Such is an outline, slight indeed, but still comprising the most essential features of the doctrine presently taught, with the express approval of the Head of the Church, by the accredited organs of the Society, as directly conducive to that best possible governance of mankind, which will make the world radiant with the Greater Glory of God. Of the organisation of the Order we gave a sketch in our last number, and we have seen no reason since to consider it incorrect in any material point. Taken together, these two articles furnish, we believe, a not unfaithful account of the resources of this mysterious Corporation, and of the principles which are agreeable to its spirit. That it has been exercising an ever-increasing power in the Latin Church, is a fact too plainly written in the ecclesiastical history of the last three centuries to be for an instant called in question. What is not so conspicuous is the special element through which the school of Jesuit thought has been subtly working on the spirit of the Roman Catholic Church. This resides in the doctrine of Probabilism, in which lies distilled the sublimated essence of all Jesuit doctrine. The champions of the Order will say, that to pick out passages of the character we have quoted, as typical of what its doctors teach, is to falsify the nature of their writings. We admit that the Jesuit Divines never omit recommendations in favour of a strict observance of the Moral Code. Our contention is, that all these expressions of rigorous sentiment are reduced to mere figures of speech through the all-covering action of the principle of Probabilism, which runs continuously through the volume of Jesuit doctrine like a foot-note which thoroughly modifies the force of the text, exactly as the conditions laid down in the Constitutions with an elaborate display of stringency are practically cancelled through the faculties quietly lodged with the General. Through the slides of a sideproposition artfully masked, the Jesuit Doctors have provided a mechanism for converting at will the whole series of moral principles into a set of dissolving views. Undeniably lax as is the tone of the Jesuit code, it would yet be a misconception to attribute to its framers the deliberate purpose of corrupting morals. The motive that has ever actuated the Society has been to secure influence, and the laxness in its deserere quamprimum poterunt. Datum Romæ in S. Poenitent. die 10 Dec. 1860.' Absolvendi sub conditionibus expressis, . . milites qui arma tulerunt et dimicarunt contra Pontificiam ditionem dummodo tamen animo parati sunt quamprimum poterunt sine periculo vitæ injustam militiam deserere. Romæ die 9 Martis, 1865. It is to be particularly noted that this last instruction is framed so as to include the whole army of the Italian kingdom, irrespective of whether the soldier was a native of the old Papal provinces, and therefore a rebel against the Pope-King. doctrine doctrine has been consequent solely on a sense that, to acquire this influence over untamed natures, connivance might prove an efficient instrument. 'Cui enim finis licet, ei et media permissa sunt,' is the maxim, of which the practical application is worked out in the Jesuit Code. The dangers must be selfevident of a so-called moral system, that rests on the principle of enticing coy spirits by sweetmeats within a charmed area. On the majority of mankind, labouring under innate frailty, a doctrine replete with justificatory pleas for self-indulgence can hardly fail to act in relaxation of moral restraints. Pascal's story of the serving man who robbed his Jesuit employers is not the only instance in point. In 1808 a Bavarian parish priest, called Riembauer, murdered his mistress with revolting cold-bloodedness, because he feared she would make their intimacy public to the ruin of his position. Being brought to trial, Riembauer, who displayed much morbid ingenuity, symptomatic of warped intellect, defended himself, on the plea that the deed was in strict accordance with the maxims he had been taught in the Seminary-that it was quite lawful to put out of the way any one from whom there was reason to dread a ruinous denunciation and this he sustained by extracts from Stattler's 'Ethica Christiana,' at that time a standard manual.* No doubt this is an extreme case. Still this miscreant could appeal with perfect plausibility to maxims in divines of authority, which, without any strained construction, did seem to justify his deed.. Grave as is the demoralization that may be wrought by this system on the individual fibre, the State is still more interested in the action which its spread has exercised on the Constitution of the Latin Church. Before the confirmed ascendency of the Order, there had been recurrent exhibitions of imperious Papal pretensions; but these had not become so infused into the system of the Church as to be dogmatically proclaimed particles of its lifeblood. The action of the Society of Jesus on the Constitution of the Church has been that of a chemical agent which precipitates a substance previously present in solution. The substance precipitated by Jesuit agency has been the essence of pure Abso This psychologically very remarkable case will be found in detail with Riem bauer's pleas in Feuerbach's Aktenmässige Darstellung merkwürdiger Verbrechen.' Giessen, 1829, vol. ii. p. 86. How inoculation with Jesuit doctrines results in strange reproductions! Of this the following is a striking instance. Weishaupt, the founder of the secret society of the Illuminati, which at the end of the last century exercised powerful influence in Germany, received his education in the great Jesuit College at Ingolstadt. In a letter written by him as Grandmaster occurs this passage: Marius retains still something out of the Court Library. Let him communicate this to us, and make to himself no casus conscientiæ of this, for only what brings harm is sin, and when advantage exceeds the harm, then it becomes even a virtue.' lutism, lutism, the sublimated corrosiveness of which has been steadily gnawing away with deadly edge every element of organic independence. For what is wholly incompatible with the nature of the Jesuit system is an element of independence. Much as has been said about the intellectual eminence of the Order, as shown in educational institutions, its scholastic efforts have uniformly been directed to substitute for the occasionally exaggerated manifestations attendant on a vigorous nature that monotony which accompanies stagnant life-the dead-level of general mediocrity. Independence of character, of mind, of research, are objects fatal to the Society, which must be expelled, and in lieu of these it has evolved a system of pseudo-culture, studded with the counterfeits of science-playthings adapted to natures that are being carefully nursed to grow up with stunted strength. A glance at the Ecclesiastical annals of the last centuries is enough to reveal the increasing sterility within the officially recognised area of the Latin Church. In the seventeenth century, the French clergy, then eminent above all others for Catholic tradition and conviction, not here and there individually, nor yet under the mask of timid-hearted anonymousness, but in corporate declarations with their names appended thereto, over and over again protested against, and stigmatized as outrageous, the theological maxims propounded by Jesuit divines. From no section of the great Catholic community has there, however, been heard any protest in recent times against enforced inoculation with such doctrine. If some individual has spoken an occasional word in disapproval, he has been instantly darted upon and ostracized as a rebellious sheep; but of collective protest from any quarter that might claim to represent an element of weight in the Church, there has been no sign. This fact gives a measure to what degree that fibre of honourable self-respect, which was the best bulwark at once for the grandeur and the liberties of the Church, has been crushed out. Silently, but ruthlessly, that stealthy organisation which calls itself the Society of Jesus-in grim pursuit of what it also calls the Greater Glory of God-has laid siege to, broken into, and razed those glorious and venerable sanctuaries, in Italy, in Germany, and above all in France, whence during generations there had beamed forth across the wide plain of the Catholic world, with the calmly luminous glow of purified light, the mellow gleam of a religious sentiment, which did not divorce the fervour of Catholic piety from candid learning and heartfelt attachment to liberties, any more than it considered it essential for the triumph of the Faith to propagate a belief in coarse superstitions, and to fortify the Church by a network of trickeries. Having succeeded succeeded step by step in outlawing every element that betrayed a feeling for organic freedom, the Society of Jesus, in our time, has set the cope-stone on their work by that momentous stroke in the Vatican Council, which has dogmatically identified the Church with the Order, and has practically transformed, at all events for the present, the organisation of the former into an enlarged house of the latter. This is not the place to enter upon the proceedings through which this result was achieved, and the consequences which it is reasonable to infer may flow therefrom. Amidst much that is controverted, one fact is positive. The outcome of the Vatican Council was wholly in accordance with what had been strenuously striven for by the Order. It was a signal and emphatic victory for the Society. But the very magnitude of this triumph instantaneously evoked peril in the alarm instinctively instilled into the Civil Power at sight of this inflation of ecclesiastical pretensions. In consummating the conversion of the Latin Church into a synonym of the Jesuit Order, in vesting in the Pope absolute direction over a universal organisation, and in having ensured through careful preparatory enervation that, at the critical moment, all the forces in this organisation acquiesced in becoming obsequious agents at the beck of the Pontifical Cæsar, the authors of this transformation wrought a modification in the Church's Constitution, that materially altered the aspect presented by it towards the Civil Power. In the instinctive sentiment of the Civil Power, that it is being confronted by an organisation bristling with menacing sentiments, is to be found the key to the state of public feeling-most marked in Germany, but unmistakeably running along the whole line of modern governments-which looks on the new Constitution of the Latin Church with uneasiness, and singles out the Society of Jesus as the Prætorian Guard of a dangerous ecclesiastical Cæsarism. How things may shape themselves during the course of the conflict that has been fairly joined, it would be vain to speculate. This much, however, may be affirmed, that the deed which consummated the mischief was rendered feasible only because the ever-increasing spread of the influences specially represented by the Society of Jesus had thoroughly saturated and made subservient those who needed only to have protested, firmly and persistently, in order to have saved the liberties of the Church; and that the recovery of what has thus been lost from failure of courage, can be hoped for only when there is in the body of the Catholic community a revival of the spirit now apparently quenched. ART. ART. III.-The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort. By Theodore Martin. With Portraits and Views. Volume the First. London, 1875. YO, me,' says Mr. Theodore Martin, in his admirable dedication of this volume to the Queen, biography, while one of the most fascinating, has always appeared one of the most difficult branches of literature. How difficult, the few master-pieces in that kind, of either ancient or modern time, are enough to show.' In view of much that has of late years been given to the world, the remark is peculiarly appropriate. A good biography demands very special qualities in the writer. As a primary requisite, he must enter thoroughly into the mind and character to be portrayed. He must also have so lived into the circumstances, and become imbued, as it were, with the atmosphere of the life of the man whom he has undertaken to describe, as to be able to look upon its incidents with the same eyes, as nearly as may be, as his. At the same time he must have the power of holding himself so far aloof as to scrutinize all its details with a judgment at once calm and penetrating, to discriminate the relative importance and significance of every detail with which he has to deal, and to assign to each its due place and relief in working out the picture which is to reproduce in the minds of his readers the conception to which conscientious research and long meditation have given a definite shape within his own. Nor does the difficulty end here. We are a mystery,' as Mr. Martin truly says, 'to ourselves; how much more, then, must we be a mystery to each other;' and he illustrates his proposition by Keble's beautiful lines, which remind us, that Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own, An almost womanly sympathy and tenderness of touch are, indeed, required for the subtle half-tints that make up much of the charm of a good biography. But no biography will be good which is not also distinguished by a manly sincerity, no less than by the wise reticence of sound taste, and by an austere judgment that holds in check the writer's enthusiasm. For enthusiasm he must have; or the book will want that underglow of life, without which the reader's sympathy is not to be arrested or retained. These considerations, and they are only a few of those which enter into the question, have had little weight with the mass of recent biographers. A quantity of crude materials, some good, |