salutation, to that infrangible, that devoted army. The Jesuits were not only the ablest of Renaissance schoolmasters, they were great priests, great missionaries, great civilizers, great practicians of the supreme art of persuading and leading men. And the sentence of destruction smote them in the midst of their activity, in a hundred regions where they had become indispensable or almost impossible to replace... Never was such a famous company of scholars in all the records of former civilizations, deep-read in philosophies; famous for sacred eloquence; masters of languages, editors of the lore of antiquity, of the writers of Byzantium, of the obscure dialects of Malaysia and the Upper Amazon; historians, philologists, restorers of chronology... To gain the lying promise of a lying peace, they were demanded as a holocaust to the licentious puppets on the thrones of the Bourbons, to the dark powers behind the veils of the lodge. And their loss to civilization, their loss to France, was not to be computed even by the largest enumeration of what they had done, and what they were capable of doing. The Christendom to which they had become so necessary, and which in an hour was forced to do without them, was yet to learn the unspeakable significance of such a deprivation. In proportion to the services of the Jesuits was the void of their disappearance, the calamity of their fall. When main pillars of an edifice are shattered, more may be shattered than the pillars alone."[1]
- ↑ The London Tablet, Dec. 7, 1901, p. 884.
