few years, been elected members by celebrated Academies of Science: Father Wasmann by the Russian Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg; Father Baumgartner by the Belgian Royal Academy of Ghent; and Father Ehrle, in November 1901, by the Prussian Royal Academy of Göttingen.
The favorable criticisms on Jesuit publications, quoted on the preceding pages, are almost exclusively by Protestant scholars of highest repute. Are these facts unknown, or are they studiously ignored, by certain writers who are so loud in belittling Jesuit education and scholarship? We readily confess that Jesuit scholarship has not yet regained that brilliant position which it enjoyed in the first centuries of the existence of the Order; the reasons for this have been mentioned. We also admit that the eulogies bestowed on the literary and scientific success of the older Jesuit institutions are not a sufficient guarantee that the Jesuit system is equally efficient in modern times. But we think this last point is proved by what has been said in this present chapter. It certainly proves that the Jesuits do not rest satisfied with the laurels of their predecessors, but that they strenuously struggle to keep abreast with the scientific progress of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The testimonies adduced are all the more remarkable, if we keep in mind the most discouraging circumstances under which the Jesuits had to labor, and the coldness and antipathy with which the works of the Jesuits are ordinarily viewed by non-Catholic writers. This leads us to a rather sad chapter in the history of Jesuit education, in which we have to speak of the opposition which the educational work of the Society had to encounter in all centuries.
