Hall in Tyrol. At Munich, on one occasion, in 1609, the impression of a play – it was "Cenodoxus, the Doctor of Paris", (or the "Conversion of St. Bruno") – was overpowering. A spectator wrote that a hundred sermons could not have produced the same effect; fourteen of the foremost members of the Bavarian court, on the following day, withdrew themselves into solitude, to enter upon the "Spiritual Exercises" of St. Ignatius, and to change their manner of life.[1]
Protestant preachers lamented that "high personages, princes and counts, no less than townspeople and rustics take such delight in the dramas of the Jesuits, contribute money to them, and honor the actors, whereas ours have nothing of the kind. Thus the Jesuits have an opportunity of propagating their idolatry and of gaining the good will even of the Evangelicals."[2] This result would certainly have been impossible, if the Jesuit dramas had contained invectives against non-Catholics. They were free from insulting and abusive attacks with which those of the other side were teeming. This is established by the standard authors on this subject, Karl von Reinhardstöttner, and Holstein. The latter, speaking with offensive and bitter language of the Jesuit dramas as means of defending "idolatry", must admit that their object was exclusively pedagogical, not at all polemical. Another Protestant, Francke, states as the difference between Protestant and Catholic school dramas, that the former sank more and more to a mere form for political and ecclesiastical controversies, chiefly directed against Popery, whereas the Jesuits were
