oor students for the Gospel Ministry, for Schools of
Technology and boat-clubs and accommodations for the sons of the rich
and worldly?

Now the Society of Jesus went through just such a transformation as has
taken place, almost within the memory of living men, in the life and
habits and ideas of the people of Boston and Philadelphia and in the
teachings of their universities. Some may boldly say, "Why not? This
change indicates progress." But this progress is exactly similar to that
progress which the Jesuits made in the magnificence of their churches,
in the wealth they had hoarded in their colleges, in the fashionable
character of their professors and confessors and preachers, in the
adaptation of their doctrines to the taste of the rich and powerful, in
the elegance and arrogance and worldliness of their dignitaries. Father
La Chaise was an elegant and most polished man of the world, and
travelled in a coach with six horses. If he had not been such a man, he
would not have been selected by Louis XIV. for his confidential and
influential confessor. The change which took place among the Jesuits
arose from the same causes as the change which has taken place among
Methodists and Quakers and Puritans. This change I would not fiercely
condemn, for some think it is progress. But is it progress in that
religious life which early marked these people; or a progress towards
worldly and epicurean habits which they arose to resist and combat? The
early Jesuits were visionary, fanatical, strict, ascetic, religious, and
narrow. They sought by self-denying labors and earnest exhortations,
like Savonarola at Florence, to take the Church out of the hands of the
Devil; and the people reverenced them, as they always have reverenced
martyrs and missionaries. The later Jesuits sought to enjoy their wealth
and power and social position. They became--as rich and prosperous
people generally become--proud, ambitious, avaricious, and worldly. They
were as elegant, as scholarly, and as luxurious as the Fellows of Oxford
University, and the occupants of stalls in the English cathedrals,--that
is all: as worldly as the professors of Yale and Cambridge may become in
half-a-century, if rich widows and brewers and bankers without children
shall some day make those universities as well endowed as Jesuit
colleges were in the eighteenth century. That is the old story of our
fallen humanity. I would no more abuse the Jesuits because they became
confess