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alike and suppressed by the Pope himself, there is not a spot of earth
in Catholic Christendom where the Jesuit can place the sole of his foot.
In this hour of distress, he finds refuge in Russia, and in Protestant
Prussia. Then, restored and tolerated, the order revives here and there
in Europe, with a fitful life; and, at length, blazes out into a glory
of missionary triumphs and martyrdoms in China, in India, in Africa, and
in North America; and now, in these later days, we see it advancing
everywhere to a new epoch of labor and influence. Thorough in education,
perfect in discipline, absolute in obedience--as yielding, as
indestructible, as all-pervading as water or as air!

The Jesuits make strong friends and strong enemies. Many, who are
neither the one nor the other, say of them that their ethics are
artificial, and their system unnatural; that they do not reform nature,
but destroy it; that, aiming to use the world without abusing it, they
reduce it to subjection and tutelage; that they are always either in
dangerous power, or in disgrace; and although they may labor with more
enthusiasm and self-consecration than any other order, and meet with
astonishing successes for a time, yet such is the character of their
system that these successes are never permanent, but result in
opposition, not only from Protestants, and moderate Catholics, and from
the civil power, but from other religious orders and from the regular
clergy in their own Church, an opposition to which they are invariably
compelled to yield, at last. In fine, they declare, that, allowing them
all zeal, and all ability, and all devotedness, their system is too
severe and too unnatural for permanent usefulness anywhere--medicine and
not food, lightning and not light, flame and not warmth.

Not satisfied with this moderated judgment, their opponents have met
them, always and everywhere, with uniform and vehement reprobation. They
say to them--the opinion of mankind has condemned you! The just and
irreversible sentence of time has made you a by-word and a hissing, and
reduced your very name, the most sacred in its origin, to a synonym for
ambition and deceit!

Others, again, esteem them the nearest approach in modern times to that
type of men portrayed by one of the chiefest, in his epistle: "In much
patience, in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in
imprisonments, in tumults, in labors, in watchings, in fastings; by
pureness,