and women of wealth
who, in the early days of the order, were honored by the notice of
Jesuit priests. Add to this the fact that the Jesuits were, in general,
a picked body of young, strong, handsome men of gracious manners and
fascinating address, and we have the secret of their power over women.
Small wonder that women worked indefatigably to advance the interests of
the new order.

Allied to the Jesuits only by the smarting, chafing tie of persecution
were the Jewish women. After the Thirty Years' War there were many of
these in Germany. Their descendants, even when Christians, were debarred
from entering the Society of Jesus. The babes of Jewish mothers were
often forcibly baptized. Freytag quotes a pathetic story told in an old
pamphlet written by two Jesuit fathers, Eder and Christel.

One Samuel Metzel was converted to Christianity. His wife refused to
forsake her ancestral faith. Her four children were taken away from her
and placed in Christian families. She was about to bring a fifth child
into the world. In terror lest she should lose this one too, she hid
herself in a retired spot. Her oldest little girl unconsciously betrayed
the mother's hiding place. When the babe was born the father and the two
priests sent a Christian midwife to baptize and kidnap it. Three "pious
ladies" accompanied the midwife.

When the Jewish mother saw that the midwife baptized her newborn babe,
she "sprang frantically from her bed and with vehement cries tore the
infant from the woman's arms." The "pious ladies" sent for masculine
help. The city judge, with armed men, entered the room and "tried to
separate the now little Christian son from his mother. But as she, like
a frantic one, held the child so tightly clasped in her arms, they
desisted, fearing to stifle the babe, and the judicious judge contented
himself with strictly forbidding the Jews in the house to try to make a
Jew of the child." The Lord Count of the empire, when appealed to,
decided that the child must be delivered to its father. The priestly
historians add, with evident pride and satisfaction: "Not long after,
the mother who had so stubbornly adhered to Judaism gave in and was
baptized."

When the plague swept Germany, the Jesuits and their women coadjutors
were magnificent in their self-forgetfulness and unremitting work of
succor. Splendidly, too, as a rule, did they stand by one unfortunate
class of women the so-called witches of the seventeenth century.