How is this hostility to the Jesuits to be explained? It is not so difficult to find some reasons which account for the aversion of Protestants to this Order. Time and again they have been told that Ignatius of Loyola founded this Society in order to crush Protestantism. Although it has been proved that such a view of the Society is entirely contradicted by the Constitutions and the history of the Order,[1] most non-Catholics still cling to their old prejudices and traditional views of the Jesuits. Even now many see in the Society the "avowed and most successful foe of Protestantism, and the embodiment of all they detest."[2] The Jesuits have been represented to them as notoriously dishonest and unscrupulous men, who teach and practise the most pernicious principles; they have been denounced as plotters against the lives of Protestant rulers, Queen Elizabeth, James I., William of Orange, Gustavus Adolphus. The mention of the Gunpowder plot, and the Titus-Oates conspiracy,[3] conjures up the most horrible visions of those black demons who dare to call themselves companions of Jesus. Then it has been said that the Jesuits were the cause of the Thirty Year's War, of the French Revolution, of the Franco-German War of 1870, of the Dreyfus affair.[4] All such and similar silly slanders
- ↑ See above chapter III, pp. 77-78.
- ↑ Canon Littledale in the Encyclopedia Britannica, art. "Jesuits".
- ↑ "That lie about the Titus-Oates Conspiracy," as the Protestant historian Gardiner says (Hist. of England, vol. II, pp. 483 and 615). An apostate priest, Chinicquy, has charged the Jesuits even with the assassination of President Lincoln!
- ↑ Quite recently the suspicion was expressed in French anti-clerical papers that the Jesuits were the cause of the coal strikes. Any one who wishes to see to what extreme of
