not what they do." But what should we say of men who lay claim to critical scholarship, if they, instead of examining conscientiously the documents and the history of the Order, unscrupulously copy the slanders of virulent partisan writers, as is done by so many modern historians and educationists? Some seem studiously to neglect to acquire that information which is necessary and easily available, in order to understand this system. Of others one has reason to suspect that they write against their better knowledge, from fanatical hatred, not so much of the Society as of the Catholic Church. But then let them at least be honest; let them say that they are fighting against the "Anti-Christ in Rome," against the "Scarlet Woman," as their leaders were pleased to express themselves; let them confess that it is the odium Papae, the old "no-Popery" and "Know-nothing" feeling which inspires them. Well has a non-Catholic periodical recently observed: "We end inevitably by recognizing that all the reproaches with which we may feel entitled to load the Jesuits, in the name of reason, of philosophy, etc., etc., fall equally upon all religious orders, and upon the Church herself, of which they have ever been the most brilliant ornament. Why then address these reproaches to the Jesuits only?"[1]
History has proved the correctness of these statements. In the eighteenth century the Jesuit colleges were suppressed. Not long after the monasteries of other orders were "secularized". In 1872 the Jesuits were expelled from Germany; two or three years after, the other religious orders had to leave the fatherland,
- ↑ The Open Court, Chicago, Jan. 1902, p. 28.
