possible evils] is achieved. The present position of the Jesuits in France is for us a more hopeful sign than would be the introduction of the very system called for by Abbé Gaume."[1]
In 1894 M. Jules Lemaître renewed the attacks on the classics, directing his accusations especially against the Jesuit schools. "I find," he writes, "in the pagan authors read in schools voluptuous naturalism, Epicurean principles, or that Stoicism which is not virtue but pride. The consequences of this anomalous state of affairs are incalculable. We cannot wonder that the Jesuit colleges have produced so many pagans and freethinkers, among them Voltaire."[2] Now this is very amusing. This writer accuses the Jesuits of fostering a heathen, free-thinking spirit, by means of teaching the classics; and M. Compayré charges them with suppressing the characteristic spirit of the classical writers. This is one of the numberless contradictions into which the opponents of the Society have been betrayed. If the classics were taught in the spirit of M. Compayré, there is little doubt that, as Abbé Gaume and M. Lemaître apprehended, free-thinkers would be produced. But the Jesuits teach them in quite a different spirit. Hence the charges of these writers are wide of the mark. Nor did the Jesuits give mere anonymous fragments, mere travesties of the classics, as M. Compayré claims. They expunged obscene passages from their editions, as conscientious non-Catholic editors have done, and that is all.[3] The reasons for doing this are so obvious that
