
himself down at the Bishop's feet and said : " Out of
love to Our Lord Jesus Christ and to His servant
Francis, I forgive you from my heart, and am ready
to do your will as it may seem good to you." On this
the Bishop embraced the Podesta and said : "On
account of my office, I should be humble and peaceful,
but I am by nature inclined to anger and thou must
therefore be indulgent to me."

With failing powers St. Francis continued from this
time to concentrate himself " with a certain haste "
upon the completion of his work. Whenever well
enough he journeyed along the byways of the March
of Ancona, preaching sometimes five times a day.
His eyes were operated upon according to the bar-
barous surgery of the time, but without effect. As he
drew near Assisi he raised himself upon the stretcher
on which he was being carried and blessed his native
place. Arrived at Santa Maria degli Angeli, he sum-
moned the brethren, and delivered to them his last
Will and Testament.

Declaring his devotion to the Church, his deep
reverence for the Sacraments, his desire for the con-
tinued devotion of his followers to the service of the
sick, he charged his brethren never to ask for any
favour from the Roman Court and ever to be true to
their ideal of Evangelical poverty.

Finally, he thanked God that he had himself been
enabled to keep faith with his Lady Poverty and
that, having been freed from every burden, he was now
able to go to Christ. He blessed not only the brethren
present and those absent, but all those who should
hereafter enter the Order. " I bless them," said he,
" as much as I can and more than I can." " He went

20 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

to meet Death," says Thomas of Celano, "singing."
Waking early on Friday morning, and, thinking it to
be Thursday, he asked for the thirteenth chapter of
the Gospel of St. John to be read to him. After
listening to the chapter, he chanted feebly the 142nd
Psalm ; as he reached the closing words, " Bring my
soul out of prison, that I may praise Thy Name," he
passed

" to where, beyond these voices, there is peace."

" Next to Christianity," says Renan, " the Fran-
ciscan movement is the greatest popular work recorded
in history." Yet how is it possible to summarise in
a few sentences the character of the Franciscan
Gospel ?

It was a direct return to Christ, the Christ of the
Gospels, the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount, the
Christ of Calvary, with nothing altered or explained
away. St. Francis held that " the world groaned,
because it forgot that it had been redeemed, and
that there was a good chance for it yet." The rich,
overweighted with possessions, " forgot that all men
were brothers and lost the joy of friendship." The
learned, overweighted with knowledge, forgot that
" the bird soars higher than the snail which drags its
shell after it."

Francis asserted the sufficiency of Christ, " the
capacity of simple humanity for the higher joys of
life," the Reality, the Inspiration and the Rest of the
Fatherhood of God.

St. Francis was himself the embodiment of his own
Gospel of the " fulness of life." He proved that a man
could literally " have nothing " and yet " possess all
things " that were worth possessing. His life deepened

St. Francis of Assisi 21

the possibilities of individuality ; linked men together
in a brotherhood of active service for the amelioration
of the world ; turned the prose of crabbed theology
and worldly churchmanship into the poetry of Christian
self-sacrifice and Christian love. Francis made all
men see in one another the lineaments of Christ and
breathed into them the one passion of his own life,
the desire to be like Christ. " No revolution," says
Bishop Creighton, " no war, no Declaration of Rights,
advanced the cause of freedom so much as did the
life and example of Francis of Assisi."

Nor can we forget that the richness and poetry
of this poor man's character gave to European
Art, Poetry and Learning the profoundest impulse.
Francis, at one with Nature and with God, inspired
the genius of Giotto, the poetry of Dante, the
philanthropic science of Roger Bacon.

Yet though we owe to Francis of Assisi a new inter-
pretation of Christ and of Nature, it would be absurd
to deny his limitations. Francis did not sufficiently
emphasise the God of Providence, of Civilisation, of
Law. He practised a too severe asceticism, depre-
ciated the lawful claims of the body, did not make
sufficient allowance for the manysidedness of the
human mind. He underrated the importance of
national life and national feeling. In condemning
Learning, too, Francis condemned intellectual truth ;
in casting out the demon of avarice he overlooked the
great and generous uses to which money may be put.
In short, he did not recognise the complexity of
human life and civilisation.

We cannot, therefore, say with Renan that " Francis
was the only perfect Christian since Jesus " ; but we
do assert this, that by his loving service of the leper,

22 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

the outcast and the poor he brought men back from
the worship of Mammon to the worship of God, from
lives of active or passive selfishness to the lowliness
of adoration and the humility of true service.

II

THE EARLY FRANCISCANS IN ITALY

My object in these pages is not primarily to trace the
growth of the Franciscan Order, but to tell the story
of the early Franciscans. It is the personal element
which I propose to emphasise, using the expansion of
the Order only as a broad highway upon which we may
view the followers of Francis passing and repassing.

When Francis died in the October of 1226, Elias of
Cortona had been for five years his Vicar-General.
At the celebrated Chapter of Pentecost held at the
Portiuncula in 1221, Elias had presided. Francis sat
humbly at his feet and, when he wished to interpolate
a remark, plucked his Vicar by the tunic. Then Elias
would bend down and listen, afterwards rising up and
saying, " Brethren, thus saith Brother Francis." Yet
upon this man, who was to play the leading part in
the Franciscan drama for some years, the mantle of
St. Francis had by no means fallen. He represented
the ambitious ideals of the mediaeval ecclesiastic rather
than the simplicity of his master.

Elias Bombarone was born about 11 80, the son of
a mattress-maker ; he added to his father's profession
that of a schoolmaster at Assisi. He was a serious
and studious youth with an eye for real greatness
and quickly fell under the fascination of Francis. Of
his thoroughness and capacity there was never any

23

24 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

doubt ; in 12 19 he was appointed Provincial Minister
in Syria, having two years previously headed a band of
missionaries to the Holy Land. When Francis re-
turned to Italy Elias accompanied him. On their
arrival at Bologna Elias received an object lesson on
the uncompromising narrowness of his master's aims.
A certain Peter Stacia had founded a house of study
for the Friars Minor in this University city. Francis
at once ordered all the brothers to quit, even one who
was sick and laid Peter Stacia under a curse. At
Bologna Elias met Cardinal Ugolino, and it is certain
that these two men, who saw of what value the Order
might be to the Papacy if the rigours of Francis' rule
could be mitigated, worked together with this end in
view.

On the death of Francis, Elias took over the manage-
ment of everything. He arranged for his burial, his
canonisation within two years, his memorial in the
magnificent Church of Assisi, the translation of his
remains to the new sanctuary. As the part he played
in these transactions completed the rift between the
old ideal of the Order and the new and is of importance
in the history of mediaeval Art, we must relate it with
some detail.

Elias procured a glorious site for the new church
on the brow of a hill outside the city, known as the
Colle dell' Inferno on account of its being the burial
place of criminals. Francis had himself chosen the
spot as his place of interment. Appointed Master of
the Works, Elias selected an unknown architect
familiar with the Gothic churches of southern France,
and pressed on the building with all speed. " Assisi
awoke to a sense of her importance. Under the
vigilant eye of Elias, armies of masons and labourers

The Early Franciscans in Italy 25

worked as unremittingly as ants at a nest, while
processions of carts drawn by white oxen went ever
to and fro upon the road leading to the quarries,
bringing creamy white, rose and golden blocks of
Subasian stone." In less than two years the Lower
Church was completed, six years later the Upper Church,
to which was soon added one of the most beautiful
peals of bells to be heard in Italy. But all this labour
was not to be procured without money, and Elias with
unflagging zeal pressed his appeals in every direction.
Finally he caused to be placed outside his majestic
church a marble vase for the offerings of the faithful.

Now this marble vase was like a match applied to a
heap of highly inflammable material. The inner circle
of St. Francis' personal friends, Leo his secretary, Giles
and Bernard his first follower had from the beginning
viewed this visible apotheosis of their master with
violent indignation. They recalled his words bearing
on this very matter of church building and they were
these : " Also cause small churches to be built, they
ought not to raise great churches for the sake of
preaching to the people, for they will show greater
humility by going to preach in other churches ; little
cells and small churches will be better sermons and
cause greater edification than many words."

When, therefore, they saw the marble vase of
Elias for the offerings of the faithful their indignation
knew no bounds ; and Leo, Francis' " little lamb of
God," gentle and unworldly but stubborn to the last
degree of stubbornness, smashed it into a thousand
atoms. We may imagine the wrath of Elias ; Leo
was scourged, and expelled from Assisi, but the rift
in the Order was now complete.

Nor was Leo, though so gentle, without resources ;

26 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

he could wield the pen. It was at this time that he
wrote such part of the Speculum Perfectionis as owes
its authorship to him ; depicting the life of St. Francis
known to him with such intimacy and flashing forth
his indignant scorn upon those who travesty his
ideal of Evangelical Poverty. This manifesto and
that known as the Sacrum Commerciiim, or mystical
marriage of St. Francis with Poverty by Giovanni
Parenti, created a profound impression and reaction.
At the Chapter General of 1227 Giovanni Parenti was
elected Minister-General, in place of Elias.

Elias, however, was not a man to take an unex-
pected reverse without hitting back. Probably through
his initiative, but at the bidding of his friend Ugolino,
now Gregory IX, Thomas of Celano was commissioned
to write his first life of St. Francis, in which Elias is
made to figure very impressively and to receive a
special blessing at the hands of the founder. His
second move was less tactful. The translation of the
remains of St. Francis to the new church had been
fixed to take place on May 25, when there would be a
gathering of the annual Chapter under Giovanni
Parenti. Elias, however, determined to anticipate
this, and by the connivance of the secular authorities
effected the translation to his new basilica, with great
secrecy, three nights before. Great as was the indig-
nation excited by this unscrupulous manoeuvre, Elias
weathered the storm and soon after played his trump
card. By the Papal Bull " Quo elongati," the Testa-
ment of St. Francis himself was waived aside, as not
binding on the brethren ; while buildings and sites of
value were allowed to be purchased, and held in trust
for the Order, by Papal nominees.
This last move disheartened the party of Brother

The Early Franciscans in Italy 27

Leo, now known as the " Zealots " or " Spirituals,"
and caused Giovanni Parenti to resign his office.

By a kind of coup d'etat Elias was elected in his
place, and for the next seven years ruled with a rod
of iron. It is not to be denied that under his rule
the Order made rapid strides and became a power of
the first rank. The Provinces in Europe were re-
organised and reinforced, missions to the Moslems
were pressed forward, Chairs of Theology were founded
in the Universities ; Paris and Oxford especially
becoming centres of Franciscan influence. Yet it was
the Universities who were the ultimate causes of the
fall of Elias. The Visitors he appointed were officious
and exacting and, notably in England, were regarded
as extortioners and spies, even by the moderate party.

At the Chapter General of 1239 and in the presence
of Pope Gregory, the English Friars, headed by
Aymon of Faversham, impeached Elias for extrava-
gance and tyranny. At first the Pope was not in-
clined to listen to Aymon, but an English Cardinal
said, " Hear him, he is a good man and not tedious."
Aymon declared that Elias had spent too much money
on himself and lived delicately. If his physical in-
firmities obliged him to ride, he need not at least be
so choice in the trappings of his steed or in the livery
of his servants. He had heaped up treasure not only
for his Church but for himself. This was more than
Elias could stand. " You lie," he shouted, and at this
his supporters raised a great tumult. Gregory, how-
ever, silenced him. This was not the manner in which
an assembly of the Religious could be conducted.
Would it not be better for Elias to put himself in the
hands of the Pope ? This Elias refused to do ; conse-
quently he was deposed. The Pope declared that he

28 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

had appointed him, thinking that a man of such
ability would be acceptable to the brethren. As he
was not, let them elect a successor. Albert of Pisa,
the leader of the English mission, was at once elected
by acclamation. The brothers again breathed freely ;
the cause of Francis and of simplicity was saved.

The human interest of Elias is, however, so great
that we will briefly relate his end. He speedily
revenged himself on the Pope by siding with his
bitterest enemy, Frederick II, to whom he rendered
valuable diplomatic service. He was consequently
excommunicated and expelled from the Order. Elias,
nevertheless, refused to be unfrocked. On the death
of the Emperor he returned to his native Cortona and,
in a convent built by himself, passed his latter days
among his own people. Up to the last he retained a
true and tender affection for the memory of St. Francis
and, when death approached, made confession of his
delinquencies and died with the sacraments of the
Church. He was buried in the Franciscan habit in
1253, but a later guardian of the monastery flung his
ashes out of the church. His memory, however, is
immortalised by the glorious basilica of Assisi, at
once his sincere tribute to his Master and the witness
of that difference of the spirit which has so often
separated men of impetuous and lofty aims, who
once " walked in the house of God as friends."

The church erected to the memory of St. Francis
by Brother Elias is the earliest Gothic building in
Italy, and it gave the first great impulse to Italian
mediaeval art. Its walls are covered with frescoes by
the earliest Italian painters. Here, in his youth,
Giotto painted the Passion of Christ, and here, in the
prime of manhood, he told the story of St. Francis

The Early Franciscans in Italy 29

in a series of nearly thirty frescoes. " Here," says Mr.
Symonds, " he learned the secret of giving the sem-
blance of flesh and blood reality to Christian thought.
His work was a Bible, a compendium of grave divinity
and human history, a book embracing all things
needful for the spiritual and the civil life of man. He
spoke to men who could not read, for whom there were
no printed pages, but whose heart received his teaching
through the eye. For painting was not then what it
is now, a mere decoration of existence, but a powerful
and efficient agent in the education of the race."

The debt of Italian Art to Elias is immense, but his
obstinacy brought discredit upon the Franciscan
Order. It also discounted the official life of its founder
by Thomas of Celano. A request was therefore put
forward in Chapter General asking those who had
known Francis personally to put their information at
the disposal of the Minister. This request led in the
first place to the " Legend of the Three Companions "
by Brothers Leo, Rufino and Angelo ; and in the
second place to the utilisation of this first-hand infor-
mation by Thomas of Celano in his second life. In
these works the Gospel of Evangelical Poverty was
again set forth with uncompromising directness.

If we want to understand the soul of St. Francis
it is to Brother Leo that we must turn, for he was the
chosen intimate of the Saint, the antithesis of Brother
Elias. Leo occupies with regard to St. Francis much
the same position as that which we suppose St. John
to have occupied in relation to Our Lord. He was the
disciple whom St. Francis loved, the companion of his
most intimate moments, the passive mirror of his
most spiritual ideas. Like St. John, too, he lives by
his writings and lingered to an extreme old age, sur-

30 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

viving his master by forty-five years. From the
time of his retirement at Vernia, St. Francis chose Leo
as the most " simple and pure " of his followers to
care for and wait upon him. It was his hand which
wrote down at Francis' dictation the Song of the
Creatures. For Leo St. Francis wrote his only extant
autograph, the blessing of Moses the man of God,
signed with the Cross, in order that, after he had
passed away, his sorrowing disciple might still possess
some visible reminder of his tenderness and friendship.
Thus Leo, living on into a new generation, became the
rallying point of the " Spirituels " of the Order ;
while he is still for us, by virtue of the Legend, and the
Speculum Perfectionis, the faithful and true witness of
what Francis really was.

It is Leo who records Francis' saying in abhorrence
of money, " Let us take heed, who have given up all,
lest for so slight a thing we lose the Kingdom of
Heaven." It is Leo who tells us that " he carried a
broom to sweep out unclean churches, for the holy
father grieved much when he saw any church not so
clean as he wished " : and who records the answer of
the dying Francis to Brother Elias, when the latter
remonstrated with him for singing so incessantly to
the scandal of passers-by : " Suffer me, brother,"
replied St. Francis with great fervour, " to rejoice
in the Lord, both in His praises and in my infirmities,
since by the grace of the Holy Spirit, I am so united
to my Lord that I may well rejoice in the most High."

With Brother Leo we must associate as early com-
panions and " Spirituels," Rufino, Angelo, Giles and
Santa Clara. These loved to describe themselves by
the phrase, "Nos qui cum eo fuimus," "We who were
with him."

The Early Franciscans in Italy 31

The following story, in Jorgensen's words, sums up
graphically their point of view : "An English Fran-
ciscan who was a Doctor of Theology stood in the
pulpit of St. Damien and gave a sermon which, with
all its learning, seems to have been very different from
the words which used to be heard from this place out
of the mouth of Francis. All felt it and suddenly
Brother Giles raised his voice and called out, ' Be still,
Master, and I will preach ! ' The English Doctor
stopped and Giles began ' in the heat of the spirit of
God.' When he had had his say, the English Friar
returned and concluded his discourse. But Clara,
we are told, rejoiced over this more than if she had
seen the dead brought to life again ; ' for this was
what our most holy father Francis wanted, that a
Doctor of Theology should have enough humility to
be silent when a lay brother wished to speak in his
stead.' "

Brother Giles was certainly an uncomfortable person
to encounter. His caustic wit was far-famed, and
dignitaries of the Church knew what it was to wince
under it. When Giles, for example, in his old age was
placed before the learned Bonaventura, General of the
Order, he asked him the following question : " Father,
can we unlearned and ignorant men be saved ? '
" Certainly," replied St. Bonaventura kindly. " Can
one who is not book-learned love God as much as one
who is ? " asked Giles again. " An old woman,"
replied the General, "is in a condition to love God
more than a master in theology." Then Giles went to
the garden wall, and shouted out at the top of his voice,
" Hear this, all of you, an old woman who has never
learned anything and cannot read, can love God more
than Brother Bonaventura."

32 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

But the following instances of the sarcasm of Brother
Giles will suffice to show the uncompromising character
of the Zealot party. On one occasion two Cardinals
visited Giles and asked for a place in his prayers. " It
is surely not necessary that I should pray for you, my
Lords," replied the Saint, " for it is evident that you
have more faith and hope than I have ! " " How is
that ? " asked the Cardinals. "Because," replied Giles,
" you, who have so much of power and honour and the
glory of this world, hope to be saved while I, who live
so poorly and wretchedly, fear, in spite of all, that I
shall be damned."

It will be obvious from the foregoing that the spirit
of humility which characterised St. Francis was in
danger of being lost by both sections of his followers.
That it did not cease to be operative altogether will be
equally clear to those who study the career of John of
Parma, seventh General of the Order.

John of Parma was a scholar, statesman, musician,
man of business and saint. Before becoming Minister-
General he had occupied the highest positions in the
Universities of Paris, Bologna and Naples. Yet
though versatile and learned he combined the humility
of a true Franciscan with the enthusiasm of a visionary
and the common sense of a man of the world. Above
all, he was a man of peace, rising above all party spirit
and restoring to the Order the heroic temper of its
earliest days.

" Welcome, Father," said Giles to him, " but oh,
you come late ! "

John of Parma's ideal was to come into touch with
every single member of the Family of St. Francis and
he is said in ten years to have visited every friary and
hermitage of the Order in Europe. Dressed like the

The Early Franciscans in Italy 33

poorest of his brethren, he travelled on foot from town
to town. Admitted " for the love of God " into the
friaries, it was often several days before it was dis-
covered by the brethren that they were entertaining in
their midst the General of the Order. Salimbene relates
how, when asked by St. Louis of France to sit by the
King's side, he refused, preferring the society of the
poor and unnoticed at the lowest table. " Many," he
says, " were edified thereby ; for consider that God
hath not placed all the lights of heaven in one part
alone but hath distributed them in divers parts and
sundry manners for the greater beauty and utility of
the heavens." If good wine was poured out for him
he distributed it to the poor brethren seated beside
him, to the great annoyance of his hosts ; and if he
found himself more than once seated between the
wittiest and more polished of his brethren he changed
his place, that he might make the acquaintance of the
dull and stupid.

Seventy-two " Zealots " who had been exiled by his
predecessor, he recalled ; " scattered by the wolf,"
says the chronicler, " they were gathered again by the
shepherd and brought back to the fold." He desired
to listen and to sympathise with all men, and, so far as
might be possible, restore the Kingdom of God on
earth.

Like our own Henry II, he was a man so indefatig-
able in business as to be obliged frequently to change his
secretaries, who would otherwise have been worn-out
before their time.

In 1247 he attended a Chapter at Oxford and was
delighted with the English brothers : "Oh, that such
a Province," he cried, " were in the middle of the
world that it might be a pattern to all the Churches ! "

34 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Salimbene describes him as a man " above the middle
height, finely made in all his limbs, well knit, sound,
able for all fatigues of the road, or the study. His
face was that of an angel, and ever cheerful."

Mindful of the Apostolic maxim, " if any would not
work neither should he eat," he earned his own living
by copying manuscripts, in addition to his multi-
farious labours on behalf of his Order. He was em-
ployed by Innocent IV on a mission of reconciliation
with the Greek Church, but, although he made a most
favourable impression, he was unable to heal the
wound of so many centuries.

His beneficent rule was, however, brought pre-
maturely to a close. The writings of Joachim of Flora,
the Calabiian mystic, who held that the ages of the
Father and the Son were now passing into the age of
the Spirit, had been set forth in a mutilated and
heretical form at Paris, by an injudicious Franciscan,
under the title of " The Everlasting Gospel." The
University of Paris, always jealous of the Friars,
obtained the condemnation of the book, and the
imprisonment of its author. John of Parma was a
friend of the writer and was, moreover, known to be
in sympathy with the Joachimite mysticism ; he was
therefore denounced to the Pope who suggested his
resignation. Unlike Elias, John immediately resigned.
He lived, however, for forty years longer at Greccio,
in a retired hermitage, the friend of all men, the
counsellor of all in trouble and perplexity until, in his
eightieth year, on his way to Greece upon a Papal
mission, he died. " Zeal for God," says Ubertino,
"had eaten away all thought of self in John of Parma."

With characteristic magnanimity John nominated
as his successor St. Bonaventura, at once his friend

The Early Franciscans in Italy 35

and opponent. Bonaventura was a man of peace, and
with his immense prestige as a saint and scholar was
well calculated to compose the differences of the Order.
A true Franciscan in the simplicity of his life, his love
of learning tended to link him with the more pro-
gressive and liberal section of the Order. Tall of
stature, handsome in feature, gracious and gentle in
manner, he was essentially a popular and sympathetic
personality. As General, he followed the via media.
The chief counts against him are that he deprived
Roger Bacon of his books and forbade him to lecture
and that he wrote a life of St. Francis in which he
toned down the vagaries of the saint, robbing him in
the process of his daring originality. Yet this com-
position was received with such favour by the second
generation of Franciscans that a Chapter-General
ordered all previous lives of the saint to be destroyed.
It is the only life of St. Francis with which Dante
seems to have been acquainted.

St. Bonayentura, known as the " Seraphic Doctor,"
occupies a high place among the mediaeval schoolmen,
those ponderous theologians who begin with St.
Anselm in the eleventh century, and end with Wyclif
in the fourteenth. These men tried to " unify the
Christian consciousness " and to build up the Christian
faith into an encyclopedic philosophy of life. To scoff
at their labours is equally easy and superficial. They
worked out the pure laws of thought, and endeavoured
to justify the truths of revealed religion to the reason.
Their logic was unanswerable. Once grant their
premisses and their conclusion follows inevitably. But
instead of confining their arguments to the funda-
mental doctrines of Christianity, they took for granted
the whole theological system of the mediaeval Church.

36 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

The excessive deference, too, paid by the schoolmen
to logic diverted their minds from the consideration
due to the fact of human experience.

St. Bonaventura did something to remedy this defect
and to make theology less a matter of pure dialectics,
more a matter of devotion and personal experience.
With him, the way to God is the way of the Mystic, by
purification, illumination and perfection. He main-
tained the primacy of willing over knowing and held
that man attained to Divine knowledge through
prayer, contemplation, virtue and love. " The first
necessity of the spiritual life," he said, " is to feel
highly, devoutly and holily about God." " If," says
a recent American writer, " the philosophy of Bona-
ventura has little pragmatic value for us, it had a great
deal for him and enabled him to walk through difficult
places and to keep himself unspotted from the world."

We will now turn to an entirely different phase of the
Franciscan movement, its religious poetry. St. Francis
was instinctively a poet by virtue of his love of God
and Nature. " What else," he said, " are the servants
of God than His singers whose duty it is to lift up the
hearts of men and move them to spiritual joy ? " He
turned with especial delight to all that was glad and
joyous and beautiful in his surroundings, to the jocund
fire, the pure running water, to birds and flowers.
Renan calls his Canticle of the Creatures " the finest
religious poem since the Gospels." Dean Milman says
of him : " His ordinary speech was more poetical than
poetry, and when dying he said with exquisite sim-
plicity, ' welcome, Sister Death.' "

But not only was Francis a poet, he awoke the poetic
fire in his disciples. The two noblest hymns of the
Middle Ages are both by Franciscans, the "Dies Irae"

The Early Franciscans in Italy 37

by Thomas of Celano, the " Stabat Mater " of Jacopone
da Todi.

When Sir Walter Scott lay dying at Abbotsford
in 1832, " we very often heard," says Lockhart,
" the cadence of the ' Dies Irae ' ; and I think the
very last stanza that we could make out was the first
of a still greater favourite,

' Stabat mater dolorosa
Juxta crucem lachrymosa
Dum pendebat filius.' "

Even in English, how haunting is the melody, and how
profound the appeal to the heart, of these moving
stanzas !

" Who on Christ's dear Mother gazing,
Pierced by anguish so amazing,

Born of woman, would not weep ?
Who on Christ's dear Mother thinking,
Such a cup of sorrow drinking,

Would not share her sorrows deep ?
Jesu, may her deep devotion
Stir in me the same emotion,

Fount of love, Redeemer kind,
That my heart fresh ardour gaining,
And a purer love attaining,

May with Thee acceptance find."

The amazing story of Jacopone da Todi, the reputed
author of these very human stanzas and the greatest
of Franciscan poets, is briefly as follows.

Jacopone was a lawyer and lived at Bologna, where
was the greatest school of jurisprudence in mediaeval
times. His youth was wild and extravagant and his
gambling habits kept him always short of money. He
married Vanna, a lady of noble birth, whom he truly
loved but who also brought him a large dowry. One

38 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

day decked out in her finest clothes, in which her
husband took the greatest pleasure, she went to a great
fete at Todi, and sat with others on a high raised
platform. Suddenly it collapsed. When the body of
Vanna was extricated, she was still breathing, and was
found to be wearing under her gay clothing a hair shirt,
from the knowledge of which she had always kept her
husband. Soon after she died, and her loss unhinged
the mind of Jacopone, while at the same time it opened
his heart to the spiritual meaning of the world. He at
once distributed all his goods to the poor and, in a
hermit's frock, wandered from place to place. Now
one of the secrets which Francis had discovered
about human nature was this, that its weakest
point lies in its fear of ridicule. Man is so proud
that he cannot bear to be laughed at. Therefore,
if he wishes to be saved, he must become literally a
fool for Christ's sake. No one, even Brother Juniper,
even exemplified this Franciscan principle more
thoroughly than Jacopone. Lady Folly was to him
the surest and safest guide to real wisdom. For
example, when a wedding was about to take place in
the family, his brother wrote inviting him, but begging
him with some trepidation to be on his best behaviour.
Jacopone 's reply was to appear at the dance, " tarred
and feathered from top to toe ! " the childishness of
the Franciscan temperament reaches its climax in
this nonsensical performance.

Yet this religious fanatic was also a citizen of the
world, capable of forming the shrewdest judgments of
men, adored by the common people and the creator of
the purest vernacular poetry of the age. He was ten
years before he judged himself worthy of joining the
Franciscan Order and in the meantime lived the life of

The Early Franciscans in Italy 39

a spiritual vagabond, singing the praises of God,
Nature and Poverty.

" God does not lodge in narrow heart,
Love claims the whole and spurns the part,
Greathearted one, where'er thou art,
Thou shelterest Deity."

As years passed over his head, however, Jacopone
feared that his soul was suffering from want of discipline
and joined the Order of St. Francis, excelling even the
" Zealots " in self-denial and austerity.

His contempt for learning and for all selfish views of
salvation is uncompromisingly set forth in the following
stanzas : —

" Plato and Socrates may contend
And all the breath in their bodies spend,
Arguing without an end ;

What's it all to me ?
Only a pure and simple mind
Straight to heaven its way doth find ;
Greets the King — while far behind

Lags the world's philosophy.
Lord of my heart, give me to know
Thy will and how to do it, show.
That done, what care I, whether or no,

Damned or saved I be."

We owe to Jacopone exquisite pictures of Nature
thoroughly Franciscan in their freshness, purity and
joyousness ; and charming carols of the Nativity
conceived less as a past event than as a present joy.

" The little angels join their hands
And dance in holy ring.
Love songs they're whispering,
The little angel bands.

Good men and bad they call and greet :

High Glory doffs its crown,

And has come down,

Low lies there at your feet.

40 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Now, shamefaced boors, why keep
Ye back ? Show courtesie.
Hasten and ye will see
The little Jesus sleep.

The earth and all the skiey space
Break into flowery smiles.
So draws and so beguiles
The sweetness of His face."

Jacopone has also left us severely mystical poems
descriptive of the merging of the human soul in God.
Fra Angelico's pictures of the Saints dancing in the
green meadows of Paradise are anticipated in his
poems, which sometimes soar to an audacity of freedom
nigh to blasphemy.

But the real significance of Jacopone lies in his
intense sympathy with the " spirituels " of his Order,
his democratic fervour, his detestation of worldliness
and tyranny. When that grasping Pontiff Boniface
VIII, after causing the deposition of his predecessor the
saintly Celestine, ascended the Papal throne, Jacopone
assailed him with vigorous lampoons and accurately
forecasted the character and termination of his rule.
" He has entered the fold as a fox, he will reign like a
lion and go out like a dog." Boniface naturally
retaliated by bestowing on the poet a term of severe
imprisonment and feeding him with the bread of
affliction. All this Jacopone endured manfully, only
pleading for the Pope's absolution, which was per-
sistently refused. After the tragic overthrow of
Boniface at Anagni in 1303, Jacopone now in his
seventy-eighth year was released.

Three years later he was taken ill. On Christmas Eve
the brethren wished to give him the last sacraments,
but he said, " I will wait, perad venture my friend John

The Early Franciscans in Italy 41

of Alverna will come." " John will not come," they
said. Nevertheless, Jacopone waited, beguiling the
time with canticles and songs. Hardly had he con-
cluded when his friend arrived.

" The joy of meeting," says his biographer, " was
surpassing great. John gave him the sacraments. The
dying man sang once more a song of love and triumph
and his spirit passed. It was believed by those stand-
ing near that he died not so much conquered by his
malady, though that was grave, as from an extra-
ordinary excess of love." " I weep," he once said,
" because Love is not loved." Francis had no more
thoroughgoing disciple.

The last of the early Franciscans whom it is our
purpose to describe here is Fra Salimbene, one of the
most vivacious and brilliant chroniclers of the Middle
Ages.

Salimbene, who was of good family, was born at
Parma in 1221. At the age of sixteen he witnessed a
sensational religious revival in what was known as the
year of Alleluia. Religious processions of all classes
swept through the towns and villages of Italy carrying
banners, branches of trees and lighted candles. There
was preaching in the streets and squares morning,
noon and night, conversions, much excitement, and,
no doubt, varied moral results. But to the youthful
Salimbene it seemed altogether a coming of the King-
dom of God upon earth. " Men lifted their hands," he
says, " to God, to praise and bless Him for ever. Nor
could they cease, so drunk were they with love divine.
There was no wrath among them, or disquiet, or
rancour. Everything was peaceful and benign. I saw
it with my eyes."

The year following Salimbene joined the Franciscans

D

42 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

and was received by Brother Elias. His parents,
however, were furious and moved heaven and earth to
get him back. They even applied to the Emperor for
assistance, with the result that the father was per-
mitted to visit his son, to try to win him back. " Lord
Guido," said the Minister-General, " We sympathise
with your distress. Behold, here is your son, he is old
enough, let him speak for himself. Ask him, if he
wishes to go with you, let him in God's name ; if not,
we cannot force him." But Salimbene was firm.
When his father asked him whether he was willing to
accompany him or not, he replied : " No, because
the Lord says, ' No one putting his hand to the plough
and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of God.' "
Beside himself with anger, his father demanded to see
him alone, and the request was granted. " Then my
father said to me, ' Dear son, don't believe those filthy
tunics who have deceived you, but come with me, and
I will give you all I have.' " His son, however,
proving obstinate, his father took leave of him with
these words : "I give thee to a thousand devils, cursed
son, thee and thy brother here who has deceived thee.
My curse be on you for ever and may it commend you
to the spirits of hell." Salimbene, nevertheless, re-
mained quite, unmoved by the parental malediction
and a dream which he had seemed to him to set the
Divine approval upon his disinterested conduct.

" The Blessed Virgin rewarded me that very night.
For it seemed to me that I was lying prostrate in
prayer before her altar, as the brothers are wont when
they rise for matins ; and I heard the voice of the
Blessed Virgin calling me. Lifting my face, I saw her
sitting above the altar in that place where is set the
Host. She had her little boy in her lap and she held

The Early Franciscans in Italy 43

Him out to me, saying, ' Approach without fear and
kiss my son, whom yesterday thou didst confess before
men.' And when I was afraid, I saw that the little
boy gladly stretched out His arms. Trusting His
innocence and the graciousness of His Mother I drew
near, embraced, and kissed Him ; and the benign
Mother gave Him to me for a long while. And when I
could not have enough of it, the Blessed Virgin blessed
me and said, ' Go, beloved son, and lie down, lest the
brothers rising from matins find thee here with us.'
I obeyed and the vision disappeared, but unspeak-
able sweetness remained in my heart. Never in the
world have I had such bliss."

Yet, as Salimbene grew older, he hardly maintained
this high level. The inner vision never quite failed him,
but his interest in the outer world quickened and his
insatiable curiosity made of him an incurable humanist.

Salimbene 's chronicle teems with wars and rumours
of wars, crimes, famines and horrors of every kind.
Yet it also contains some finely drawn portraits of
great men. Take, for example, his description of
St. Louis whom he saw at Auxerre, in 1248, at a
Chapter of the Provincial General. " The King was
slender and graceful, rather lean, of fair height, with
an angelic look and gracious face. And he came to
the church of the Brothers Minor, not in regal pomp,
but on foot, in the habit of a pilgrim with wallet and
staff. Nor did the King care as much for the society
of nobles as for the prayers and suffrages of the poor.
Indeed he was one to be held a monarch, both on the
score of devotion and for his knightly deeds of arms.
The following day he resumed his journey, and I
followed him. It was easy to find him as he frequently
turned aside to go to the hermitages of the brothers

44 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

to gain their prayers. And this he kept up con-
tinually until he reached the sea and took ship for the
Holy Land."

Yet with this genuine appreciation of saintliness,
there was an equal appreciation of the good fare
provided by the King for the Brothers Minor and we
can imagine the horror with which St. Francis would
have regarded his sympathetic description of the
royal repast. " On that day first we had cherries
and then the very whitest bread ; there was wine in
abundance and of the very best, as befitted the royal
magnificence. After that we had fresh beans cooked
in milk, fish and crabs, eel pies, rice with milk of
almonds and powdered cinnamon, broiled eels with
excellent sauce, and plenty of cakes, herbs and fruits.
Everything was well served and the service at table
excellent."

Nevertheless, Salimbene, though his stories are not
always very refined, hated vice and drunkenness, and
though fond of good living, reconciled himself on
ordinary occasions to the cabbages which formed
the staple of Franciscan fare. He was not ambitious
nor had he any desire to leave the Order, only he
liked to travel and see as much of the world as was
possible. When his liberties in this respect were
curtailed, he settled down with reasonable resignation
to the humdrum life of an Italian brother. Nor was he
ever idle ; he knew his Bible far better than most
moderns, and as a student, scribe, preacher and con-
fessor acquitted himself with credit. Yet, though he
knew the purest and best of the early Franciscans,
Bernard and Leo, the radiant figure of Francis rarely
crosses his pages and we feel that the salt of the true
Franciscan had already begun to lose its savour.

The Early Franciscans in Italy 45

It is, indeed, a far cry from the spiritual passion and
self-effacing abandonment of St. Francis, walking
literally in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth, healing
the sick, nursing the leper and preaching the Gospel
to the poor to this self-satisfied and gossiping chronicler,
making the best of both possible worlds and serving,
without serious qualms of conscience, both God and
Mammon.

But Salimbene is more typical of the later Fran-
ciscans with whom love had grown cold, than of the
second generation to which he belonged. And a
severe critic of the Order, Mr. Coulton, has declared
that " the Friars were still, until some time after Salim-
bene's death, the most real intellectual and moral
force in Christendom." For there were many still
who, with Jacopone and Angelo Clareno, found the
Cross of Christ stronger in attraction than all the
pleasures of the world and who possessed the Kingdom
of God within them.

" Nay, see, the Cross with flowers is ablow ;
Decked with its silken pansies I go.
Nought of its wounding, its burning, I know ;
It useth me tenderly."

Note. — The translations of Jacopone's poems given
above are by Anne Macdonell.

Ill

THE EARLY FRANCISCANS IN ENGLAND

The Grey Friars arrived in England in 1224, nine
years after the signing of Magna Charta and at the
very moment when the walls of Salisbury Cathedral
were rising above the ground. To understand the
immense stimulus which they gave to spiritual,
intellectual and constitutional freedom, it is necessary
to take a bird's-eye view of the state of the country,
at the time of their arrival.

King John had been dead only eight years. During
his lifetime he had outraged national sentiment by
his political tyranny ; but on his death arbitrary power
passed into the hands of the Pope. There has never
been a time when the Pope exercised so great an
influence on English affairs, or taxed the country so
heavily. According to Grosseteste he drew from this
country 70,000 marks annually, a sum equal to more
than a million pounds of our present currency. The
Friars, therefore, landed in England at a critical
moment. The feudal system was breaking up, and
the issues between arbitrary government and con-
stitutional freedom were being fiercely debated. Into
this struggle the Friars threw themselves with charac-
teristic energy. As Bishop Creighton has pointed out,
the life of St. Francis was based on the idea of in-
dividual freedom, and this involved civic freedom and

46

The Early Franciscans in England 47

led up to it. Thus, in England the Friars were not
only Mission preachers but also constitutional re-
formers, preaching a Social Gospel, and entering,
sometimes with undue violence, into political con-
troversy. Their ideas found ultimate expression in
the Baron's war, and many of them accorded to Simon
de Montfort, after his death, the honours of a Saint.

Bishop Stubbs has called the thirteenth century
the " golden age of English Churchmanship," yet the
conditions of ecclesiastical life at this epoch were far
from ideal. There were few Bishops in the country.
The diocese of Lincoln stretched from the Humber to
the Thames, and during the interdict of John's reign
only three bishops remained in the country. Episcopal
visitations of the modern kind do not appear to have
been held until the time of Grosseteste ; the villages
were largely served by non-resident monks, many of
them not even in priest's orders ; the towns were
understaffed by secular clergy ; and until the coming
of the Friars preaching in the vernacular was unknown.
Above all, the suburbs of the towns were crowded
by a poor labouring population, living in squalor and
degradation and utterly neglected by every spiritual
authority.

The thirteenth century was, however, " the golden
age " of English Monasticism. When the Friars landed
in England there were 560 monasteries in the country,
430 of which had been founded during the preceding
century and a half.

The monks had, in their way, been great bene-
factors. Their moral tone was high, their mental
culture considerable. They were, at one and the
same time, scholars, architects, builders, chroniclers,
pioneers of enlightened farming, just and generous

48 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

landlords, entertainers of travellers, succourers of the
poor, as well as public remembrances of God by their
continual services of prayer and praise.

But the monks were aristocratic in tone, opposed
to moral enthusiasm and confined to the country.
The poor of the towns did not come within the range
of their influence.

A great gap then in the Church's system waited to
be filled, and it was the followers of Francis who filled
it. They descended into the insanitary slums outside
the city walls and there not only preached the Gospel
to the poor in their native tongue, but acted as nurses
and physicians to the infirm. But the Friars were
not only Medical Missionaries bringing physical and
spiritual health to the cities ; they were also mis-
sionaries of a broader culture to the Universities.
For as Dr. Jessopp has said, " St. Francis' hatred of
book learning was the one sentiment that he was
never able to inspire among his followers : they
could not bring themselves to believe that culture
and holiness were incompatible or that nearness to
God was possible only to those who were ignorant
and uninstructed." But if they acquired knowledge,
it was always with a practical aim in view. "To
the Franciscan," says Professor Maurice, " doctrines
presented themselves as precious for the sake of the
wayfarer." Their coming to the Universities, at this
particular crisis, was a matter of national importance.
For the Universities were a new force of vital signifi-
cance in the thirteenth century. They represented
the superiority of mental culture to mere brute force.
They were the strongest antidote to the narrow class
influences of feudalism, and the aristocratic tendencies
of monasticism. In J. R. Green's words, " the smallest

The Early Franciscans in England 49

University was European, not local," while the con-
stitution on which they were based was purely demo-
cratic. At Oxford, in the Middle Ages, the son of the
nobleman and the son of the trader were on exactly
the same footing. For " knowledge made the Master,"
and those who did not know, had to sit humbly at the
feet of those who did.

We have arrived then at this point. In 1224 there
were two main forces making for social freedom in
England, the towns and the Universities ; but what
sort of freedom ? The answer to this question was
largely determined by the Friars. It was not to be
only political freedom, as the towns might have
answered, nor only intellectual freedom, as the Uni-
versities might have decreed, but moral and spiritual
freedom, the freedom wherewith Christ claimed to
set men free. " What gave St. Francis and his Friars
their vast influence in the thirteenth century," says
Father Cuthbert, " was just this fact, that in them
the new world spirit was wedded to the deepest
religious spirit of the period ; the spirit of democratic
freedom to a fervent devotion to the person of the
earthly Christ as the rule of their life." Thus they
were a social power, claiming England, not in sections
but as a whole, for the Kingdom of God.

The story of the coming of the Friars to England is
told us by the Franciscan Thomas of Eccleston in a
plain unvarnished narrative. His work only covers
the first thirty years of their labours, while they were
still living in great poverty and simplicity and
breaks off before the time when the Order had attained
intellectual distinction through its distinguished school-
men. Eccleston was a contemporary of the events he
records and, if his narrative lacks the lightness and

50 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

charm of the " Fioretti," it is far more accurate. It
shows us in homely phrase how the followers of St.
Francis managed to retain their joyousness and good
humour, in the colder climate and under the more
leaden skies of England.

The Friars, nine in number, landed at Dover on
September ioth, 1224, under the leadership of Agnellus
of Pisa, who had been selected for the post by St. Francis
himself. The company consisted of four clerics and
five laymen. Of the clerics three were English, the
fourth an Italian. After resting for two days at the
Priory of the Holy Trinity at Canterbury, four of the
party set out for London. The rest were assigned a
small room at the back of a schoolhouse, where they
remained shut up for the greater part of the day. In
the evening, when the scholars had retired, they
ventured forth into the schoolroom, where they sat
round the fire, and partook of their simple refection.
" Sometimes," says Eccleston, " they would put on
the fire a small pot, in which were the dregs of beer,
and would dip a cup into the pot, and drink in turn ;
each speaking meanwhile some word of edification."
In London, they rented a small house in Cornhill.
At Oxford, they obtained a house in the parish of
St. Ebbe, and " there," says Eccleston, " was sown the
grain of mustard seed which was afterwards to become
greatest amongst herbs." Within thirty-two yeais
the Franciscans were able to count forty-nine houses
of their Order in England, with 1242 brethren. The
country was speedily mapped out into custodies,
each custody being remarkable for some special note
of sanctity. At London, it was " the spirit of fervour,
reverence and devotion in the reciting of the daily
office." Oxford was noted for its learning, York for

The Early Franciscans in England 51

its poverty, while the custody of Salisbury was con-
spicuous for brotherly love.

It was not the custom of the brothers, in these
early days, to use pillows, or wear sandals, unless
they were sick or delicate and then only with per-
mission.

" It once happened," says Eccleston, " that brother
Water de Madeley of happy memory found a pair of
sandals and put them on when he went to Matins.
And while he stood at Matins it seemed to him that he
was more comfortable than he was wont to be. But
afterwards when he went to bed and had fallen asleep,
he dreamed that he was passing along a certain dan-
gerous road between Oxford and Bagley, where
robbers were often found : he had come down into a
deep valley, when robbers came running out on
either side, crying with a loud voice, ' Kill him, Kill
him.' Much frightened, Brother Walter told them
that he was a Friar Minor ; but they replied, ' Thou
dost lie, for thou goest not unshod.' And he, be-
lieving himself to be as usual barefooted, said, ' Nay,
but I am unshod,' and thereupon confidently raised
a foot. But in the robber's presence he found him-
self shod in the aforesaid sandals. In great trouble
of mind he then awoke, and taking the sandals, threw
them out into the garden."

Eccleston tells us of the humility with which the
Friars confessed their sins to one another. " Were
anyone accused by his superior or companion he at
once replied, ' Mea culpa,' and frequently prostrated.
Whereupon Brother Jordan of happy memory has
related how the Devil once appeared to him and said
that this ' mea culpa ' snatched from his grasp
whatever hope he had of getting the Friars Minor,

52 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

since, whenever one offended against another, he
always acknowledged his fault."

The homely wit of the Friars is pleasantly illus-
trated in the following parable, related by Albert of
Pisa, on account of a novice who was too wise in his
own eyes and a busybody in other men's matters.

" A certain countryman enamoured of the rest and
joys of Paradise, reached the gate of Heaven, and
asked St. Peter to admit him. St. Peter assented on
condition of his keeping the Rules. When he asked
what they were, St. Peter told him that he had nothing
else to do except hold his tongue. Having gladly
assented to the condition, the countryman was ad-
mitted. But as he was walking through Paradise,
he saw a man ploughing with two oxen, a lean and a
fat one, and he allowed the fat ox to go as he would,
but kept whipping the lean one. And, running up to
him, the countryman rebuked him. Then St. Peter
appeared and warned him. Forthwith the countryman
saw a man carrying a long beam with which he wanted
to enter a house, but he always turned the beam across
the door ; and, running up to him, the countryman
told him to turn one end of the beam forward. Again
St. Peter appeared and warned him. Then the country-
man saw a man lopping trees in a wood and he spared
all the old and rotten trunks but cut down all the
straightest, tallest and greenest. And, running up, he
rebuked him. Then St. Peter appeared and inconti-
nently expelled him."

Another characteristic of the Friars is exemplified
in the following : " An English Friar who was ill
saw his Guardian Angel enter the room and seat
himself by his bedside. After him came two devils,
who accused the Friar of all the things which he had

The Early Franciscans in England 53

done amiss in his life. At last one of the devils said to
the other, ' Besides, he is so frivolous, he laughs and
makes jokes and cuts all manner of capers.' Then the
Guardian Angel rose up and said to the devils, ' Be
gone ; so far you have spoken the truth, but now you
find fault with his cheerfulness and if you make out
religion to be a sad and gloomy thing, you will drive
his soul into the recklessness of despair and strangle
his spiritual life,' and so saying, the Guardian Angel
drove the fiends forth."

Another parable of Brother Albert's, rebuking the
presumption of young men, is worth recording.

" There was a young bull who diverted himself in
the meadows just as he liked. One day, about Prime,
he turned aside to see the ploughing and beheld the
senior bulls pacing leisurely along the furrow and doing
but little work. So he rebuked them and told them
that he would do as much as they at a start and they
begged that he would come and help them. So,
placing his neck in the yoke, he ran with great speed
to the middle of the furrow and being weary and out
of breath he looked round and said, ' What ! is it
not all done ? ' And the old bulls answered, ' No,'
and laughed at him. Then the young bull said that he
could not go any further. ' Thereupon,' said they,
' we advance with moderation because we have to
work continually and not for a time only.' "

The simplicity, kindliness and homely wit of the
Friars procured them a hearty welcome wherever
they went, especially with the middle classes and the
poor. Their style of preaching was unlike anything
that preceded it. It was crude, full of lucid denun-
ciations of sin and illustrated by anecdotes and stories
of a popular character. But whatever its defects it

54 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

was racy and of the soil ; moreover it was commended
by the life. Wherever to-day in our cities we stumble
upon streets with the time-honoured names of " Friar
Lane," " Friar Gate," " Grey Friars," there we know
the disciples of Francis once nursed the sick and
cleansed the leper and preached the Gospel of Divine
Love to the poor in the mother tongue.

We must now turn to a very different page of their
history, to their work at Oxford where, for a generation
at least, they produced the most brilliant scholars and
thinkers in Europe. The fact that Robert Grosseteste,
first Chancellor of the University and afterwards Bishop
of Lincoln, became lecturer to the Order gave the
Franciscans an admirable start at Oxford. A man
of great moral earnestness, encyclopaedic knowledge
and reforming zeal, Grosseteste 's strong and fearless
character impressed itself on the leaders of the Fran-
ciscan movement, while his intellectual enthusiasm acted
as a powerful stimulus on the minds of his pupils.

The Friars came to Oxford with two main aims in
view : to gain such a knowledge of Theology as would
enable them to cope successfully with the heresy and
unbelief of their day ; and to acquire such a knowledge
of physical science as would assist them in their
philanthropic labours. Thus the distinguishing feature
of the Oxford Franciscans was their practicality.
" Before all," wrote Roger Bacon, " the utility of
everything must be considered, for this utility is the
end for which the thing exists."

The Oxford course for a Franciscan was no light
and airy matter in the thirteenth century. In the
first place, he was thoroughly grounded in the Bible.
Grosseteste insisted on the Old and New Testaments
as the only sure foundations of teaching and caused

The Early Franciscans in England 55

them to be made the subject of all morning lectures.
Learned Friars lectured at the University on ethics
and practical theology, Biblical exegesis and physics.
Each Friary sent up its most promising scholars who
had already accomplished eight years' study in Arts.
After six years' study at Oxford, each scholar was
presented to the Chancellor and Proctors and an
enquiry made concerning his morals and mental
efficiency. If he satisfied his examiners, he was
admitted " to oppose in theology " and two years
later could become a respondent. This meant that he
was allowed to take part in public theological disputa-
tions, an admirable training for those who had to
brush up against the sharp-witted burghers of the
towns, given as these were to argument and destructive
criticism. Had it not been for the Friars the Middle
Classes would not only have been lost to the Church
but would have become its most active assailants.
Owing, however, to their training in dialectics, their
practical genius and ready sympathy, the Friars
found in men of trade and commerce their warmest
supporters. They received more legacies from trades-
men than from any other class.

The Friars were supported at Oxford by a system
of Exhibitions inaugurated by Grosseteste.

The usual Exhibition amounted to £5 a year, which,
we assume, covered the ordinary expenses of living at
this period. Masters and lecturers were supported by
the Friary in which they lectured, for from Oxford and,
to a smaller degree, from Cambridge went out a small
army of trained teachers to the provinces. Continental
Universities frequently filled their professorial chairs
with Oxford Friars, while Franciscans from every
country in the West migrated to the city on the Isis.

56 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Under the influence of Grosseteste and the Friars,
Oxford became the headquarters of constitutional
opposition to Royal and Papal oppression and the
Propagandist of the New Learning. Richard of Bury
says of the libraries of the Mendicant Orders at the
English Universities, " there we found heaped up,
amidst the utmost poverty, the utmost riches of
wisdom." The English language itself owes a great
debt to the Friars. Though classical scholars, they
preached and taught in the vernacular ; and it was
because they did so that the century which first saw
English poetry attain to self-consciousness in Chaucer,
also saw English prose first express itself in the clear
and vigorous tracts of John Wyclif.

The two greatest Friars of the first generation in
England were Adam Marsh and Roger Bacon.

Adam Marsh, known as Doctor illustris, was educated
at Oxford, and after holding a cure of souls near Wear-
mouth joined the Friars Minor and was their first
lecturer. Among his pupils were the three most
illustrious schoolmen of the Order, Bacon, Duns Scotus
and Occam. Of his own writings, only his letters, 247
in number, have survived. These written to corre-
spondents of all classes show how the followers of
St. Francis " became all things to all men ' and
explain why the early Friars were as deeply loved in
England as their successors in the time of Chaucer and
Piers Ploughman were distrusted and despised.

Adam Marsh was a man whose counsel and sym-
pathy everyone sought and upon whose energies almost
superhuman demands were made. He was literally
here, there and everywhere. At one moment advising
the Archbishop, at another preaching a Crusade, now
at Rome with St. Anthony of Padua opposing Brother

The Early Franciscans in England 57

Elias, now with Grosseteste at the Council of Lyons, now
at Oxford endeavouring to keep the peace among three
thousand unruly students, who were attacking the
Jews, having frays with the townsmen, or assaulting the
foreign cook of the Papal Legate. But wherever he is,
Adam Marsh is a Peacemaker. He pours oil on the
troubled waters, he rebukes or soothes the angry, he
encourages the unhappy and unfortunate. At one time
he is interceding for a penitent thief, at another he is
helping a poor woman at Reading overwhelmed by the
quibbles and delays of the lawyers, or asking Grosse-
teste to aid some deserving scholar, or protecting
Juliana, a poor widow, from oppression. To Simon de
Montfort he writes with the greatest intimacy and
freedom. He tells him that " his only hope of safety
against the dangers of his enemies, the plots of deceitful
friends and the reverses of the world was in reliance
upon Him who sits on the throne of Justice and Judg-
ment ; if the Earl would be careful of preserving in his
own person, his soldiers and servants, and in all
belonging to his Government, devotion to God, un-
broken loyalty, friendship with one another, charity
towards all." He warns him frankly against his
besetting sins : " better is a patient man than a strong
man, and he who can rule his own temper than he who
rules a city." He encourages him in his desperate and
thankless task of bringing Gascony into a state of
peace and order.

Creighton says that " it is not too much to say that
it was the influence of Grosseteste and Adam Marsh
which converted Simon from a wild and reckless
adventurer into an English patriot."

To the Countess of Leicester Adam writes with equal
freedom, reproves her for failures of temper, warns her

£

58 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

against extravagance in dress, congratulates her on the
birth of a child, thanks her for concern about his health,
impresses on her that God's goodness to her merits a
proportionate gratitude.

Perhaps the noblest action of Adam Marsh was his
interference on behalf of the Jews. In 1255 a boy,
Hugh of Lincoln, was supposed to have been murdered
by the Jews and it was alleged that he had been
scourged and crucified in imitation of Our Lord.
The whole charge was probably as baseless as a similar
accusation made and disproved in Russia, shortly
before the Great War. The Jews, however, as a
consequence of the supposed crime, were exposed to an
explosion of popular fury and many were put to death.
Adam Marsh and the Franciscans alone opposed the
arguments of the accusers, and Adam, defying the
royal authority, forbade the execution of the accused.
The result of this fearless conduct was that for some
time after the Friars were regarded with disfavour and
refused alms by the people. The whole story proves
that if the Friars stood as a rule high in popular favour,
they were at any rate not charlatans.

Amidst all his multifarious occupations, Adam

Marsh pursued his intellectual studies and was

solicitous about the careful transmission of books.

When at Lyons he sent for a copy of St. Gregory and

other volumes, adding, " and you may pack the books

neatly in a waxed cloth, taking off the wooden covers."

Professor Brewer applies to him Chaucer's lively

description of the Oxford scholar :

" Of study, took he most care and heed,
Not one word spake he, more than was need.
All that he spake, it was of high prudence,
And short and quick and full of great sentence,
Tending to moral virtue was his speech
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach."

The Early Franciscans in England 59

But, above all, Adam Marsh laboured for the
reformation of the Church, by resisting the claims of
King and Barons to appoint unfit persons to sacred
offices. On one occasion he incurred the grave dis-
pleasure of the King by a too outspoken discourse at
Court ; but the monarch was afterwards placated,
continuing to consult him and calling him his father.
Grosseteste left his books to the University of Oxford,
" out of love for Adam Marsh," whose character he
summed up in the following words : "a true friend
and faithful counsellor, respecting truth not vanity,
a wise man and prudent and fervent in zeal for the
salvation of souls."

When at last, worn-out by his labours, he fell
seriously ill, he begged St. Bonaventura to send him
John of Stamford, " by whom, through God's blessing,
I may be directed through things transitory and my
thoughts raised to things eternal." He died at Lincoln
and was laid to rest in the Cathedral by the side of
Bishop Grosseteste, " that," says the chronicler, " as
they were lovely and amiable in their lives, so in their
death they should not be divided."

If Adam Marsh was regarded by his contemporaries
as a typical Friar, this was far from being the case with
Roger Bacon. Bacon was born near Ilchester in 12 14
and died in 1294. Of good family, he was educated at
Oxford under Marsh and Grosseteste. At Paris, where
he was known as Doctor Mirabilis, he spent several
years in experiment and research. " Through the 20
years," he says, " in which I laboured specially
in the study of wisdom, careless of the crowd's opinion,
I spent more than £2000 on occult books and various
experiments, languages, instruments, tables and other
things." He acquired a first-hand knowledge of

60 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Arabic, which enabled him to acquaint himself with
the best writings of the age on natural science. Yet
though Bacon is one of the earliest prophets of science,
it would be a mistake to imagine him free from the
trammels and superstitions of his age. He saw, how-
ever, and expressed with great clearness the import-
ance of experiment and observation and fumbled after
a true conception of natural law. " There are two
modes," he says, " of arriving at knowledge, to wit
argument and experiment. Argument draws a con-
clusion and forces us to concede it, but does not make it
certain or remove doubt unless the mind finds truth
by way of experience." He illustrates this con-
tention by saying that you can never convince a man
by mere argument that fire burns, but experience soon
sets the matter at rest.

Bacon was really quite orthodox, even in the
mediaeval sense, but unfortunately for himself he had
not the conciliatory manner so necessary to a preacher
of new truth and attacked his opponents with bitter-
ness and exaggeration. The result was that he soon
found himself deprived of all scientific apparatus and
restricted to a diet of bread and water. Seething with
enthusiasm and brimful of new matter and know-
ledge, he raged like a caged lion in his narrow confine-
ment at Paris. Then suddenly a great light illuminated
his prison cell. Pope Clement IV bade him write the
results of his discoveries, " notwithstanding the prohi-
bition of any prelate or any constitution of thy Order."
Bacon was excited and overjoyed beyond measure and
expressed his gratitude in language which is truly
pathetic. " The Saviour's vicar, the Ruler of the Orb,
has deigned to solicit me who am scarcely to be named
among the particles of the world. Yet, while my

The Early Franciscans in England 61

weakness is oppressed with the glory of this mandate,
I am raised above my own powers, I feel a fervour of
spirit, I rise up in strength. And, indeed, I ought to
overflow with gratitude, since your Beatitude com-
mands what I have desired, what I have worked out
with sweat and gleaned through great expenditures."

Unfortunately, Bacon was penniless, enjoined to
secrecy and the Pope far too busy to think of sending
him any money ; worst of all, the works required of
him were not yet written. Yet by a stupendous mental
effort Bacon finished within eighteen months the four
great works by which he is still remembered, the Opus
Majus, the Opus Minus, the Opus Tertium and the
Vatican fragment. Of their immediate fate we know
nothing. Clement IV died the following year. Bacon
was again imprisoned, shortly afterwards released, and
after composing a final work, the Compendium of
Theology, died, in his eightieth year.

The works of Roger Bacon are so numerous but so
scattered that they have been compared to the
Sybilline leaves. Many of them still lie in manuscript
in British and French libraries.

Bacon insisted on the importance of geometry and
mathematics, and showed how these sciences could be
applied to the solution of such problems as the light of
the stars and the ebb and flow of the tide. He described
the anatomy of the eye from first-hand knowledge,
discussed the laws of reflection and refraction, the
construction of mirrors, lenses and even the telescope,
though the latter must have been of a very elementary
character. His work on optics is his most original
contribution to the science of his time and his investiga-
tion into the nature and cause of the rainbow is said by
experts " to be a fine specimen of inductive research."

62 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Modern criticism, however, allows to Bacon very
little in the way of mechanical discovery. What is
really notable about him is the extent to which he
transcended the scientific ignorance of his times and
anticipated the direction of future discovery. In his
own age he was " a voice crying in the wilderness," a
seer gazing into the Promised Land of science into
which he himself was not allowed to enter. In this
connection it is interesting to note that his admirable
treatise of geography was used by Columbus in his
discovery of America and that he foretold the invention
of flying machines, though he did not like Leonardo
da Vinci actually construct one. Professor Maurice,
after remarking that the dramatists of Queen
Elizabeth's days had an instinctive sense that " in
seeking for the secrets of Nature Bacon had been a
witness for the freedom of man," adds, " our own
conviction is that the moral and metaphysical student
is not under less obligations to him than the physical
and that he helped to teach theologians the worth of
their own maxim, that the greatest rewards are for
those who walk by faith and not by sight."

To pass from the story of individual English Fran-
ciscans to their general relation to their times leads
us to ask in what ways they anticipated or influenced
the Wyclifites ? Professor Brewer says, " Wyclif is the
genuine descendant of the Friars, turning their wisdom
against themselves and carrying out the principles he
had learned from them to their legitimate political con-
clusions."

Certainly Wyclif had much in common with the
Friars, especially on points of ecclesiastical policy.
Like them he opposed Papal exactions and held that
the State had the right, under certain circumstances,

The Early Franciscans in England 63

to interfere with the temporalities of the Church.
But when Wyclif attacked the mediaeval doctrine of
the Mass the Friars were up in arms, and Wyclif 's later
years were spent in bitter polemics against their theo-
logical position. It argues well for the Friars that
though Wyclif charges them with lack of spirituality,
he finds it difficult to levy against them any definite
charges of a grave or immoral nature.

The English Franciscan who most vigorously
attacked the Papal system, showing " the long-
concealed antagonism between the theories of Hilde-
brand and Francis of Assisi," was William of Occam,
who died in 1349. He can hardly be called an early
Franciscan, but inasmuch as he stated in memorable
language the real difference between the ideal of
St. Francis and the Papacy and forecasted the trend of
ecclesiastical opinion in this country, his position may
be suitably summarised. " Occam," says Creighton,
" is opposed to the Papal claims to temporal monarchy
and spiritual infallibility ; for the Head of the Church
is Christ and by her union with Him the Church has
unity." Again, " The Pope may err, a General Council
may err, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church are not
entirely exempt from error. Only Holy Scripture, and
the beliefs of the Universal Church, are of absolute
validity."

Occam groped after the eternal elements in the
faith of the Church, endeavoured to mark them off
from what was of purely human authority, and above
all from the worldly and temporary expedients of the
ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Nothing has as yet been said about the Third Order
of St. Francis. Although the whole subject is involved
in profound obscurity, it is unquestionable that Francis

64 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

recognised a class of married people, living in the world,
as affiliated to his spiritual family. This institution did
as much to break down the wall of partition between
the religious Orders and good people living in the world
but not of it, as the Friars themselves did to break
down the hard-and-fast line between cleric and layman.
The members of the Third Order were bound to have
no debts, to make their wills, so that there should be no
disputes about succession to their property, to visit the
sick and needy, to live lives of purity and soberness and
in all reasonable ways to serve God in spirit and in
truth. Through this Third Order Christian influences
passed into innumerable English households, for there
were few households which were not in one way or
another connected with a tertiary of the Order of
St. Francis.

Our story of the Early Franciscans now draws to its
close. We have watched the light of the Dawn rising
over the hills of Umbria, touching the valleys of Italy
with its rays, and illuminating even the crowded slums
of our English cities. With the gold of the Franciscan
movement there was no doubt much dross inter-
mingled, as the fourteenth century was soon to prove ;
but that the result of the movement for some time to
come was one for the uplifting of humanity there can be
no reasonable doubt. For in the words of Dr. Jessopp :
" The Saint and the Prophet do not live in vain. They
send a thrill of noble emotion through the heart of their
generation and the divine tremor does not soon
subside ; they gather round them the pure and
generous, the lofty souls which are not all of the earth,
earthy."

But St. Francis did far more than this ; he gathered
into the Gospel net the poor, the outcast and the

The Early Franciscans in England 65

sinner ; the men whom no one loved and for whom no
one cared. He opened a fount of faith and love issuing
in perpetual service of the Incarnate Christ which can
never die. And with his spirit of love came freedom :
freedom in Church and State, freedom of will and
conscience, freedom in our conceptions of knowledge,
human, scientific and divine.

And of all lands our own lies most heavily in his
debt. " Nowhere," says Mr. Stevenson, " has the
Franciscan Order done so much as in England for the
advancement and dissemination of knowledge ; no-
where has it furnished so long a list of distinguished
names ; nowhere has it presented so clear and clean
a record of useful work."

The Court, the Parliament, the Universities, the
towns, the villages, all owed something to the followers
of St. Francis ; for he left to a world in which selfish-
ness and grasping avarice predominated the image of
the divine life which is hid with Christ in God ; a life
which asserts with every impulse of its being the
transcendent truth that " where the spirit of the Lord
is, there is liberty."

Note. — The internal history of the Franciscan Order is
a stormy one. The " Spirituals " were few, but bitter,
their influence always greatly in excess of their numbers.
The party of relaxation were worldly and their corruption
is severely satirised in the literature of the fourteenth
century. The majority of Franciscans, however, belonged
to a third party, " the Moderates," whose more conciliatory
policy, and deeper spirituality, is typified by St. Bona-
ventura. In 1370 arose a reforming branch of the Order,
" the Observants," who upheld learning but adhered to
poverty and simplicity of life. The leader of this move-
ment was St. Bernardino, of Siena, whose life has been ably

66 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

written by Mr. Ferrers Howell (Methuen). Leo X divided
the Order into " Conventuals," who accepted the Papal
dispensations in regard to poverty, and " the Observants,"
who held to their Founder's Testament ; the latter are
to-day by far the most numerous and influential. The
Order has always been the largest in the Church. At the
time of the Reformation it numbered nearly 100,000
brothers ; to-day it has about 26,000, including " the
Capuchins," founded in 1525, and allied in spirit to " the
Observants." The Franciscans, largely recruited from
the poor, have been, on the whole, the consistent friends
of the poor ; they have also a notable record in missionary
work amongst Moslems.

In support of the statement on page 48 that monastic
influence was confined to the country, see Professor
Brewer's Monumenta Franciscana, Preface, page xi, el seq. :
" Monasteries had provided for the spiritual rule and
welfare of the country; for the towns there was no such
provision." The Friars were as a rule bitterly opposed by
the monks. Their religious ideal was a novel one, they
were " to all intents and purposes laymen, bound by
certain religious vows " (Brewer, page xxxv), while their
social teaching was revolutionary.

IV

IGNATIUS LOYOLA

One of the chief attractions of history lies in its
revelation of human character. The Monastic Orders
in the West were a great school of originality. The
same can hardly be said of the Jesuits. Yet
their founder was a man of profound originality,
and developed in his Society a new type of eccle-
siastic.

The Company of Jesus was an attempt to blend
together several irreconcilable ideas, the Sermon on
the Mount, the whole scheme of doctrine and morals
current at the close of the Middle Ages, and a new
theory of the relation of the Church to the State. But
the originality of the Company of Jesus lies less in the
body of doctrine which it formulated than in the
methods which it employed. Loyola's successors soon
perceived the impossibility of reconciling the world of
the sixteenth century to more than a nominal accept-
ance of Christian morality ; and, since to regain the
world for the Church was the main object of the Jesuit,
the principle of compromise became the salient
characteristic of the Society, a cause both of its
brilliant successes and of its irremediable failure.

The main characteristics of Loyola's foundation
may be briefly summarised as follows : —

In the first place, it concentrated its energies on

67

68 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

principalities and powers, it minded " high things,"
not condescending to " men of low estate."

In the second place, its motto, Ad major em Dei
gloriam, to the greater glory of God, was taken to
imply the principle that the end both determines and
justifies the means.

In the third place, the Jesuit held a purely secular
theory of the State which rendered it absolutely
subject to the control of the Church, the theory of
modern Ultramontanism. The Jesuit was taught to
maintain that the people were the only true sovereign
and consequently possessed the right to remove their
Ruler at will, the theory, at a later date, of Rousseau
and the French Revolution. Assassination of Pro-
testant Rulers was justified by Jesuit writers like
Mariana, the way being thus prepared by the society
for the theories of Modern Anarchism.

A fourth characteristic of the Society was the
absolute devotion demanded of its members to the
aims of the corporate body and to the despotic rule
of its General. This devotion, though it led to heroic
acts of self-sacrifice, led also to the idealisation of an
external authority, willing, on occasion, to dispense
with the canons of normal morality.

Fifthly, the Jesuits reasserted the freedom of the
will and, armed with an invincible optimism, believed
in the possibility of universal salvation, though always
within the Church. This belief stimulated the en-
deavours of the Society both to win over men of fashion
and influence by their suavity and social gifts and also
to their heroic attempts to evangelise the heathen.
While we in England, with our sleepy conservatism
and narrow insularity of outlook, were still disputing
over the rubrics of Edward VI's Prayer Books, Xavier

Ignatius Loyola 69

was preaching in Japan to a " people governed by
reason," and dying alone and unbefriended on the
lonely shores of China.

Now from such a Society all who admire the heroic
spirit, even when tainted by ambition, cannot with-
hold a measure of admiration.

The founder of the Jesuits (though that name, first
employed by Calvin and the Parliament of Paris, was
only given them by their enemies) was Ignatius,
eighth son of Don Bertram, hidalgo of Loyola. The
castle in which Ignatius was born was situated in the
most purely Basque province of Spain under the
shadow of the Pyrenees. His birth took place in 1491,
the year before the discovery of America. Ignatius
was trained as a page at the court of Ferdinand the
Catholic. From his earliest years, he shared in the
passion for renown which characterised the Spaniards
of that stirring epoch. Without real education, he.
devoured with eagerness the flowery romances popular
in his day, but soon to fall into contempt through
the satire of Cervantes. A bold knight, vain of his
personal appearance, Ignatius led at first a life of
considerable irregularity. He said of himself that,
up to his twenty-sixth year, he was entirely given up
to the vanities of the world.

When, in the spring of 1521, the French laid siege
to Pampeluna, the garrison was prepared to surrender
at once but Ignatius persuaded the commander to
continue the defence, fighting himself with supreme
courage until the citadel was taken. Ignatius' right
leg was broken by a cannon ball, while a splinter
injured his left. His enemies, admiring his bravery,
sent him back in a litter to the castle of Loyola. On
his arrival it was found that the bone had been so

70 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

clumsily set that it was necessary to break it again,
an operation which the patient endured unmoved.
Even then a bone protruded unduly, but this was
removed at the injured man's request. On the con-
clusion of the whole business, one leg was found to be
shorter than the other and Ignatius remained lame for
life.

During this long illness Loyola sought for recreation
in reading. He asked first for the Romances of Chivalry,
but, none of these being procurable, he was given a
life of Christ, and The Flowers of the Saints. He found
a special fascination in the stories of St. Dominic and
St. Francis. " What," he said to himself, " if I did
this thing which blessed Francis did, what if I copied
Dominic in this ? " At the same time he was equally
desirous of winning the approval of a certain high-
born lady, and would ponder what services he might
yet perform to win her praise and goodwill.

Thus the early years of Ignatius present us with
two salient characteristics of his later life. At Pam-
peluna he was for no surrender ; at Loyola, he aspired
to outrival Francis and Dominic in their spiritual
feats. The raw material of an aspiring character was
in him from the first ; but it required the rude buffet-
ings of an adventurous career, the discipline of edu-
cation and the unifying force of a single dominating
aim to complete the transformation of his strong and
masterful intellect.

It will indeed be generally found that the men who
have most powerfully moulded the religious temper of
their times have themselves survived an unusually
stormy apprenticeship ; having fought their way to
light and conviction unaided by friends and counsellors.

As it was with Francis and Luther, so it was with

Ignatius Loyola 71

Loyola. He has himself left it on record that he
sought in all directions for someone " to understand
and help him, but found none." Thus, when he at
last attained to peace and self-mastery, it was natural
that " spiritual direction " should figure as an im-
portant item on his programme for humanity ; that
he tried to compress into a single month for others
those " spiritual exercises " which, in his own case,
had spread themselves over the agony and conflict of
many years.

The naive and almost childish efforts of Loyola to
understand the will of God, during these early years,
explain also an important principle of Jesuit teaching.
Two men may be equally good but for want of spiritual
knowledge one may be condemned to a life of practical
uselessness, while the other will become a force making
for reason and human well-being. Thus Loyola's
most cherished aim in these uninstructed days was
to prove his earnestness by going on pilgrimage to
Jerusalem. It was a hackneyed and time-wasting
project, but it seemed something to be willing to
endure cold and heat, hunger and thirst ; and it might
" satisfy the hatred he had conceived against himself."
Thus with stern resolution he set his face eastwards
in search of light, in the very same year in which
Luther in the solitude of the Wartburg was translating
the Scriptures. Each was to come by his own at last,
Luther in Freedom, Loyola in Authority, but by
what throes and pains of travail ! For the errors of
many generations had made Truth difficult of access,
impossible almost of individual appreciation. Strange
enough, too, both ended in tyranny ; Luther's theories
in the absolutism of the State, coupled with spiritual
anarchy ; Loyola's theories in spiritual absolutism.

72 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

It was in 1522 that Loyola set out on pilgrimage to
Our Lady of Montserrat, scourging himself daily on
the journey. With his head full of Amadis of Gaul,
he spent a whole night before the altar of Our Lady,
kneeling or standing until dawn broke. He was now,
in his own sight, a knight of Holy Church. He next
made a written confession of his own sins, which took
him three days, during his Retreat at the Benedictine
Convent. Here he became acquainted with the
Exercises of Father Garcia de Cisneros, a fact of much
importance to him, for they became the basis of his
own Spiritual Exercises. One characteristic difference,
however, distinguishes the spiritual exercises of the
Jesuits from those of the Benedictines. The Bene-
dictine used them in solitude for his individual benefit ;
the Jesuit was given them by his spiritual Director
who intervened between his soul and God. Loyola
carried this invaluable work with him when he left
Montserrat ; and for years to come it formed the
subject-matter of his daily meditations.

Unable to sail for Palestine, on account of the
plague, Loyola now turned aside to the little town of
Manresa, where he daily begged his bread from door
to door. During his sojourn in this place he practised
the utmost austerities, denying himself food and
sleep, torturing himself with every conceivable scruple
and wondering whether he should be able to sustain
his spiritual conflict to the end.

Finding himself unable in his emaciated condition
to enjoy the fruits of devotion, he was harassed by
an inner voice saying to him, " How canst thou
possibly endure such a life as this through the fifty
years yet before thee ? " " Canst thou, O wretched
creature," he replied, " promise me even one hour of

Ignatius Loyola 73

life ? " The discipline of Manresa, nevertheless, did
great things for Ignatius ; it convinced him of the
folly of extreme asceticism, it led him to recognise that
the body as well as the soul is an instrument of the
Divine Will, and that, for the sake of efficiency, both
must be cared for if the work of life is to be success-
fully performed. Much more difficult did he find it to
quiet his purely spiritual scruples. Reflecting on his
written confession, it seemed to him that he had
omitted first this point and then that ; thus he was
tormented with an agony of unrest. From such mor-
bidity Luther found an escape through his doctrine of
" justification by faith," and by his maxim " sin
boldly " : Loyola had yet to secure his peace by his
theory of the end which justifies the means ; a prin-
ciple which distracts the mind from petty scruples
by fixing it on great and ultimate purposes. For the
present, however, Loyola's Dominican confessor did
not afford him much comfort. He told him not again
to confess any of his past sins, unless they seemed to
him very heinous. Since, however, to Loyola's morbid
mind all offences seemed equal, this solution by no
means ended his despair.

A characteristic prayer which escaped him at this
time shows the deep waters through which he was
passing on his way to the firmer mind of later years.

' Make haste to help me, O Lord ; for there is no
help in man, neither in any creature do I find relief !
Ah ! if I knew where I might find it, no labour would
seem great or hard ; Lord, show me where it is hid.
As for me, had I to go to a dog's whelp and take my
cure from him, I should do it." Perhaps if we re-
membered oftener that it is by such steep paths that
the heroes of the Church scaled the sublime heights of

74 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

perfection we should possess more of that Christian
charity which " thinketh no evil."

Ignatius was delivered from the madness of his
morbid fancies by his departure from Manresa for
the East. Travel brings a man into contact with
the vast spaces and silences of Nature, presenting an
objective so engrossing as to deliver the most morbid
from the barren agonies of introspection. Passing
through Italy on foot, the pilgrim deepened his know-
ledge of men, missing nothing of importance but ob-
serving all around him with his searching vision. It
was his custom, when at table, never to speak except
very briefly, but to listen closely to all he heard,
registering mentally any remark which would enable
him to lead the conversation to the subject of God
when the meal was over.

Owing to the unsettled state of the country, Loyola
was not allowed to remain long in Palestine ; on his
return to Italy he experienced some inconvenience
owing to his spiritual scruples. Having to pass through
armed camps, it seemed to him wrong to call the
officers before whom he was brought " Lord " or
" Master," since the Gospel restricted the application
of such titles to Christ alone. The result, however,
did not prove as serious as might have been expected.
" The fellow is mad," replied the Governor before
whom he was brought ; " give him his belongings, and
send him away."

Loyola returned to Barcelona in the Lent of 1524,
resolved to devote himself to study. At first he
found the necessary concentration of his intellectual
faculties a severe and difficult matter, but his iion
will stood him in good stead, and with a humility which
it is impossible not to admire, he was content at the

Ignatius Loyola 75

age of thirty-three to sit with mere boys upon the
benches of the University.

After spending two years in mastering the School-
men, Loyola passed to the University of Alcala, where
he employed his spare time in giving the Spiritual
Exercises to his disciples, thus arousing the suspicions
of the Holy Office. The reign of Terror inspired by
the Spanish Inquisition lies outside our subject, but
it should not be forgotten that, during the first 139
years of its working, this institution is said to have
banished or exterminated three millions of human
beings. Yet Loyola, though he disapproved of its
methods and suffered from its intolerance, afterwards
came to uphold the whole scheme of Papal doctrine
and discipline enforced by the Inquisition and Index.
The authors of the Inquisition were the Dominicans,
whose methods differed widely from those of the Jesuits.
The latter were in favour of argument, persuasion and
even tactful concession, the former were the servants
of a theory of brute force.

The Dominicans were, indeed, responsible for the
departure of Loyola from his native land. They threw
him into prison for forty-two days, chaining him and
his companions together by the feet. After a second
imprisonment at Salamanca, being forbidden to preach
until he had studied for four years longer, he decided
to proceed to Paris ; unable, as he said, to see the
justice of the verdict which had been imposed upon
him, " since though he had spoken no evil, they had
closed his mouth."

With Loyola's departure for Paris, where he spent
the next seven years, a more cosmopolitan stage of
his activity opens ; for there he gathered about him
the first members of the Company of Jesus, while his

j6 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

own education proceeded upon more philosophical
lines. Believing that he had passed too hastily to
the higher branches of study, he now went back to
the humanities ; sitting again with mere youths on
the benches of undergraduates. His expenses at this
time were defrayed by the alms of devout women at
Barcelona, but he was ever ready to deny himself
that he might enable others to prosecute their studies
more efficiently. The heroic unselfishness of Loyola
at Paris was, indeed, the predisposing cause of his
success. " He gained," says a severe critic, " the
affections of his companions in a hundred ways, by
kindness, by precept, by patience, by persuasion, by
attention to their physical and spiritual needs, by
words of warmth and wisdom, by the direction of
their conscience, by profound and intense sympathy
with souls struggling after the higher life."

To one fellow-countryman he lent money which was
never returned. On hearing, however, that this man
had fallen seriously ill at Rouen, Loyola walked bare-
foot to that city, nursed him through his illness and
on his recovery placed him on board ship with letters
of recommendation to his friends in Spain.

On another occasion, having fruitlessly remonstrated
with a Spaniard who was paying court to another
man's wife, he adopted a mode of appeal which, if
extravagant, was at least supremely noble.

" Ascertaining," says Mr. Stewart Rose, " that on
his way to visit the object of his guilty passion, his
friend had to cross a bridge over the Lake of Gentilly,
Ignatius repaired to the spot in the dusk of the evening
and, taking off his clothes, stationed himself in the
water up to his neck, awaiting the moment when the
infatuated man should pass over. It was winter, and

Ignatius Loyola yy

the water icy cold ; the saint passed the time praying
God to have mercy on this madman who had no
mercy on his own soul. Absorbed in the thought of
his criminal purpose the adulterer neared the bridge,
where he was startled by a voice from the water which
was vehement in its earnestness. " Go," it said,
" and enjoy your odious pleasures at the peril of your
life and of your immortal soul. I, meanwhile, will do
penance for your sin. Here you will find me when you
return ; and here every evening till God, whom I
shall never cease imploring, shall bring your crimes
or my life to an end." At these words and still more
at the sight he beheld the man stood abashed and
confounded ; he abandoned his guilty purpose and
changed his whole course of life.

Incidents like this explain the power which Ignatius
exercised over his friends and make us understand
why a man of the best blood in Spain, like Francis
Xavier, always wrote his letters to Loyola on bended
knee. With his appalling earnestness and supreme
unselfishness Loyola united a versatility and shrewd-
ness seldom found in the same character. Desirous of
moving to shame a hard-hearted priest, he chose him
as his confessor, retailing to him the story of his past
life with such unfeigned agony and remorse that the
heart of the priest was touched by seeing a man so
vastly superior to himself moved to such profound
depths at the thought of his own shortcomings.

On another occasion, Loyola challenged an enthu-
siastic billiard player to a contest at his own pastime
on the condition that the loser should serve the winner
for a month in whatever way the latter should demand.
Loyola made use of his success by consigning to his
adversary the performance of the Spiritual Exercises,

j8 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

which formed the initial discipline of all his fol-
lowers.

Thus, like the Apostle, Loyola became " all things
to all men " that he might " by all means save some."
For patiently as he waited and closely as he observed
the mental characteristics of men, he always meant
to bring them ultimately under the yoke of his spiritual
discipline.

For this purpose, he directed his attention primarily
to the able, the well-born and the influential. No one
was admitted into the Company of Jesus in its earliest
days unless endowed with good health, mental talent,
moral earnestness, good manners and attractive person.
The Society /was to be a kind of spiritual elite, to win
back those who lived in high places and directed the
destinies of mankind. Of these early disciples one was
of outstanding merit and possessed perhaps the most
original mind ever employed in the service of the
Society, Francis Xavier. Physically no one could be
less like his master. Loyola was of middle height,
with swarthy complexion, dark glowing eyes, bald
head, and limping gait. Xavier, though dwarfish in
stature — he was under five feet — had clear blue eyes,
fair hair, finely chiselled features and a buoyant step.
He was, moreover, of a cheerful and even hilarious
temperament and found much food for amusement
and satire in the sordid clothing and solemn bearing
of his future chief. Nevertheless, the two gradually
drew together, and in the end the elder drew the younger
into the wake of his stronger purpose. When Xavier's
lectures on philosophy began to lose their popularity
Loyola exerted all his influence in beating up fresh
pupils. When Xavier's purse was empty Loyola
replenished it, giving him the alms which he himself

Ignatius Loyola 79

had begged. He entered, too, with keen sympathy into
all Xavier's interests and ambitions ; only at the close
of their conversations, he would quote in terms of
unforgettable solemnity, the words of Christ : " What
shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and
lose his own soul ; or what shall a man give in exchange
for his soul ? " These oft-repeated words, resented at
first by Xavier, began as time went on to fasten
themselves upon his conscience and imagination.
From despising the sordid dress and unconventional
manners of his friend, he learned by degrees to admire
the versatility, the patience and, above all, the im-
movable purpose of Ignatius. So that with Peter
Faber, he was the first to enter the Company of Jesus.
At dawn, on the Feast of the Assumption, 1534, he
took the vows of poverty and chastity and received
the Communion with his friends in the Church of Our
Lady at Montmartre.

Of what character were the Spiritual Exercises em-
ployed by Loyola to break in his followers to his way
of life ? They were a carefully graduated series of
meditations, based on a religious theory of the End of
Man. " I come from God, I belong to God, I am
destined for God : that is to say, God is my first
principle, my sovereign master, my last end."

The Exercises, used under the direction of a superior,
are extended over four weeks, during which the
disciple remains entirely excluded from the sights
and sounds of the outer world. He is to pass through
a discipline so vivid and searching that its impression
can never be effaced by any subsequent experience.

During the first week, he is to examine his conscience.
Every period of his life is to be thoroughly searched,
every infirmity of deed or thought to be brought to

80 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

light, until his own self-contempt is thoroughly
established and he is made to feel like a convicted
criminal before the bar of an offended judge. Having
realised his life as an outrage against the Divine
Clemency, he is led on during the second week to
contemplate the life and rule of his Redeemer, to enrol
himself among his faithful followers, choosing a plan
of life suitable to his own gifts and character. The
third week leads him to the Love and Mystery of Our
Lord's Passion, sensibly realised, while the concluding
week is given up to an equally sensible realisation of
Christ's Ascended Glory.

The novelty of Loyola's training lay chiefly in two
points. Intense concentration on a few main principles
of doctrine and life and the vigorous employment of the
five senses. The neophyte of the Company of Jesus
sees, touches and handles spiritual things. He lives
again through the supreme vicissitudes of the Gospel
story, he realises with a vivid and unforgettable horror
the shortness of life, the physical humiliations of the
grave, the terrors of judgment, the penalty and
sufferings of the lost. Everything is clear, definite,
precise. More, it is practical. After one of the most
awful passages ever penned on the future state of the
sinner, comes the quiet question, " What led them to
this ? ' " The way which you perhaps have followed
until this day ; the way of self-love, of sensuality, of
lukewarmness."

To men who believed in the supernatural in a vivid
and definite manner, without any of the reserves and
evasions of the modern thinker, these meditations were
full of meaning and of power.

When the imagination was too sluggish, flagellation
might be ordered, or other penances ; but these

Ignatius Loyola 81

austerities all vanished on the close of the Retreat.
Loyola's idea was to pass his disciples as quickly as
possible through this searching and effective initiation.
When it was once over, asceticism might be discarded
for ever ; " agreeable manners, a cheerful temper
and ability for worldly business " were henceforth to
be cultivated with a like assiduity.

Judged by results the Spiritual Exercises must be
pronounced wonderfully effective. They enabled
many earnest souls to find a definite object for their
life, to attain self-knowledge, to quiet their consciences
for the past by a full confession ; above all to realise
the presence of an Omnipotent Ruler, Redeemer and
Judge. No Jesuit who had passed through these
Exercises with belief and earnestness, could ever forget
the place of purpose and effort in the life of the soul.
Nor had the followers of Ignatius that humane culture
which is repelled by the crude dogmas of his pitiless
eschatology.

Loyola's seven years in Paris were the greatest of
his life and exhale a kind of meridian splendour.
The rest of his story is soon told. On revisiting
his native country, he proposed to give instruction
to children daily ; when assured by his brother that
none would come, he replied, " One is enough for
me."

The last sixteen years of his life were spent at Rome,
perfecting the organisation of the Society. His out-
look on life became severer and more uncompromising,
as he beheld the tide of innovation rising, intellectual
freedom gaining ground and whole nations lost to the
Catholic faith as he interpreted it. It was indeed a
forlorn hope which he led, but with set resolution and
? in conquerable persistence he was determined to yield

82 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

no inch of ground, but rather to take his enemies'
strongest positions by a vigorous offensive.

The last phase of Ignatius is mirrored for us in an
episode related by Mr. Rose. " He was now past sixty
years old, infirm and broken in health ; yet he often
said that at a sign from the Pope, he would take his
staff and go on foot into Spain, or embark in the first
vessel he found at Ostia, without oars, sails, or pro-
visions, not only willingly but with joy. A nobleman
who heard this, said in surprise, ' But where would be
the prudence of doing this ? ' ' Prudence, my lord,'
replied Ignatius, ' is the virtue of those who com-
mand, not of those who obey.' "

In this uncompromising spirit, he passed away, on
the 30th of July, 1556.

What were the aims and what has been the influence
of the Society which he founded ?

The name of the " Company of Jesus " was chosen
with distinct reference to the military companies of
adventure which played so important a role in the
Middle Ages. Loyola's conception was that of a mobile
force, a spiritual light horse, at the disposal of their
General and the Pope ; in contrast with the older
Orders which resembled infantry guarding a definite
position and bound by vows of stability.

That the name of Our Lord was chosen, instead of
that of the founder, was another fresh departure, but
one which no amount of pressure from Rome could
induce Lo}^ola to alter. His idea was that of a direct
return to the Sermon on the Mount, though with a very
flexible mind he so adapted his teachings to the
exigencies of his age that the simplicity of the dove
was soon lost sight of in the subtlety if not the wisdom
of the serpent. Men were to be brought into the

Ignatius Loyola 83

Church, even if their citizenship could only be procured
by the surrender of Christian principle. But this was
the work of his followers rather than of Loyola himself.

Another characteristic of the Society was that it
entirely reversed the existing views of the Religious
Orders with regard to the supremacy of the inward over
the outward life. In place of retirement, the Jesuit
lived avowedly in the world.

It was the supreme object of every member of the
Company of Jesus to influence society by freely ming-
ling with its members, gaining their confidence and
directing their energies. They were instructed even to
lay aside the clerical habit, the more completely to set
at rest any scruples of the lay mind as to the advisability
of being confidential with men of priestly caste.

Allied to this diplomatic complaisance with the
world was the esoteric character of Jesuit teaching.
The Constitutions of the Society as drawn up by
Loyola, with the glosses of his successors known as the
Declarations, were, until modern times, inaccessible to
the outsider.

Again, while in the Benedictine Order everything
relating to discipline was discussed openly at the daily
gathering of the Chapter, in the Company of Jesus a
system of universal espionage prevailed, every member
from the General downwards being dogged by prying
eyes, every motion being reported to the supreme
tribunal which struck effectively and without warning.

Again, every previous Order had been founded on
democratic principles, but the Company of Jesus was
commanded, like the Salvation Army in modern times,
by a General of absolutely despotic power from whom
there was no appeal.

In the Company of Jesus, the Society was every-

84 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

thing, the individual nothing, a mere instrument in the
hand of the General, a pawn to be moved here or there
as the great Intelligence behind the board directed.
This Obedience was pressed to a point never before
reached ; the obedience of a slave to his master, or of
a dog to his human lord. Loyola's maxims do not leave
us in any doubt upon this point. In his famous letter to
the Portuguese Jesuits in 1553, he says : " I ought not to
be my own, but His Who created me ; and his, too,
through whom God governs me. I ought to be like a
corpse, which has neither will nor understanding ; like
a crucifix that is turned about by him who holds it ;
like the staff in the hands of an old man who uses it at
will." Again, " A sin, whether venial or mortal, must
be committed, if it is commanded by the Superior, in
the Name of Our Lord, or in virtue of obedience."

Thus, in the words of Dr. Figgis, " the history of the
Society of Jesus affords in its constitution the com-
pletest exposition of Machiavelli's doctrine, which is,
that the individual conscience is to be sacrificed to
the community ; while its most characteristic moral
principle extends into private life the same destruction
of moral responsibility which the ordinary follower of
Machiavelli would leave intact." Nor is Jesuit morality
very far removed from that of Treitschke and Bern-
hardi, except that the latter substituted the State for the
Church, and the German Army for the Society of Jesus.

Jesuit Divines have, indeed, plausibly argued that
the maxims which we have quoted refer to extreme
and obviously exceptional cases and that the moral
record of the Society, which is a conspicuously high one,
proves that they are not ordinary injunctions. Never-
theless, as to play with fire is a dangerous pastime, so
to manipulate human obedience without restraint,

Ignatius Loyola 85

even for great aims, is a perilous and, in the long run, a
fatal course. Jesuit morality, as a matter of fact,
rapidly deteriorated under this moral despotism which
stifled the promptings of the unsophisticated conscience.
Evasion and hypocrisy crept into the Order ; while the
love of truth, without which human ethics are involved
in inextricable confusion, ceased to be a characteristic
of a great Christian society.

It is true that the actual freedom enjoyed by the
average Jesuit was far greater in practice than in
theory, for no society possessed greater elasticity in
working. Except when the credit of the Society was
concerned, the individual Jesuit was treated with
indulgence by his Superior. It was a special aim of
Loyola's to give free scope to each man's natural
abilities, so that every Jesuit possessed two of the
strongest motives to labour, the development of his
own intellectual powers upon congenial lines and the
honour belonging to a renowned society working, with
intensified sagacity, for great religious ends.

Nor was this all. The Jesuit was hampered by no
fixed hours for public devotion, no tedious round of
study, he had no special fasts to keep or dress to wear.
He was always welcomed by the best society, being not
only permitted but encouraged to become a man of the
world ; provided only that the aims of the Society
were never lost sight of, and this the haunting memory
of the Spiritual Exercises was likely to secure.

The famous motto of the Society, ad majorem Dei
gloriam, covered, as we have said, in Loyola's view
the principle that the end determines and justifies
the means. The glory of God, too, was identified, not
with the Catholic Church in the widest interpretation
of the term, but with the distinctly Roman Church of

86 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

the sixteenth century, with all its abuses of practice,
anachronisms of doctrine and perversions of morality,
ineffaceably stamped as Divine.

At the Council of Trent, three Jesuits acted as
theological advisers to the Pope, and, if their influence
in the decisions of the Council has been sometimes
exaggerated, it is indisputable that the Jesuits did far
more than any other body to popularise its teaching
and enforce its dogmas.

The machinery of the Society was constructed with
superb ingenuity. The novice, separated from his
family, was placed for two years under the care of a
superior, who gave him partial instruction in the Jesuit
constitutions and prepared him for future work
according to the bent of his character and talents. At
the end of this period vows were taken and the novice
was drafted either into the secular or spiritual service.
The Temporal Coadjutors managed the property of
the Society, distributed alms, nursed the sick, acted as
gardeners, porters and cooks. The more intellectual,
classified as scholastics, entered the colleges of the
Order to study languages, science and theology for
five years. Afterwards they taught in schools for a
similar period, received Priest's Orders and became
Spiritual Coadjutors. From their body were drawn
the professors, confessors and preachers of the Society.
There were still, however, two further stages to be
reached, the stage of the three and of the four vows.
The latter group formed the core of the Society, and
not more than 2 per cent ever reached this exalted
position. Thus the esoteric character of the Society
was preserved, the reins of government confined to a
few experienced hands and secrecy of movement and
policy made possible and easy.

Ignatius Loyola 87

Education was revolutionised by the Jesuits, who
substituted new methods for those employed by the
old grammarians, and acquired great popularity by
their persuasiveness and tact. They did not, it is true,
interest themselves in popular education, but expended
immense pains in the instruction of the higher and
middle classes. Even Protestants sent their children
to be taught by them, partly because they believed in
the excellence of their methods and partly because the
Jesuits made no charge for tuition. New catechisms,
primers and manuals of history, skilfully composed
and graduated to the age of the pupil, made learning
easy and agreeable. Fond parents were amazed by the
rapidity of their children's progress, at their fluency
and versatility which contrasted favourably with the
pedantry and dullness of their own education. The
Jesuits, too, made free use of recreation ; while
they were entirely free from that stiffness and formality
which erects a barrier between the teacher and the
taught. Philology and mathematics, dialectics and
rhetoric were favourite studies, dexterity in argument
being the main aim pursued. History was taught
from their own point of view, while experimental
science was discouraged. The Jesuits produced
excellent Latin scholars, but Greek was neglected
because the Hellenic spirit did not harmonise with the
spirit of the Society. It is the general opinion that the
Jesuits were more successful in imparting information
than in forming character, while the whole tendency of
their system was to discourage original research. A
more serious charge still was that of Sarpi, that they
withdrew their pupil's allegiance from the Nation, the
Government and the Family, in order to concentrate
it upon themselves.

88 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

As Preachers, the Jesuits were clear, simple and
direct, and to them the Anglican Church owes, in
modern times, the Good Friday devotion of the Three
Hours. A less healthy growth, in the form of books of
sickly and sentimental devotion, is also due to the
Society, though in this department they by no means
possessed a monopoly. It was, however, in the Mission
Field that the Jesuits won their noblest laurels, and
showed themselves to the greatest advantage. Their
missionaries in China and India, in Japan, Mexico and
Paraguay won for the Society an honourable renown
and sustained its reputation for holiness, when its
political intrigues nearer home had begun to shed a
sinister light upon its maxims and practices. In these
countries they were the genuine pioneers of Christian
civilisation, while their protection of the slave, by the
Codes which they drew up for his social and religious
amelioration, is in striking contrast with the methods
of contemporary Protestantism. As Sir Harry Johnston
has recently shown, the lot of the Spanish slave was far
preferable to that of the English or Dutch slave in the
New World. Yet even in the Mission Field, deteriora-
tion soon set in under the fatal concessions of com-
promise and the desire for short cuts to ephemeral
renown. At a Council held at Lima it was decreed
inexpedient to impose any act of Christian devotion
except Baptism on the South American converts,
without the greatest precautions, "on the ground of
intellectual difficulties."

When we turn from Jesuit triumphs in education
and missionary enterprise to their casuistry, we are
forced to handle a thorny and much-controverted
subject.

One of Loyola's main objects was the spiritual

Ignatius Loyola 89

direction of Conscience. We have already seen with
what difficulty and after what painful struggles he had
himself arrived at what he supposed to be the Light.
It was natural that he should wish to guide others to
the same goal by a more direct path. At the same
time it was not to pure religion that he led them.
Unconscious as he was of it, his whole world view was
narrow and distorted, his views of morality warped and
unsound. Doctrine was more than practice, prudence
better than sympathy, power more valuable than
truth. Probabilism, equivocation, mental reserve,
directing the intention, undue allowance of extenuating
circumstances, justification of doubtful means were
dangerous weapons in the hands of a worthy confessor ;
in the case of an unscrupulous adviser, they were
certain to lead to wickedness and its palliation.

Thus arose what Mr. Symonds has called " the Jesuit
labyrinth of casuistry, with its windings, turnings,
secret chambers, blind alleys and issues of evasion " :
the system against which Pascal launched the bolts of
his indignant eloquence and inimitable raillery in his
Provincial Letters. Yet it is unfair to empty the vials of
our superiority on Jesuit casuistry, as though it stood by
itself in the history of the Church. Casuistry arises
from the complications of competing social claims and
partly, also from the too great deference of the indi-
vidual conscience to external authority, especially in
ages of imperfect enlightenment.

The Reformation emphasised the Divine Education
of the individual conscience, modern psychology has
overthrown the barren science of abstract deduction,
but it would have been impossible for Loyola either to
have accepted the former or to have anticipated the
latter.

go The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

If he is to be blamed, it is for unduly weakening
the moral fibres of humanity by enunciating principles
unsound in themselves and absolutely fatal to human
nature with its inherent tendencies to evil. His
condemnation is that of all opportunists who take
short cuts to what seems to them great and desirable
ends.

Jesuit casuistry was, however, far less responsible
for the failure of the Society than the political views
of Loyola's successors.

The Jesuit theory of Politics was a simple one. The
Ecclesiastical Power was by Divine Right the
Supreme Power. The Church was the Soul of humanity,
the State only its vile body. Since, then, the Soul
should direct the Body and even punish it in time,
for its eternal welfare, the people who owned allegiance
to the Church might lawfully expel, remove (or,
according to Mariana, assassinate) their nominal but
heretical sovereign. From the time, therefore, that
Aquaviva (Fifth General, 1581 to 1615) enunciated
and Parsons with his followers put into practice this
maxim, the Society became anathema to those in
authority. A Jesuit seemed to lurk behind every con-
spiracy, to foment every rebellion, to hasten the advent
of every war. It was obvious that no society could
have been universally expelled from European
civilisation unless it had nourished the seeds of social
disloyalty and thus justly deserved the penalty of social
ostracism.

Nor can it be denied that such social disloyalty,
though accentuated by his successors, was a logical
consequence of the principles of Loyola in his later
years ; for he was the implacable foe of individual,
national and religious freedom. Nevertheless, as Dean

Ignatius Loyola 91

Church has pointed out, the original aims of Loyola
were far loftier and more spiritual than those which he
came to adopt as his own, in the face of continuous and
successful opposition.

" Ignatius did not begin with intending to found the
Jesuits. He began with something at once humbler
and greater. He began, as Luther began, with a
violent and indignant reaction against the blindness
and dullness of a firmly settled Catholicism, which had
lost eyes and heart for the primary simple realities of
its own overwhelming creed. ... To realise in
imagination and conscience the actual truth of the
example and words of Christ and to subdue his own
will to a thorough and unqualified compliance with
them, was the first great thought of Ignatius. . . . And
to make others feel like him, his second. But the
inherent love of power, the influence of Paris and Rome,
the hatred of freedom and the worship of success led
to a fatal blindness to truth, a fatal unscrupulousness
of method, a fatal loss of simplicity and Christian
charity, only too faithfully embodied in his famous
foundation."

At the present crisis of the world's history we can
perhaps appreciate with a deepened intensity the fatal
character of Loyola's mistakes. The world during the
last decade has been suffering from precisely the same
errors as those which he encouraged and the Company
of Jesus continued to propagate ; absolutism, servile
obedience to authority and political immorality. The
Future lies with those who will sacrifice themselves,
with no less devotion, to a nobler ideal, to freedom, to
conscience and to social truth. For righteousness alone
exalteth a nation.

92 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Note. — The Company of Jesus was suppressed by Pope
Clement XIV in 1773, under pressure from the sovereigns
of Europe. The chief reasons given were : the Jesuits'
defiance of their own constitution which forbade them
to meddle with politics ; their condescension to heathen
usages in the East ; the disturbances which they had
stirred up even in Catholic countries ; the ruin caused
to souls by their quarrels with local ordinal ies and the
other religious Orders.

But though suppressed, the Society soon rose again with
renewed power and influence. In 1811 it was revived and
reconstituted by Pius VII, and under Pius IX played
a dominant part in the triumph of modern ultramon-
tanism. The proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception, in 1854 ; the Syllabus of 1864, which made
the Pope sole judge of what was true in science, history
and criticism ; the dogma of Papal Infallibility, in 1870 ;
all these were the work of the Jesuits, favoured, promoted
and abetted by the Supreme Pontiff.

To the Jesuits, therefore, more than to any other body,
we may fairly attribute the irreconcilable antagonism
of the modern Papacy to the modern State, and also to
modern thought and science.

THE FOREIGN MISSIONS OF THE JESUITS

The noblest pages of Jesuit history are those which
relate to their foreign missions. The real heroes of
the Society are not the men who influenced the
decisions of the Council of Trent, or planned the over-
throw of Protestant sovereigns in Europe, but Francis
Xavier and Isaac Jogues, who sacrificed every earthly
comfort to preach Christ to the heathen.

" The Jesuit," says Parkman, " is no dreamer, he is
emphatically a man of action ; action is the end of his
existence." These words form an appropriate intro-
duction to the career of Xavier, whose brief life of
forty-seven years was animated by a missionary
energy only exceeded by St. Paul.

Like Loyola, Xavier came from a Basque province of
Northern Spain, and was nurtured among the Pyrenees.
His father held high office under the King of Aragon,
while his mother, from whom he derived the name
Xavier, was the sole heiress of two ancient houses. Of
Xavier's University life at Paris and of his early
friendship with Loyola we have already spoken. When
Loyola left Paris, Xavier took up his residence in the
Hospital for Incurables at Venice, but soon after
became Loyola's secretary at Rome. A year later came
his call to the mission field.

It was on the 14th of March, 1540, that Ignatius

93

94 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

summoned him to his room and told him to leave Rome
for Portugal the following day. Xavier accepted the
commission by stooping to kiss the feet of his former
companion ; afterwards returning to his room to mend
his tattered cassock and to prepare for his long journey
to India. On passing through the Pyrenees, he sighted
in the distance the towers of his ancient home, but,
mindful of Our Lord's injunction " to salute no man by
the way," he avoided a parting scene with his mother
and pressed on to Lisbon. ~£ _ lv^^^^^A

There a disappointment awaited him. King John
refused to allow the distinguished Jesuit who was to
have accompanied him to leave and he was assigned
two very inferior substitutes, Father Paul of Camerino
and Francias Mancias, the latter a deacon of such dull
intellect that it was doubtful whether it would even be
possible to admit him to Priests' Orders. The King
obtained for Xavier, however, Papal briefs, constitut-
ing him Apostolic Nuncio in the East, while he
besought Xavier to write to him frequently, giving
him exact accounts of his progress and requirements.
Finally, he charged the Purveyor-General of the Fleet
to supply him with every comfort on the voyage.
Francis, however, refused to accept anything except
some warm clothing and a few books of devotion. He
insisted, too, on cooking his own food and washing his
own clothes. " So long," he said, " as God gave him
the use of hands and feet, no one should wait on him
but himself and there was no occupation so lowly that
he would not glory in it."

On the 7th of April, 1541, on his thirty-fifth birthday,
he sailed for India.

Sir James Stephen has graphically described his
spiritual exhilaration during the voyage. " He was

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 95

going to convert nations of which he knew neither
the language nor even the names, but his soul was
oppressed with no misgivings. Worn by incessant
sickness, with the refuse food of the lowest seaman
for his diet and the cordage of the ship for his couch,
he rendered to the diseased services too revolting to
be described and lived among the dying and profligate,
the unwearied minister of consolation and peace. In
the midst of that floating throng, he knew both how to
create for himself a sacred solitude and how to mix in
all their pursuits in the free spirit of a man of the world,
a gentleman and a scholar. With the Viceroy and his
officers he talked of war, politics and navigation. To
restrain the common soldiers from gambling he
invented for their amusement less dangerous pastimes,
or held the stakes for which they played, that by his
presence and gay discourse he might at least check the
excesses which he could not entirely prevent."

On the 6th of May, 1542, he arrived at Goa, the
capital of Portuguese India. There he found a convent
of Franciscans, a fine cathedral and a large number of
Christian churches. A closer acquaintance with the
colony revealed to him its seamy side. The Bishop
though a venerable old man was lethargic. The
Portuguese settlers, removed from the restraint of public
opinion and living in an enervating climate, were
corrupt, their morality differing little from that of the
surrounding heathen. Xavier lost no time in opening
a campaign of aggressive missionary effort. Swinging
a heavy bell in his hand, he passed along the streets of
the city, calling out to the astonished crowds, " Faith-
ful Christians, for the love which you bear to Christ,
send your children and your servants to the Christian
doctrine." Xavier also frequented the haunts of vice

g6 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

that he might by his kindness convince men of the
Divine Love which overshadowed them, while, by
pungent jests, he sought to show the contemptibleness
and folly of a life of dissipation. Starched and pompous
Pharisees were not wanting at Goa to carp at his
unconventional methods, but he loved the title of
" Friend of Sinners " too well to be deterred from his
errands of mercy. " I care little," he said, " for the
judgment of men and least of all for their judgment
who decide before they hear and before they under-
stand." " You, my friends," he said to a group of
soldiers who hid their cards at his approach, " belong
to no religious order, nor can you pass your whole days
in devotion. Amuse yourselves. To you it is not
forbidden, if you neither cheat, quarrel, nor swear
when you play." Then, sitting down in their midst, he
proceeded to challenge one of them to a game of chess.
After five months at Goa, Xavier set out on a
mission to the Paravas, a degraded caste who acted as
divers in the pearl fishery of Manaar. The occupation
of these men was hard and perilous, yet they derived
no benefit from it, for the profits of their industry
were seized by the Moslems who treated them as
slaves. Ten years before Xavier's arrival they had
appealed to the Portuguese for protection, which was
given them on condition of their accepting the Catholic
faith. Thankful for such easy terms, the Paravas were
baptised wholesale, but the Portuguese never took any
further trouble to turn their nominal faith into a reality.
Xavier resolved to devote himself to their spiritual
welfare and, taking two interpreters with him, he lived
in their miserable huts, sharing their diet of rice and
contenting himself with three hours' sleep out of the
twenty-four. In four months' time he succeeded in

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 97

translating the Catechism into the Malabar tongue,
and having committed it to memory, he summoned the
inhabitants twice daily for Christian instruction. On
Sundays he caused the whole population to repeat
after him the Creed, the Decalogue, the Ave Maria and
the Lord's Prayer ; afterwards discoursing to them
upon the meaning and obligations of the Christian
religion. Xavier also set the Catechism to simple
music, so that the sound of Christian melody might
often be heard on this barren coast.

The charm of his personality no doubt helped him to
win the goodwill of the natives and contributed towards
his amazing success. " As to the numbers who become
Christians," he wrote in 1543, " you may understand
from this ; that it often happens to me to be hardly
able to use my hands from the fatigue of baptising ;
often in a single day I have baptised whole villages.
Sometimes I have lost my voice altogether with
repeating again and again the Credo and other forms.
Doubtless Xavier, like all the Jesuits, laid too exclusive
stress on the sacrament of baptism, while much of his
work was superficial and hasty, yet he seems con-
sistently to have emphasised the obligations of Christian
morality, inspired by a burning devotion to the
Incarnate Christ.

The use Xavier made of children was original and
certainly daring. "Their hatred for idolatry," he
writes, " is marvellous. They get into feuds with the
heathen about it ; and wherever their own parents
practise it, they reproach them and come off to tell me
at once. Wherever I hear of an act of idolatrous
worship, I go to the place, with a large band of these
children, who very soon load the devil with a greater
amount of insult and abuse than he has lately received

98 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

of honour and worship from their parents and acquaint-
ances." There is indeed something delightfully naive
about the religious exploits of these juvenile evangelists.
Finding it impossible to visit all the sick himself, " I
send round the children," he says, " whom I can trust,
in my place. They went to the sick persons, assembled
their families and neighbours, recited the Creed with
them and encouraged the sufferers to conceive a well-
founded confidence of their restoration. Then, after all
this, they recited the prayers of the Church."

He goes on to deplore the fact that the learned
Doctors of Paris University do not lay aside their
studies to become teachers of the heathen ; adding
characteristically that " many thousands of infidels
might be made Christians without trouble, if we only
had men who would seek not their own advantage but
the things of Jesus Christ."

Of the Brahmins, Xavier did not form a high opinion.
"The Brahmins are liars and cheats to the backbone.
Their whole study is how to deceive most cunningly
the simplicity of the people. They give out publicly
that the gods command certain offerings to be made
to their temples, which offerings are simply the things
which the Brahmins themselves wish for. . . . They
eat sumptuous meals to the sound of drums and
make the ignorant believe that the gods are banqueting."

When Xavier asked them what their gods enjoined
them in order to obtain the life of the blessed, theii
reply was, to abstain from killing cows, and to show
kindness to the Brahmins who were their worshippers.

The Paravas themselves were most anxious to know
what colour Xavier himself imagined the Deity to be.
" The Indians, being black themselves, believe that
the gods are black. On this account the great majority

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 99

of their idols are black as black can be, and, moreover,
are generally so rubbed over with oil as to smell
detestably and seem to be as dirty as they are ugly
and horrible to look at." Such was heathendom as it
presented itself to the mind of a Jesuit father, in the
year of grace 1543.

Let us now take a glimpse into the heart of Xavier
as, alone on this solitary shore, he endeavours to atone
for the neglect of his fellow-Christians in Europe. It is
afforded us by a prayer, dating from the year above-
named. " O Lord, I beseech Thee, overwhelm me not
now, in this life, with so much delight : or at least,
since in Thy boundless goodness Thou dost so over-
whelm me, take me away to the abode of the blessed.
For anyone who has once known what it is to taste in
his soul Thy ineffable sweetness, must of necessity
think it very bitter to live any longer without seeing
Thee face to face."

Much of our knowledge of Xavier 's labours in Asia
comes to us from his copious letters to the Society at
home ; letters which convey an impression of his
affectionateness, buoyancy and common sense. To
his dull and depressed companion Francias Mancias
he writes with considerate sympathy for his loneliness
and ill-success. " Beware of growing weary of your
work and don't let any kind of disgust weaken you,
or relax your patience. I entreat you to show con-
tinual marks of very great love to the whole of the
people you are among. The consequences will most
certainly be that they will love you in return ; and if
you once get to that, the ministry by which you are
trying to lead them to the knowledge and worship of
God will find its course more easy and its fruit more
abundant."

ioo The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

It is impossible to describe even superficially the
numerous missions undertaken by Xavier in the
East. He is said to have founded thirty churches in
the neighbourhood of Cape Comorin, forty-five settle-
ments in Travancore, to have spent four months in
Ceylon, another four months in Malacca, besides
visiting the islands of the Malay Archipelago and
spending many months among the cannibals of the
Moluccas.

During his sojourn at Amboyna there arrived a
hostile fleet of Spanish corsairs. Xavier at once
boarded the vessels, which he found infected with the
plague. Day and night he nursed these unfortunate
pirates who, experiencing so great kindness at his
hands, sailed away without molesting the islanders.

The most important enterprise of Xavier was his
attempted conversion of Japan. Japan had only been
discovered by Europeans seven years before, but
Xavier had encountered in Malacca a Japanese gentle-
man, Yajiro or Angero by name, whom he converted
to the faith and admitted into the Company of Jesus.

" I asked this Angero whether he thought, in case I
accompanied him to Japan, the inhabitants would
become Christians. He replied that his countrymen
would not assent instantly to everything they heard
but would be sure to ask a great many questions as
to the religion I was introducing and that, above all,
they would consider whether my actions agreed with
my words. If I could satisfy them by a consistent
statement, and give them no cause for finding fault
with the goodness of my life, then, when the matter
had been fully examined, they would certainly join
the flock of Christ, for theirs is a nation which follows
the guidance of reason."

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits ioi

After drawing up his famous code of instruction
for the conduct of missionaries in the East, Xavier
started for Japan in company with Angero.

At Cangoxima they laboured with such effect that,
two hundred years after, when Christianity had been
extirpated in Japan by persecution, communities of
Japanese were found in this neighbourhood who still
preserved with reverence the Christian formularies.

Amid the snows of winter, Xavier, carrying only
the vessels necessary for the celebration of Mass, made
his way through dense forests and over steep mountains
to Meaco, the capital of the country ; but, finding the
city in a state of siege, was obliged to retrace his
steps. No disappointments, howTever, dulled his en-
thusiasm, or shook his confidence in the Japanese
character. " The Japanese surpass in goodness any
of the nations lately discovered. They are of a kindly
disposition, and not at all given to cheating. Honour
with them is placed above everything else. There are
a great many poor among them, but poverty is not
considered a disgrace. They are sparing and frugal
in eating, but not in drink. They abhor dice and
gaming and seldom swrear. Most of them can read and
this is a great help to them in the understanding of
our prayers. They have not more than one wife.
They are wonderfully inclined to all that is good and
honest and have an extreme eagerness to learn." As
in India he was displeased with the native priests and
says of them with some amusement, " that though
they take money from everybody by way of alms, they
themselves never give anything to any one."

Xavier's early experiences in Japan and his desire
to convert its Rulers led him to make the most of his
position as an accredited representative of the King of

102 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Portugal. Magnificently arrayed in ecclesiastical
vestments and accompanied by Portuguese sailors and
merchants, he visited the Court of the King of Bungo.
This sovereign at once manifested his good will and
conversions among his subjects speedily followed, the
Japanese eagerly anticipating commercial advantages
from their change of faith. But the Bonzes, or native
priests, proved a stumbling-block in the way of success.

One of these, Fucarandono by name, asked Xavier
whether he remembered seeing him before. " Cer-
tainly not," replied Xavier, " for I have never seen you
before." Fucarandono expressed surprise and asked
whether it was possible that he could have forgotten
selling him fifty picos of silk at Frenojamo 1500 years
previously. That Xavier should have forgotten this
incident, told heavily against him, for the Japanese,
believing in the transmigration of souls, held that it
was a reward of virtue to remember what had passed
in a previous state of existence and a mark of wicked-
ness to forget it. Public feeling now ran high against
Xavier, and had it not been for the chivalrous support
rendered him by the Portuguese sailors and merchants
he would probably have attained the crown of martyr-
dom. The Japanese, however, came to the conclusion
that there must really be something in a religion which
could prompt " rich men of the world to risk their
property and lives " in the service of their spiritual
father.

Nevertheless, Xavier found it expedient to leave
Japan within a few days, exhorting the King on his
departure to remember the shortness of life, the
certainty of Judgment and the greatness of the grace
of God.

The last enterprise of Xavier was his attempted

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 103

conversion of China. His friend Angero had already
been martyred in China, and Xavier, proceeding in a
pirate ship to the island of San Chan, at the mouth of
the Canton River, there laid down his own life.

' Stretched on the naked beach," says Sir James
Stephen, " with the cold blasts of a Chinese winter
aggravating his pains, he contended alone with the
agonies of a fever which wasted his vital powers. In
the cold collapse of death, his features were for a
few moments irradiated as with the first beams of
approaching glory. He raised himself on his crucifix,
and exclaiming, ' In Thee, O Lord, have I trusted,
let me never be confounded,' he bowed his head and
died."

Ignatius had already nominated him as his successor,
but the letter announcing his appointment never
reached him.

" An ascetic and mystic," says Mr. Jayne, " to
whom things spiritual were more real than the visible
world, Xavier had the strong common sense which
distinguished the Spanish Mystics, St. Theresa and
Raymond Lull." As an organiser he was supreme ;
and though the claim of Jesuit chroniclers that he
converted 700,000 persons to the faith may be dis-
missed as absurd, he may fairly be regarded as the
most effective missionary since St. Paul. He in-
augurated missionary enterprise from India to Japan,
and wherever he preached he left behind him an
organised Christian community. His personality was
so attractive that he endeared himself even to the
pirates and bravos with whom on his voyages he was
forced to consort. It cannot be denied that, despite
his humanity, he sanctioned the persecution of
Nestorians and Jews, misunderstood Oriental religions

104 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

and was disastrously successful in converting the
Portuguese Government at Goa into a proselytising
agency. His interference with politics was an evil
precedent, fraught with penal consequences for his
successors ; while his knowledge of Oriental languages
was so imperfect as to render much of his labour
nugatory.

The character of Xavier has rarely been surpassed
in the annals of Christian history for its daring and
humility, its sweetness and its strength. Even after
four centuries we are compelled to think of him as
among

" the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence : live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues."

Though Jesuit figures are rarely to be trusted,
there is no doubt that after Xavier's death Christianity
in Japan made enormous strides, obtaining the support
of the highest civil power. Professor Kikuchi states
that in 1595 there were 137 Jesuits in the country,
with 300,000 converts, among them seventeen feudal
chiefs and even a few of the native priests. But
through the indiscreet meddling of the Jesuits and
Franciscans with commerce and politics, Hideyoshi,
the powerful Ruler of Japan, became incensed against
all Christians and, after a fierce persecution endured
by the fathers with immense heroism, they were
expelled from the country. In India, a field at first
less promising, the work of Xavier was far more

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 105

lasting. By 1565 there were 300,000 new converts
between Goa and Cape Comorin ; and Jerome Xavier,
a nephew of Francis, held a post of importance at the
Court of Akbar, three princes of this great Mogul
sovereign's house receiving Christian baptism. In 1621,
a Jesuit College was founded at Agra and a station
at Patna. Xavier's followers made too great con-
cessions to Hindoo belief and practice, adopting
Brahmin costume and recognising the social principle
of caste. In this evil precedent they were soon followed
by some of the Protestant missionaries, who assembled
their native converts for worship in separate establish-
ments. Thus in India, as in Europe, the fatal Jesuit
weakness for compromise made itself felt and, while
it helps to account for a striking temporary success, it
laid the seeds of inevitable decadence and deterioration.
We must now turn our qjqs from the East to the
West, from the ancient civilisations of India to the
untutored tribes of North America. In the early days
of the seventeenth century the French nation had
embarked on a career of conquest and civilisation
amongst the Indians of Canada. With them religion
and commerce went hand in hand, with the consequence
that the Jesuit Fathers entered the country with the
backing and support of the civil authority. When
Champlain, the French Governor of Quebec, intro-
duced the followers of Loyola to the Indians of the
Huron he did so in these words : " These are our
fathers. We love them more than we love ourselves.
The whole French nation honours them. They do
not go among you for your furs. They have left their
friends and their country to show you the way to
heaven. If you love the French, as you say you love
them, then love and honour these our fathers."

H

106 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

The Jesuits proved themselves worthy of this
introduction. With incredible devotion and silent
endurance, they watered Canada with their blood,
laying down their lives, not for their friends, but for a
cruel and ungrateful race. The Indians among whom
the Jesuit fathers lived were not the Indians of Long-
fellow's Hiawatha. They were wild and superstitious
savages. Their religion consisted of fetish worship,
or of gods no better than themselves. Their belief in
the Great Spirit only appeared after long contact
with white men ; even then it was generally materialised
and but thinly connected with morality. Only men
of tender heart and iron will, and the Jesuits were
both, would have persevered with the task of Indian
Evangelisation for a period of almost forty years.

The first Jesuit station in Canada was that of
Notre Dame des Anges at Quebec. The founder was
Paul le Jeune, who left France for the New World in
April, 1632. The six fathers who formed this mission-
ary station lived in a one-storied building on the banks
of the St. Charles. Their house was built of planks
plastered with mud and thatched with long grass.
Their furniture was primitive and their chapel only
ornamented by a sheet, upon which were glued some
coarse religious engravings. Above the altar was the
image of a Dove, representing the presence of the
Holy Spirit with their undertaking, portraits of
Loyola and Xavier and images of the Virgin. Yet
within these rude walls was nourished an enthusiasm
which does credit to human nature and a faith which
refused to accept defeat. The workmen employed by
the fathers were forced to hear Mass daily and an
exhortation on Sunday. The Jesuits themselves
preached, catechised, heard confessions at the Fort,

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 107

worked with the spade and struggled with the problem
of native languages. The difficulty of acquiring the
latter correctly soon drove Father le Jeune into the
wilderness. He came rapidly to the conclusion that
the only sure way to become proficient in the Algon-
quin tongue was to accompany the Indians on their
winter hunting expeditions. The Indians on their
part, thinking to benefit by the provisions which the
Christian father would bring with him, asked him to
accompany them, and in the latter part of October
he set out.

As they marched through the forests, Le Jeune
found the black trunks of the pine trees spattered with
snow, the waters frozen and the woods silent as the
grave. During the day the Indians hunted the beaver
and porcupine, or chased the moose and caribou.
At night nineteen human beings besides animals
crowded and jostled one another in the tiny wigwam.
Le Jeune sums up the inconvenience of their lodging
under the heads of cold, heat, smoke and dogs. Some-
times he would escape from this filthy den to read his
Breviary in peace by the light of the freezing moon.

One of the Indians who acted as his tutor palmed
off on him the foulest words of the language as the
equivalent of spiritual terms. Consequently, when he
sought to explain to his assembled hearers the doctrines
of the Christian faith, he was interrupted by peals of
laughter from irreverent children and squaws.

At other times they would tell him that his head
was like a pumpkin and his beard like a rabbit's.
Sometimes their banter was so brutal and savage
that, afraid of exasperating them beyond endurance,
he would pass whole days without uttering a word.
The whole party suffered from insufficient food and

io8 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

were sometimes on the verge of starvation. On
Christmas Eve his diary contains the following entry :
" The Lord gave us for our supper a large porcupine,
and also a rabbit. It was not much, it is true, for
nineteen persons : but the Holy Virgin and St. Joseph
her glorious spouse were not so well treated on this
very day in the stable of Bethlehem."

At the beginning of April the party returned to
Quebec, and at three in the morning the Fathers of
Notre Dame des Anges, springing hastily from their
beds, embraced their Superior with words of welcome
and of thankfulness.

Le Jeune's expedition with the Algonquin Indians
led to a revolution in the Jesuit plan of campaign.
Le Jeune saw that it was waste of energy to spend
time on the conversion of wandering tribes ; and that
it would be far more profitable to go further "West, to
the stationary tribe of the Hurons, near the great
lake of that name.

The father who undertook the hazardous mission,
which involved travelling 900 miles by canoe, was
Jean de Brebeuf. A tall, powerful man of splendid
physique, Brebeuf was the descendant of a distin-
guished Norman family and one of the ablest mis-
sionaries of the Society. He was, too, a master of the
Huron language, and it is largely from his missionary
reports that our information of this phase of Canadian
history is derived. With two companions, he set out
for Lake Huron in company with a band of Indians
returning from their annual pilgrimage to Quebec,
where they exchanged their furs and tobacco for
European commodities. After a tiring and adventurous
journey, in which the priests got temporarily separated
from one another, they arrived at their destination

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 109

and were given a hospitable reception. The Indians
built them a house and here they received enquirers
and expounded the Christian faith. Their clock
greatly excited the curiosity of the Hurons and
they would sit in expectant silence for long periods
waiting for it to strike. They wanted to know what
it ate, and what it said when it struck. " When he
strikes twelve times," replied Brebeuf, "he says, 'put
on the kettle ' ; when he strikes four times, he says
' get up, and go home.' " Profiting by this instruction
the Hurons came daily to share the father's tea at
noon, but always left promptly at four o'clock. In
this way, and by teaching the Hurons to build more
scientific forts, the Jesuits gained the confidence of
the natives, but, even with these helps, they found
Evangelisation a difficult matter. When the fathers
drew vivid pictures of heaven and hell and asked the
Hurons which they preferred, they gave the disconcerting-
answer, " I wish to go where my relations and ancestors
have gone ; heaven is a good place for Frenchmen,
but I wish to be among Indians." When they asked
Brebeuf whether there was hunting in heaven or war,
and he replied in the negative, they concluded it to be
a most undesirable place of residence, saying, "It is
not good to be lazy." Again the Indians found the
spiritual requirements of the fathers too exacting.
Monogamy, the abandonment of superstitious feasts
and the observance of the Ten Commandments seemed
an alarming price to pay for a doubtful future and a
present robbed of its customary enjoyments.

Further difficulties were caused by a humpbacked
sorcerer and by a terrible outbreak of smallpox.
The latter calamity, it is true, afforded a golden
opportunity to the fathers to commend their religious

no The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

teachings by their efforts to relieve bodily distress.
No house was left unvisited and in the depth of winter
the fathers tramped from village to village, adminis-
tering simple preparations of senna, speaking kind
words to groups of dejected Indians sitting silent around
their fires, and baptising, wherever possible, the
infants and the dying. Once they nearly lost their
lives, a midnight council of chiefs attributing the
cause of the disease to their Christian incantations ;
but they lived this down and, in the course of the next
few years, made considerable progress amongst the
Hurons. Fifteen years after their arrival, however, a
terrible disaster led to the destruction of the whole
mission.

In 1649, a thousand Iroquois Indians suddenly
took the warpath and, descending upon the more
timid Hurons, devasted their settlements, torturing
and slaying them with the utmost barbarity. Brebeuf
himself was bound to a stake, but his composure
remained unruffled, and he continued to exhort his
fellow captives to patience and endurance. After
mutilating him, they hung round his neck a collar
made of red-hot hatchets, and poured boiling water
over him, sajing, " We baptise you, that you may be
happy in heaven, for nobody can be saved without a
good baptism." Others cut strips from his flesh, ex-
claiming, " You told us that the more one suffers on
earth, the happier he is in heaven." Finally they
drank the blood of the heroic father that, by so doing,
they might inherit a portion of his indomitable courage.
They could have paid him no higher compliment. Thus
died Jean de Brebeuf, the founder of the Huron Mission.

The story of one other Jesuit father must be told,
for Christian history has few nobler episodes than the

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits in

life of Isaac Jogues. Jogues was born in Orleans in
1607, and joined the Canadian Mission at the age of
thirty-two. The delicate mould of his features indicated
a refined and thoughtful nature. Constitutionally
timid, with a sensitive conscience, " he knew, when
acting under orders, neither hesitation nor fear." An
accomplished scholar, he might have seemed out of
place as a pioneer missionary among savage tribes ;
yet as an athlete he could outrun the Indians, while
his spiritual fire and endurance seem to have known
no limits. His story is briefly as follows : —

He was sent by his Superior as missionary to the
tobacco nation. Two years later he passed on to Lake
Superior, where he preached to the O jib ways and
Algonquins. A year later, the mission being short of
clothing and other necessaries, he returned eastward
for supplies. Suddenly his party was fiercely attacked
by Iroquois Indians. Jogues sprang into the bul-
rushes, and could have escaped, but, seeing his friend
Goupil and some of his converts captured, he came out
of his hiding-place and gave himself up. When his
companion was attacked, Jogues threw himself upon
his neck, but was dragged away and beaten with clubs.
Later, he was made to march every day with his
conquerors, being subject to every indignity on the
road. His left thumb was cut off, and in one town he
was suspended by his wrists for two hours from two
poles, until, on the point of swooning, his cords were
cut by a compassionate Indian. At this town four
Huron prisoners were brought in, and Jogues, despite
his pain and exhaustion, undertook their conversion.
An ear of green corn being flung to him for food, he
discovered on its husks a few drops of dew, and with
these baptised his converts. Everywhere on the

112 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

journey he baptised dying infants, while his friend
Goupil taught children to make the sign of the Cross.
Soon after Goupil was slain by the hatchet of an
Indian and Jogues, in daily expectation of death, was
marched from place to place, through gloomy forests,
the ground covered with snow and the rocks with
icicles. Yet he spent hours in silent prayer and
carved the name of Jesus on the trees under which
they halted.

At last deliverance came. Reaching a trading
station on the Hudson, he was kindly treated by the
Dutch merchants, who offered him a free passage to
Bordeaux. Jogues thanked them, but, to their
surprise, asked for a night's delay to consider the
matter and lay it before God in prayer. He was fearful
lest self-love might, at this crisis of his fate, beguile
him from his duty. After considering the matter,
however, in all its bearings, he decided to leave ; his
French companions being now all dead. On January
5th, 1644, he reached the Jesuit College at Rennes.
The Jesuit letters from Canada were at this time the
favourite reading of religious society in France, from
the Court downwards. When, therefore, Jogues
knocked at the door of the Breton College, the Rector,
though putting on his vestments to say Mass, post-
poned service in order to hear the latest news from
Canada. Ignorant of the character of his visitor, the
Rector began to question him about the affairs of the
mission and ended by asking him if he knew Father
Jogues ? "I know him very well," was the reply.
" The Iroquois have taken him," pursued the Rector,
"is he dead ? Have they murdered him ? " " No,"
answered Jogues, " he is alive and at liberty, and I am
he." And he fell on his knees to ask his Superior's

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 113

blessing. " That night," says the historian, " was a
night of jubilation and thanksgiving in the College of
Rennes."

But Jogues' witness to the faith was not yet com-
plete. The following spring he sailed again for Canada
and was sent on a special mission to the Mohawk
Indians. He went in a twofold capacity : as an
ambassador on behalf of the French Government, to
hold the Mohawks to a Treaty of Peace which they had
made, and as a simple priest to found the mission of the
martyrs among the Mohawk tribe. The Mohawks were
disposed to peace, but the fierce Algonquins were
determined on war. After discharging his diplomatic
duties, and reporting the results at Montreal, Jogues
resumed his missionary labours among the Indians.
Soon afterwards he was surrounded by a savage crowd
who cut strips of flesh from his back and arms, exclaim-
ing, " let us see if this white flesh is the flesh of a
spirit " (oki). " I am a man like yourselves," replied
Jogues, " but I do not fear death or torture." In the
evening it was the 18th of October, Jogues was sitting
in a lodge, when an Indian entered and summoned
him to a feast. To have refused would have been
considered discourteous. Following the Indian, there-
fore, he entered the lodge of the Bear chief. As he
stooped to pass in through the low entrance an
Indian concealed within struck him with a hatchet.
Another Indian tried to save him by holding out his
arm to ward off the attack, but at a second blow Jogues
fell dead at his feet.

The death of Jogues was the beginning of the end of
the Jesuit mission in Canada. The causes of failure
were not internal, " the guns and tomahawks of the
Indians were the ruin of their hopes." Could the

114 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Jesuits but have tamed these barbarous savages they
would have taught them agriculture, arrested their
decrease of population, imparted to them their own
self-sacrificing faith and have powerfully assisted in
the consolidation of the French Empire in Northern
America. They would also have been the champions of
absolutism in Church and State and the march of
liberty and freedom would have been delayed. Their
failure facilitated the triumph of English institutions
and hastened the dawn of a less romantic but saner
civilisation.

In the words of Parkman, " The Providence of God
seemed in their eyes dark and inexplicable ; but from
the standpoint of liberty that Providence is clear as
the sun at noon. Meanwhile, let those who have
prevailed yield due honour to the defeated. Their
virtues shine amidst the rubble of error, like diamonds
and gold in the gravel of the torrent."

" The best history," says Walter Bagehot, " is like
the art of Rembrandt, it casts a vivid light on certain
selected causes, on those which were best and greatest ;
it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen." It is in
the endeavour to follow this maxim that we have made
no attempt to cover the vast field of Jesuit missionary
enterprise, but have confined our attention to the
labours of Xavier in the East, and the Jesuits in
Canada. A few statements in regard to Jesuit activities
in China and Paraguay must conclude our imperfect
survey of this great subject.

In China the Jesuits pursued an entirely different
policy to that which they had employed in Japan. The
Apostle of China, Matteo Ricci, was an Italian Jesuit
of great talent, nor are there many European names
better known than his to Chinese scholars of to-day.

The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 115

Ricci arrived in China in 1582 and at once recognised
the literary character of Chinese civilisation. He and
his companions adopted the dress of the Chinese
literati and acquired the manners of Chinese gentle-
men. Professing great respect for the teaching of
Confucius, this worthy father won by his prudence
and courtesy the goodwill of the Chinese people and
especially of the ruling classes. The Jesuits excited
the curiosity of the learned by their globes, maps and
clocks ; and of Ricci it has been said that " he usually
began with mathematics and ended with religion ; his
scientific endowments procuring respect for his religious
doctrines." Ricci's published writings in Chinese
cover a wide selection of subjects, while his knowledge
of the Chinese language and character seems to have
been profound. The attacks made on him at a later
period by his co-religionists in Europe were chiefly
owing to the fact that, while he attacked Buddhism, he
treated Confucianism with such sympathy that his
concessions seemed to disintegrate the foundations of
the Christian faith. Ricci was a man of fine character,
and his death in 1610 was caused by his unsparing
labours, coupled with the fatigues incident to the
elaborate customs of Chinese hospitality. Many
Mandarins were converted by the Jesuits ; a fraternity
of the Blessed Virgin founded at Pekin in 1605 was
followed by a Church in Nankin ; while in 1616
churches with large congregations were in existence in
five provinces of the Chinese Empire.

Even more important was Jesuit propaganda in
South America. The missions of the Society in
Paraguay won the admiration not only of the religious
but of philosophers and men of the world. The
plan of the fathers in this country was to separate

n6 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

the natives from the Spaniards, whose influence was
hostile to Christian morality and to form an impcrium
in imperio. They taught the natives " to sow and
reap, to plant trees and build houses, to read and sing."
They charmed them by their gorgeous ritual and by
the sentimentality of their theology. They taught
them songs about the crucified Son of God, " Whose
head droops like the stalk of yellow corn." Yet, though
the Jesuit community in Paraguay was one of the chief
glories of the Society, though it refined and elevated
the native Indian, as well as making him childishly
happy and content ; yet it failed to make him either a
full-grown man or a moral and consistent Christian.
Thus it was easily swept away by the intolerance of
the Spanish Government, which resented its champion-
ship of the rights of the slave and its paternal interest
in the happiness of a subject race.

The ultimate failure of the Jesuits in Paraguay was,
therefore, a failure in the cause of justice and righteous-
ness, and proves that, even when unsuccessful, the
Society was animated in its missionary labours by a
spirit of Christian benevolence and disinterested
humanity.

If the Jesuits could not achieve success, they at least
deserved it, and their failures in distant lands are far
more creditable to the character of the Society than
their noisier triumphs in European countries.

" Hopes have precarious life ;
But faithfulness can feed on suffering
And knows no disappointment."

VI

THE JESUITS IN EUROPE

Unlike Islam, the Christian Religion is based upon a
separation between the secular and spiritual authority ;
though it involves the slow permeation of the secular
by the spiritual, " a little leaven leavening the whole
lump."

Our Lord Himself laid down the principle governing
the mutual relations of Church and State when He said :
" Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's ;
and unto God the things which are God's " ; and,
when the martyrs refused to offer sacrifices to Caesar,
they laid the foundation of the modern conception of
spiritual freedom.

But the Western Church which through the earlier
Middle Ages contended boldly for spiritual independ-
ence became in time thoroughly secularised. We can
trace this process of secularisation quite clearly,
through Innocent III and Boniface VIII to Leo X and
the Popes of the Renaissance. By the time of Loyola
it was complete.

" Time was," said a speaker at the Council of Basle,
" when I thought it well that the secular should be
completely separated from the spiritual power. But I
have since been taught that virtue apart from power
is ridiculous ; and that the Pope, without the Church's
patrimony, presents to us nothing but a servant of

117

Ii8 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

kings and princes." The Popes of the Renaissance
were pre-eminently secular princes, consequently they
lost their spiritual hold upon the conscience of Christen-
dom while, on the other hand, they were incapable of
maintaining their position as temporal monarchs. " At
the time," says Creighton, " when the security of the
Papacy seemed greatest, when it had its roots most
firmly in material interests, it was suddenly called upon
to justify its immemorial position."

At the Council of Constance (1414 to 1418) the
Church endeavoured to reform herself from within.
This attempt broke down because when the question
arose as to whether the Council should carry out the
needed reforms first, or elect the Pope first, it decided
on the latter course and no sooner was Martin V elected
than he dismissed the assembly. The absolutist theory
of Church Government thus triumphed over the Consti-
tutional, but was followed only a century later by
disunion and disruption.

By the time of Loyola, the demand for a General
Council had again revived and was ultimately forced
upon the Popes, greatly against their will, by the
Emperor Charles V. It was clear to that monarch
that something must be done at once to conciliate
moderate opinion and to avert a universal revolt
of the northern nations from Catholicism. It was no
longer possible to blink the situation, the political
consequences of Papal corruption compelled a decision.
Reuchlin and Erasmus had opened to thoughtful men
the true text of the Holy Scriptures, the criticism of
Filelfo had exposed the False Decretals upon which
the Papal pretensions were based, while the universal
rise of the national spirit made men refuse subservience
to a Church which trampled upon their legitimate

The Jesuits in Europe 1 19

aspirations and fought the world with its own
weapons.

Yet it was not until the Pontificate of Paul III (1534
to 1549) tnat tne Roman Curia realised the vital
seriousness of the situation ; and from Paul's occupa-
tion of the Papal see must we date the Catholic
Reaction in which the Jesuits took so prominent a
part. It was Paul III who promoted the Catholic
Reformers Contarini, Pole, Morone and Caraffa to the
Cardinalate, approved the organisation of the Company
of Jesus in 1540, introduced the Inquisition into Italy
in 1542, established the Index in 1543 and opened the
Council of Trent in 1545.

The Council of Trent (1545 to 1563) marks a new
phase of Papal development and is one of the out-
standing landmarks of ecclesiastical history. It
sanctioned departures from Catholic practice as vital
and as revolutionary as those introduced by Luther
and Melancthon ; it dealt a death-blow to Episcopal
authority and established the Jesuits as the inspired
interpreters of Papal policy, thus inaugurating an era
of ecclesiastical tyranny, subterfuge and persecution.

It is not to be denied that the Council of Trent
initiated also spiritual reforms of great and lasting
value. Under the influence of Carlo Borromeo, the
saintly Archbishop of Milan, it reformed many abuses
and drew up the famous Tridentine Catechism ; but it
also crystallised into actual dogma many questionable
and hitherto unauthorised beliefs of the Mediaeval
Church .

From a purely constitutional point of view, the
Council was a sham from beginning to end. The Popes
packed the Council with innumerable Italian bishops,
voting exactly as they were instructed to vote by the

120 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

supreme pontiff, who made the best terms he could for
himself with each European sovereign separately by
secret diplomacy. Thus it was said by Father Sarpi
that, at the Council of Trent, "the Holy Ghost had a
way of arriving in the Spanish Ambassador's mail bag."

The Jesuit who acted as chief Papal adviser at the
Council was Diego Lainez, who succeeded Loyola as
General in 1558. He supported the Pope in his diplo-
matic methods of settling disputes and, in order to
destroy the efforts of the reforming cardinals to find
a via media on Luther's doctrine of justification by
faith only, threw over the predestinarian theology of
St. Augustine with which it was associated and pro-
claimed the doctrine of human free will.

The influence of Lainez on the Society of Jesus
resembled that of Brother Elias on the Order of
St. Francis. He introduced a still more despotic
element of government, altering the original con-
stitutions of Loyola ; he also adopted a more
worldly tone. He refused to make choir offices and
daily services obligatory on members of the Society,
while he extended its educational activities and
increased its hold on those in high places. He was also
far less scrupulous than Loyola, a type of the second
generation of Jesuits whose conduct lends an element
of justification to the term " Jesuitical," as synonymous
with subtle and underhand methods of dealing. He
made the welfare of humanity subsidiary to the aims
and interests of the Society ; but his energy was such
that when he died, in 1564, the Company of Jesus had
increased to eighteen provinces, and possessed no less
than 130 colleges.

But it was under the Neapolitan, Claude Aquaviva,
5th General, 1581 to 1615, that the Society reached its

The Jesuits in Europe 12 1

maximum of influence and began at the same time to
acquire a sinister reputation for its interference with
questions of politics and government. In this matter
exaggeration is to be deprecated. The majority of the
Jesuits were exclusively devoted to education and the
spiritual life, but the exceptions were numerous and
they counted among them the leaders of the Society.
English readers are familiar with this phase of Jesuit
activity, not only from the biassed pages of West-
ward Ho ! ; but from the more sympathetic pre-
sentation of it in Esmond and John Inglesant. In
England, the Jesuits plotted against Queen Elizabeth
and in France against Henri IV; the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes is also to be attributed to their
machinations. The Regent of the Jesuit College at
Treves gave his blessing to Balthasar Gerard, the
assassin of William the Silent ; in Venice they
were expelled for plotting against the independence
of the Republic. Even Carlo Borromeo and S. Theresa
distrusted them ; Sarpi declared that the sure
sign of being right was to be in contradiction to a
Jesuit ; and that St. Peter, directed by a Jesuit
confessor, might have arrived at denying Christ without
sin.

The best commentary on the political bias of the
Jesuits is perhaps to be found in our own country, in
the career of that robust arch-plotter, Robert Parsons,
1546 to 1610.

Robert Parsons was born at Nether Stowey in
Somerset, of good yeoman stock. Educated at Oxford,
he became at an early age Bursar of Balliol College,
where he showed a leaning towards Calvinistic theology.
During a tour in Belgium he came under the influence
of a Jesuit father and, passing through the Spiritual

122 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

Exercises at Louvain, was received into the Company of
Jesus. In 1579, when it was decided to found a Jesuit
mission in England, Parsons, on account of his versa-
tility and indomitable will, was appointed its first
Superior.

He was accompanied by the saintly Edward
Campion, a man of great spirituality and thoroughly
loyal to his native country. Unfortunately for him,
the English Government regarded all Jesuits as agents
of Philip II of Spain and consequently as traitors,
subject to torture and the gallows. Campion was
betrayed by a spy, who afterwards asked for and
received his forgiveness ; and suffered for his faith at
Tyburn. Parsons the real plotter, after a temporary
residence with the Shelley family in Sussex, took flight
to the Continent.

From this time until his death, all Parsons' energies
were devoted to the overthrow of Elizabeth and the
establishment of a Spanish dynasty in England. The
average Roman Catholic in this country was perfectly
loyal to the Crown, but Parsons persistently represented
to the Pope that they were not and did his utmost to
prevent the loyal monastic Orders from obtaining any
influence in England. He even obtained the appoint-
ment of an Archpriest, who should exercise authority
over the Roman Clergy in England in the interests of
the Jesuits.

Cardinal Bellarmine, the ablest of Jesuit theologians,
maintained, in opposition to Elizabeth's claim to
be " Supreme Governor," that the Pope had the
right of changing the Government. This theory
Parsons consistently adopted, and stoutly maintained.
When, in 1587, Sir William Stanley, commanding the
English troops in Holland, betrayed the city of

The Jesuits in Europe 123

Deventer to the Spaniards, Parsons wrote a treatise
justifying this abominable treason and maintaining
that all English Catholics were " bound, upon pain of
damnation, to do the like." Parsons, indeed, com-
pletely identified himself with the Spanish Govern-
ment's political designs upon England. He founded
numerous Jesuit seminaries in Spain to further these
designs and used his powers as Rector of the English
College at Rome with the same object in view. In the
words of Mr. Taunton, " The one hope of regaining
England was, in Parsons' eyes, not the patient toil
and blood of missionaries but the armed intervention
of Spain."

Two of his pamphlets had an immense but also a
most curious success. In The book of the Succession
he appealed to the people, asserting that they had the
right to dethrone their sovereign whose religion was of
more importance than his hereditary claims. By Act
of Parliament it was made treasonable to possess a
copy of this pamphlet ; but, by one of the ironies of
history, it was afterwards used by the Puritans to
justify the execution of Charles I. Parsons also
published a work entitled A Memorial for the Refor-
mation in England, in which he demanded the restora-
tion of the confiscated abbey lands and urged the
setting up of the Inquisition in England, though
the name Inquisition was carefully avoided. This
pamphlet exercised great influence on the mind of
James II and determined the direction of his eccle-
siastical policy in Great Britain.

Yet Parsons lived to see all his grandiose schemes
for the conversion of England fail. They failed
because of the inherent loyalty of Englishmen to the
Crown and because they distrusted a religion which

124 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

came to them disfigured in the garb of politics and
through a man devoid of every honest scruple. Even
the Pope at last threw Parsons over, for he found that
in his dealings with him Parsons was no more to be
trusted than in his dealings with heretics. He was
particularly enraged with him for throwing dust into
his eyes by misrepresenting the majority of English
Catholics as disloyal to the throne, for this statement
had led him to pursue a policy hopeless from the first.

Those who wish to understand Parsons should
study his portrait, for his is a face which tells its own
story. Big, burly and dark, his piercing eye gives the
impression of subtlety. His smile is said to have been
attractive, but in moments of anger his whole counten-
ance was terrible and alarming. His mouth indicates
a grim humour which could easily turn to biting
sarcasm. His massive chin suggests great tenacity of
purpose, while his powerful forehead marks him out
as a man of high mental attainments and a born
leader of men. Indefatigable, astute and thorough in
all that he undertook, his energy was worthy of a
better cause and his patience of a greater success. His
favourite text is said to have been, " Let us not be
weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if
we faint not."

We have seen that Parsons was not the only type of
English Jesuit that the Society comprised men of
purely spiritual aims, like Edward Campion, ready to
pour out their blood to save England from apostasy.
Half-way between these two types stands Henry
Garnett, notorious for his connection with Gunpowder
Plot. Henry Garnett, the son of a Nottingham
schoolmaster, was educated at Winchester and studied
law in London. He became afterwards the intimate

The Jesuits in Europe 125

friend of Cardinal Bellarmine and acquired a great
reputation for his varied learning. The celebrated
lawyer Coke described him as a " man grave, discreet,
wise, and learned and of excellent ornament both of
nature and art ; and one that, if he will, may do His
Majesty as much good service as any subject I know of
in England." If the service which Garnett afterwards
rendered was not such as Coke hoped for, at any rate
his brain and pen were never idle. He supervised the
Jesuit Mission for eighteen years with such success
that its members increased from three to forty during
his rule. His work was attended by many dangers and
carried on under many aliases and disguises. He
ministered to his fellow religionists in scattered country
houses and visited and consoled them in prison. His
name, however, is chiefly connected with his theory of
equivocation and with the attempt to blow up the
Houses of Parliament.

The Act of the English Government which led to
Gunpowder Plot was a declaration issued in February,
1604, which permitted lay Catholics to remain in
England, but banished all priests. A month later,
Catesby and Winter, both friends of Garnett, as
also was Guy Fawkes, originated the treason. In
June, Catesby propounded to Garnett the following
question of conscience : " Is it lawful to kill innocent
persons together with the guilty ? " The case was
supposed to be that of a siege and Garnett declared it
to be lawful. Later, Father Green way revealed to
Garnett the details of the plot. After this, Garnett,
now an accessory, withdrew in part from Catesby 's
conspiracy, but took no steps to acquaint the Govern-
ment with the treason. Knowing that it was the
intention of the conspirators to blow up Parliament,

126 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

he left London for a pilgrimage to the well of St.
Winifred, " for his health, and to shake off this business
about London." When Catesby's servant brought
him news of the failure of the plot, he wrote to the
Government, proclaiming his innocence, " with the
most solemn oaths " and " as one who hopeth for
everlasting salvation." After being hidden in close
confinement at Hindlip Hall, near Worcester, he
eventually gave himself up and was imprisoned in
London. He was well treated and, by the King's
express orders, not allowed to be tortured.

Of the value of his evidence we can judge from the
following : He denied having been at certain houses,
having held conversations with a certain Oldcorne
and having written a certain letter to Father Green-
way ; protesting on his salvation and priesthood that
what he said was true. But, when all these points
had been proved against him, he freely admitted them,
saying, " that he might lawfully deny it as he did
till they were able to prove it, for no man is bound to
charge himself till he is convicted." Plausible as is
this excuse, it is obvious that it was impossible to
place confidence in a man who made truth a matter
of expediency ; and to whom solemn oaths and
attestations were mere " scraps of paper," unless the
contrary to them could be proved. There is a clear
reference to the case of Garnett, under his well-known
alias of Farmer, and to his equivocation in the second
act of " Macbeth." When the porter hears a knocking
at the gate of the Castle, he calls out, " Who's there,
in the name of Beelzebub ? Here's a farmer that
hanged himself in the expectation of plenty. . . .
Knock, knock ! Who's there ? Faith, here's an
equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against

The Jesuits in Europe 127

either scale ; who committed treason enough for God's
sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven." On his
trial Garnett said : " We teach not that equivocation
may be used promiscuously ; but we think it lawful
when we are pressed to questions that are harmful to
ourselves or others to answer ; or urged upon examina-
tion to answer to one whom we do not hold to be a
competent judge." Even the Roman Catholic historian
Dr. Lingard declares that " by seeking shelter under
equivocation, Garnett deprived himself of the pro-
tection which the truth might have afforded him ;
nor could he in such circumstances reasonably com-
plain if the King refused credit to his assertions of
innocence and permitted the law to take its course."
Garnett met his sentence with composure and died
with the dignity which became him. " I acknowledge
myself," he said, " not to die a victorious martyr but
as a penitent thief." He was executed on a scaffold
in St. Paul's Churchyard and his head set up afterwards
on London Bridge. As he was being led out of his
cell he said to one of the cooks : " Farewell, good
friend Tom, this day I will save thee the labour to
provide my dinner."

The heyday of the Jesuits in England was during
the reign of the last two Stuart princes. In 1669,
Father Lobb the Provincial, converted James, Duke
of York, the heir to the throne ; while Charles II at a
secret conference also declared himself a Catholic.
By the secret treaty of Dover in 1670, Charles obtained
the promise of Louis XIV to support him with an
army and a handsome subsidy, in the event of an
attempt to win England to the Papal cause. It was,
however, provided in the treaty that Charles should
openly announce his conversion and this he shrank

128 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

from doing. Nevertheless, " in a moment of drunken
confidence," he revealed his secret conversion to
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftsbury, and from
this moment Shaftesbury became his bitter enemy
and assisted in the engineering of the infamous Titus
Oates' plot. Although Oates' was a rogue and his
evidence untrustworthy, the supposed revelations of
the plot, coupled with the real danger in which the
country stood from Papal designs, raised a blaze
of Protestant fury throughout the length and breadth
of the land. But when Charles died, in 1685, the hopes
of the Jesuits were realised, and in James II England
saw for the last time a Roman Catholic upon the
throne. The Jesuit father, Edward Petre, was made
Clerk of the Closet and became the real power behind
the King, as another Jesuit, Pere La Chaise, was
behind Louis XIV. Father Parsons' Memorial for
the Reformation of England was now presented to
James II and became the programme of that monarch
in his ultramontane designs upon the liberties of the
country. Attempts were made to dominate the
Universities ; six Jesuits were sent to take over
Trinity College, Dublin, and Roman professors were
forced on the University of Oxford. In 1687 James
suspended the oaths of supremacy and allegiance and
in the interest of Roman Catholics made his Declara-
tion of liberty of Conscience. The imprisonment of
the Seven Bishops for refusing to publish the Declara-
tion from their pulpits was probably suggested by
Father Petre, but it was a fatal mistake. The laity
of the country were in no mood to be governed by
Jesuits who, we are told by an impartial contem-
porary, were more hated in England than Moham-
medans. Soon after, the King fled the country and

The Jesuits in Europe 129

Father Petre followed suit. This worthy father was
not a man of great ability and of very poor judgment.
He forced the King to extremes without a thought
to their probable consequences and ruined the cause
of the Society in England for ever.

He is sarcastically described by Dryden, in his
" Fable of the Swallows " :

" With these the Martin readily concurred,
A Church-begot, and Church believing bird :
Of little body, but of lofty mind,
Round bellied, for a dignity designed :
And much a dunce, as Martins are by kind :
Yet often quoted Canon laws and Code
And Fathers which he never understood j1
But little learning needs — in noble blood."

Thus the Jesuits' great opportunity for showing
their skill at statecraft passed away. The only results
of their labours were to establish the Protestant suc-
cession firmly upon the throne and to destroy their
friends.

To pass from England to the affairs of the Society
in France, is to pass from the circumference of their
influence to very near its centre. Basking in the
sunshine of royal approval, under Louis XIV, the
Society endeavoured to win the world of fashion for
the Church by its insinuating manners and lax casuistry.
In opposition to the right of private judgment set
up by the Huguenots, the Jesuits sought to bring the
whole of a man's life under the direction of his con-
fessor. But to do this in a corrupt society, indisposed
to reform its ways, involved immense concessions. If
the confessor was to know everything which a man
did in private, he must compensate his penitent by
making the terms of salvation as easy as possible,

130 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

accepting imperfect repentance as an equivalent for
contrition and amendment, substituting orthodoxy
and spiritual direction for uprightness in word and
deed. The Jesuits also saved their clients from the
responsibility of spiritual thought, they undertook the
direction of their conscience alike in small things and
great. Luther is said to have asked a certain charcoal
burner, who said he believed what the Church believed,
what the Church did believe ? to which he replied
that he had not the slightest idea. Nor was it at all
necessary that he should. God and obedience to the
Church were synonymous terms with the Jesuit and,
provided a man came to confession with regularity,
his confessor undertook to settle his spiritual affairs
on easy terms with the Supreme Director of Con-
sciences !

Yet, even in the France of Louis XIV, such a
travesty of religion was not suffered to go unchallenged,
and in the Jansenists there arose within the fold of
the Catholic Church an energetic protest in favour
of personal religion and the severer principles of the
Gospel. In the opinion of Cornelius Jansen, Bishop
of Ypres, the founder of this new movement, the
Church had sacrificed conscience and human feeling
to mere logic and opportunism. He insisted on the
need of spiritual conversion and declared that no
amount of Churchgoing, or regular confession, could
save the soul. Not that he sympathised with Luther
or Calvin, for he held that the process of justification
by faith must be continuous within the fold of the
Roman Church. A climax was reached when, in 1643,
the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld published his famous
pamphlet on Frequent Communion, in which he
violently attacked the spiritual laxity of the Jesuits,

The Jesuits in Europe 131

arousing a storm of orthodox protest which led to the
formal condemnation of the whole Jansenist move-
ment by the Pope and the Sorbonne.

It was under these circumstances that Pascal, the
friend of Arnauld and Port Royal the stronghold of
the Jansenists, launched his Provincial Letters, which
appeared anonymously in 1656-7, and were eagerly
devoured, especially in the higher circles of society.
In these letters Pascal first laughs at and then de-
nounces with scathing though delicate irony the Jesuit
attitude towards religion ; exposing their cynical
methods of tampering with evil in the interests of their
Society and the Church. The letters were written with
such rapidity that the author was naturally asked
whether he had read all the voluminous works of
Jesuit casuistry from which he had quoted, to which
he replied that " if he had done so, he would have
spent the greater part of his life in the company of
very unwholesome books." He claimed, however, to
have verified his references ; and the substantial
accuracy of his charges against the Jesuits has never
been disproved.

Only two criticisms of unfairness on his part must
be conceded. Firstly, he selected the wildest moral
aberrations of Jesuit confessors and treated them as
examples of their normal methods. Secondly, he
visited all the spiritual errors of the Roman Church
on the Jesuits alone, a charge which does not bear the
test of a candid examination. The scope of this work
does not admit of many quotations, but the following
passage illustrates clearly enough the nature and
method of Pascal's attack. " Do not run away with
the impression that the Jesuits want to deprave the
world ; their great fault is that they do not strain

132 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

every nerve to improve it. That would be bad policy.
They have so high an opinion of themselves that they
think that religion could not prosper, unless their
influence was felt on all sides and everyone's conscience
was in their keeping. As the severity of the Gospel
suits a few, they apply it strictly to those few ; as it
does not suit the many, they leave it out of account
in dealing with the mass of mankind. Thanks to what
Father Petau calls this easy and obliging conduct,
they can hold out a helping hand to all. If a man
comes to them firmly determined to restore illgotten
goods, do not think that they will dissuade him ;
on the contrary, they will encourage so pious a resolve.
But if another man wants to be absolved without
making restitution, his case must be hard indeed if
they cannot find some loophole. Thus they keep all
their friends and have an answer for their enemies.
If one throws extreme indulgence in their teeth, they
at once produce their austere Directors and some
books which they have written on the severity of the
law of Christ ; and simple souls, who only look at the
outside of things, ask for no further proof."

Pascal attacks in succession all the dubious moral
stratagems of the Jesuits, probabilism, directing the
intention, mental reserve and so on. He talks to
Jesuits, who, out of their tomes of casuistry, find
justification for lying, theft, gluttony and even murder.
Take, for example, the question of keeping one's word,
it is a Jesuit who is speaking : " Listen to the general
rule laid down by Escobar. ' Promises are not binding
when the person in making them had no intention to
bind himself.' Now it seldom happens that any have
such intention, unless when they confirm their promises
by an oath or contract ; so that when one simply

The Jesuits in Europe 133

says, ' I will do it,' he means he will do it if he does
not change his mind ; for he does not wish by saying
that to deprive himself of his liberty. ' My dear
Father,' I observed, ' I had no idea that the direction
of the intention possessed the power of rendering
promises null and void.' "

Or take the case of probabilism, which is thus
defined by a Jesuit. " A person may do what he con-
siders allowable, according to a probable opinion,
though the contrary may be a safer one. The opinion
of a single grave doctor is all that is requisite." " Well,
reverend Father," said I, " you have given us sinners
ample room at all events ! Thanks to your probable
opinions, we have liberty of conscience with a witness !
Only think of being able to say ' Yes ' or ' No,' just
as you please ! It is impossible to prize such a privilege
too highly." Pascal wants, however, to know whether
a probable opinion, when it is obviously an unsound
one, will be upheld in the confessional ? " How hasty
you are," replies the Jesuit, " listen to what follows :
' To refuse absolution to a penitent who acts according
to a probable opinion, is a sin which is, in its nature,
mortal' "

The climax of the Provincial Letters is reached
when the Jesuit, after excusing murder on the flimsiest
pretext, goes on to prove that, since the Gospel, even
to love God is not necessary in order to obtain
absolution. Then Pascal throws off all reserve, and
passes from polite irony to burning indignation.

" Oh, Father ! " I burst forth, patience herself could
listen no longer, " was it not enough to allow men
forbidden pleasures without number under cover of
your special pleading ? Must you go further and hold
them out a bribe to commit crimes which even you

134 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

cannot excuse, by promising them an easy absolution
without change of life or sign of repentance, beyond
promises a hundred times broken ? But even here
your Fathers have not stayed their hand. From
tampering with the holiest rules of Christian practice
they have gone on to an entire subversion of the law
of Christ. They set at naught the Great Command-
ment, on which hang all the Law and the Prophets.
They say that it is not necessary to love God, nay
that release from this irksome duty was the boon
which Jesus Christ brought into the world. Before
the Incarnation it was necessary to love Him but
since He so loved the world that He gave His only-
begotten Son, the world has been dispensed from
loving Him in return. Open your eyes, my dear Father,
and, if the other aberrations of your casuists have
failed to move you, take warning from these last.
May God, in His Mercy, teach your Fathers how false
were the lights that led them on to these rocks. May
He fill their hearts with that love of Himself from
which they have ventured to dispense mankind."

Though the immediate effect of the Provincial
Letters was considerable, Pascal neither succeeded in
converting the Jesuits nor in saving the Jansenists
from bitter persecution ; but he did not write in
vain. The moral indignation and intellectual force
of the Letters co-operated with the political errors of
the Fathers to alienate from the Society the good
opinions of the world. Between 1606 and 1764 the
Company of Jesus was expelled from nearly every
country in Europe, and, as we have already stated,
was suppressed by the Pope in 1773. The doctrine
of probabilism was powerfully opposed by Bossuet,
and when it was again revived by the Redemptorist

The Jesuits in Europe 135

Alfonso Liguori, in the middle of the eighteenth century,
it was in a much modified and more innocuous form.
According to Liguori, the more indulgent opinion may
be followed whenever its authorities are " nearly as
good " as those on the other side. Even this solution,
aimed as it was at gaining worldly society for the
Church, was an unsatisfactory moral compromise and
would have been far from satisfying the upright and
fearless conscience of Pascal.

Nevertheless, on the broad issue upon which he
fought, Pascal triumphed in the long run ; and his
words of prophecy justified themselves in the subse-
quent course of ecclesiastical history. " You think
that force is on your side ; I think that truth and
justice are on mine. Strange and tedious is the war
between these two : not that victory hangs in the
balance. Violence has only a certain course to run,
marked out by Providential Ordering. Truth will
endure for ever, sure of its triumph at the last ; for it
is eternal and almighty like God."

The services rendered by the Society of Jesus, in its
earliest days, were services which it is impossible to
deny and would be ungenerous to minimise. It
aroused the consciences of thousands of Catholics to a
sense of moral responsibility and to a reawakened
devotion to their Divine Redeemer.

It enlarged the mental horizon of Southern Christen-
dom and gave a stimulus to missionary work in foreign
lands which restored an heroic tone to the Church and
left an example of unselfish service powerful in its
effects to the present day. In Europe, the honours of
the Catholic Reaction, such as they are, belong to
them ; and without their energy, enthusiasm and self-
sacrifice, the tide of religious innovation would have

136 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

swept far farther afield and have left intact much less
of the mediaeval system of the Church. On the other
hand, the Jesuits were, as they still are, the party of
remorseless reaction. They opposed liberty of thought
with every faculty at their disposal ; and fond as they
were of moral compromise, they were adamantine in
their maintenance of Papal authority and eagerly
anxious to strengthen and increase it. In the severe
but balanced judgment of Dean Church, they were
" an engine for maintaining at any cost the spiritual
supremacy of an unreformed theocracy, with all its
insolence, all its accumulated abuses and all its false-
hoods."

Living in a time of fierce controversy, they revelled
in religious and political disputation and thoroughly
enjoyed the heat and conflict of the fray. " The
Jesuits felt," says a modern writer, " that they were
the new men, the men of the time ; so with a perfect
confidence in themselves, they went out to set the
Church to rights."

Yet with all their self-confidence they failed ; for,
unlike the Franciscans, their spirit was not the spirit
of the coming ages.

Again, unlike the older orders of the Church, they
produced few minds of a really high or independent
character. The Jesuits can boast " no Aquinas, no
Anselm, no Roger Bacon." Loyola and Xavier were
founders, but after their time no genius appeared in the
ranks of their Society. Able organisers like Lainez
and Aquaviva, respectable commentators like
Cornelius a Lapide, industrious scholars like the
Bollandists were fairly numerous, but these were men
of talent only and of little originality. An exception
might perhaps be made in the case of Denys Petau,

The Jesuits in Europe 137

the French Jesuit of the seventeenth century, whose
unfinished treatise De theologicis dogmatibus was the
first systematic attempt to trace the evolution of
Christian doctrine from the historical point of view ;
and a work which, in later days, suggested to Cardinal
Newman his Development of Christian Doctrine.

The Jesuit process of " scooping out the will " robbed
the Society of robust and independent minds, and when
such appeared, they soon left its narrow ranks to
become in some cases its severest critics.

The whole Jesuit system of education tended to a
stereotyped mediocrity. The Ratio Studiorum devised
by Aquaviva, and still obligatory on the Society, is
incompatible with all breadth and progress in educa-
tion. Novel opinions may not even be discussed and
nothing may be taught which in any way contradicts
the prevalent opinion of Jesuit Fathers. The Vulgate
is always to be defended as the orthodox version of the
Bible, and in philosophy, the authority of Aristotle,
even when stultified by the actual experiments of a
Galileo, is never to be departed from. The results of
such a training, pursued for three centuries, has been
to make of the loyal Jesuit a master of cultivated
commonplace, wholly out of touch with the ever-
changing aspects of modern thought and therefore
without influence on the more scientific and alert minds
of the modern world. Nor are Jesuit laymen allowed
more scope or liberty than their clerical confreres.

Enough has perhaps already been said of the Jesuits'
disloyalty to the State, which they regarded as " some-
thing accidental and its form variable," while " the
Church, as the supreme power, alone was eternal."
They were " the stormy petrels of politics " and their
hands were seen to the greatest disadvantage in such

138 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

developments as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
and the Thirty Years' War.

Finally, it may be said, that the Jesuits, true to their
maxim, that the end justifies the means, sacrificed
truth to expediency ; and any society, whether
political or religious, which does this, is bound sooner
or later to come to grief.

For the future of the world belongs to those nations
which, accepting disingenuously the faith of Christ
and His Church, accept also the responsibilities of the
individual conscience, enlightened according to promise
by the spirit of Truth.

For the voice of Divine inspiration is never silent ;
it speaks afresh to every generation, bringing forth out
of the variegated wisdom of God " things new and old."

" The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The revived interest in Franciscan study owes its original
impulse to the Vie de S. Frangois d 'Assise, by Paul Sabatier,
published in November, 1893 (English translation, Hodder
and Stoughton), and those who wish to form a close
acquaintance with the early Franciscan writers cannot do
better than read the critical study of the early authorities
which precedes this biography. All the early lives of the
Saint are now accessible in English. The two lives by
Thomas of Celano have been published by Methuen. In
Dent's Temple Classics we have The Mirror of Perfection,
The Legend of the Three Companions, The Sacrum Com-
mercium, and The Little Flowers of St. Francis. Of the
latter, Sabatier says : " Avec les Fioretti nous entrons
defmitivement dans le domaine de la legende. Ce bijou
litteraire raconte la vie de Francois, de ses compagnons et
de ses disciples telle qu'elle apparaissait au commencement
du quatorzieme siecle, a l'imagination populaire. Nous
n'avons pas a nous arreter a la valeur litteraire de ce
document, une des productions les plus exquises du
moyen age religieux, mais on peut bien dire qu'au point
de vue historique, il ne merite pas l'injuste oubli oii on
l'a laisse. . . . Ce qui donne a ces recits un prix inestimable,
c'est ce qu'on pourrait appeler, faute de mieux, leur
atmosphere. . . . Mieux qu'aucune autre biographie, les
Fioretti nous transportent la-bas en Ombrie, et au
milieu des montagnes de la Marche d'Ancone, pour nous
en faire voir les ermitages et nous meler a. la vie moitie
puerile et moitie angelique, qui etait celle de leurs
habitants." The most recent biographies of value are
Johannes Jorgensen's Saint Francis of Assist, 1906,

139

140 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits

translated from the Danish by Dr. Sloane (Longman's),
and Father Cuthbert's Life. Estimates of value are
to be found in Renan's Essays in Religious History,
Westcott's Social Aspects of Christianity, Creighton's
Essays, and Mr. H. W. Sedgewick's Italy in the Thirteenth
Century. A book of value and original research is Anne
Macdonell's Sons of Francis (Dent), which also contains
an excellent bibliography of early Franciscan literature.
Fra Salimbene's Chronicle is condensed in Mr. G. G.
Coulton's From St. Francis to Dante. The story of the
Franciscans in England is told at length with the original
documents in the Monumenta Franciscana Brewer and
Howlett in the Rolls series. Eccleston's De adventu
fratrum Minor um in Angliam has been translated, with a
preface by Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C. (Sands). Much
light is thrown on the scholastic side of the English Fran-
ciscans by Mr. A. G. Little in his Grey Friars in Oxford
(Oxford Historical Society), and by Mr. Stevenson's
Life of Grosseteste. Mr. Taylor has a study of Roger Bacon
in the second volume of The Medieval Mind (Macmillan).
The story of the early Jesuits begins with The Testament
of Ignatius Loyola, to which Father Tyrrell has written a
preface (Sands), and with the Spiritual Exercises (Burns
and Oates). Mr. Stewart Rose's elaborate work, Loyola
and the Early Jesuits, is full of interesting information, but
uncritical in its estimate of Loyola, and too hagiographical
in tendency. The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier,
by H. J. Coleridge S.J., and Parkman's Jesuits in North
A merica, are indispensable for a knowledge of the missionary
activities of the Society ; as is Ethelred Taunton's History
of the Jesuits in England (Methuen) for the story of Parsons
and Garnett. Other easily accessible works on different
aspects of Jesuit life are Figgis' From Gerson to Grotius,
Ranke's History of the Popes, J. A. Symonds' Catholic
Reaction, the Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal, Pascal,
by Viscount St. Cyres, and Sir James Stephens' Essays in
Ecclesiastical Biography. An admirable critique of Loyola

Bibliography 141

will be found in the first volume of Dean Church's
Occasional Papers. In support of the statements on pages
136-7 with regard to the Ratio Studiorum and its influence
on Jesuit mentality, see article on the Jesuits by the late
R. F. Littledale, and Rev. Ethelred Taunton, S.J., in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth Edition, Vol. 15, to which
I am much indebted; as also to the article on Ultra-
montanism by Carl Mirbt in Vol. 27.

The opinions expressed in this volume have been reached
after an extensive course of reading, and considerable
reflection extending over several years. Readers who
desire to pursue further the fascinating story of Jesuit
enterprise, and to acquaint themselves with the Jesuit
defence against their opponents, can do so by consulting
the following voluminous works : Institutum Societatis
Jesu, 7 vols., Avignon, 1830-8 ; Backer, Bibliotheque des
ecrivains de la Compagnie de Jesus, 7 vols., Paris, 1853-61 ;
Cretineau Joly, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jesus, 6 vols.,
Paris, 1844 ; R. G. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations and Allied
Documents, 73 vols., Cleveland, 1896-1901.

INDEX

Agnellus of Pisa, 50
Albert of Pisa, 52-3
Aquaviva, Claude, 90, 120-1,

136
Assisi, Basilica of, 24-5, 28

Bacon, Roger, 35, 56, 59-62
Bernardino of Siena, 65-6
Bonaventura, St., 31, 34-6
Boniface VIII, 40, 117

Campion, Edward, 122, 124
Canticle of the Creatures, 18, 36
Clara, Santa, 13-14, 18, 31
Company of Jesus, 67-9, 75, 78-
9, 82-6, 135-8

De Brebeuf, Jean, 108-10
De Montfort, Simon, 47, 57

Elias of Cortona, 16, 23-9, 120

Franciscan Gospel, 20-22
Franciscan Missions to Moham-
medans, 14-15, 66

Garnett, Henry, 124-7

Giles, Brother, 30-32

Gregory IX, Cardinal Ugolino,

14, 16, 26-7
Grosseteste, Robert, 47, 54-7, 59

Innocent III, 11-12, 117
Inquisition, Spanish, 75

Jacopone da Todi, 36-41, 45
Jesuit Casuistry, 88-90, 129-35
Jesuit Education, 87, 137
Jesuit Missions, 88, 93-116
Jesuit Politics, 83, 90-2, 104-5,
120-9, 134. 1 37-8

Joachim of Flora, 34
Jogues, Isaac, 1 10-13
John of Parma, 32-5

Lainez, Diego, 120

Le Jeune, Paul, 106-8

Leo, Brother, 17, 25-6, 29-30, 44

Louis IX, 43-4

Manresa, 72-4
Marsh, Adam, 56-9
Montserrat, 72

Oxford Friars, 50, 54-6

Parenti, Giovanni, 26-7
Pascal, Blaise, 89, 131-5
Parsons, Robert, 90, 12 1-4, 128
Paul III, 119
Petre, Edward, 128-9
Probabilism, 89, 132-3, 134-5

Ricci, Matteo, 11 4-1 5

Salimbene of Parma, 17, 33, 41-5
Sarpi, Paolo, 87, 120-1
Spiritual Exercises, 72, 75, 77-8,
79-81

Third Order of St. Francis, 63-4
Thomas of Celano, 8, 19-20, 26,

29. 36-7
Thomas of Eccleston, 49-50
Trent, Council of, 1 19-120

William of Occam, 63
Wyclif, John, 56, 62-3

Xavier, Francis, 68-9, 78-9, 93-

104
Xavier, Jerome, 105

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