ius IV., and Gregory XIII.,
heaped favors and showered wealth upon the order. The Jesuits
incarnated the political spirit of the Papacy at this epoch; they lent
it a potency for good and evil which the decrepit but still vigorous
institution arrogated to itself. They adapted its anachronisms with
singular adroitness to the needs of modern society. They transfused
their throbbing blood into its flaccid veins, until it became doubtful
whether the Papacy had been absorbed into the Jesuits, or whether the
Jesuits had remodeled the Papacy for contemporary uses. But this
tendency in the aspiring order to identify itself with Rome, this
ambition to command the prestige of Rome as leverage for carrying out
its own designs, stirred the resentment of haughty and _intransigeant_
Pontiffs. The Jesuits were not beloved by Paul IV., Pius V., and Sixtus
V.

It remains, however, to inquire in what the originality, the effective
operation, and the modifying influence of the Jesuit Society consisted
during the period with which we are concerned. It was their object to
gain control over Europe by preaching, education, the direction of
souls, and the management of public affairs. In each of these
departments their immediate success was startling; for they labored with
zeal, and they adapted their methods to the requirements of the age.
Yet, in the long run, art, science, literature, religion, morality and
politics, all suffered from their interference. By preferring artifice
to reality, affectation to sincerity, shams and subterfuges to plain
principle and candor, they confused the conscience and enfeebled the
intellect of Catholic Europe. When we speak of the Jesuit style in
architecture, rhetoric and poetry, of Jesuit learning and scholarship,
of Jesuit casuistry and of Jesuit diplomacy, it is either with languid
contempt for bad taste and insipidity, or with the burning indignation
which systematic falsehood and corruption inspire in honorable minds.

In education, the Jesuits, if they did not precisely innovate, improved
upon the methods of the grammarians which had persisted from the Middle
Ages through the Renaissance. They spared no pains in training a large
and competent body of professors, men of extensive culture, formed upon
one uniform pattern, and exercised in the art of popularizing knowledge.
These teachers were distributed over the Jesuit colleges; and in every
country their system was the same. New catechisms, grammars, p