where now two princely temples,
rich with painting and many-colored marble, commemorate his great
services to the Church; where his form stands sculptured in massive
silver; where his bones, enshrined amidst jewels, are placed beneath the
altar of God. His activity and zeal bore down all opposition; and under
his rule the Order of Jesuits began to exist, and grew rapidly to the
full measure of his gigantic powers. With what vehemence, with what
policy, with what exact discipline, with what dauntless courage, with
what self-denial, with what forgetfulness of the dearest private ties,
with what intense and stubborn devotion to a single end, with what
unscrupulous laxity and versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits
fought the battle of their Church, is written in every page of the
annals of Europe during several generations. In the Order of Jesus was
concentrated the quintessence of the Catholic spirit; and the history of
the Order of Jesus is the history of the great Catholic reaction. That
order possessed itself at once of all the strongholds which command the
public mind, of the pulpit, of the press, of the confessional, of the
academies. Wherever the Jesuit preached, the church was too small for
the audience. The name of Jesuit on a title-page secured the circulation
of a book. It was in the ears of the Jesuit that the powerful, the
noble, and the beautiful, breathed the secret history of their lives. It
was at the feet of the Jesuit that the youth of the higher and middle
classes were brought up from childhood to manhood, from the first
rudiments to the courses of rhetoric and philosophy. Literature and
science, lately associated with infidelity or with heresy, now became
the allies of orthodoxy. Dominant in the south of Europe, the great
order soon went forth conquering and to conquer. In spite of oceans and
deserts, of hunger and pestilence, of spies and penal laws, of dungeons
and racks, of gibbets and quartering blocks, Jesuits were to be found
under every disguise, and in every country; scholars, physicians,
merchants, serving-men; in the hostile court of Sweden, in the old manor
houses of Cheshire, among the hovels of Connaught; arguing, instructing,
consoling, stealing away the hearts of the young, animating the courage
of the timid, holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying. Nor
was it less their office to plot against the thrones and lives of
apostate kings, to spread evil rumors, to raise tu