was the ideal; routine the practice," and so on. "The Jesuit system of blind obedience was founded to bring about the absolutism of authority;" this "makes them akin (strange though it may seem) to that Puritan strain so often found in those doing or desirous of doing great things." This is strange indeed, but far stranger are the absurdities and contradictions into which prejudiced men are led. The Jesuits are said to be deprived of personality and individuality, and in the same breath it is sometimes asserted that everywhere they know how to adapt themselves to the most different circumstances: In England, America, Germany, Spain, France, Russia, China, Japan, Paraguay, Abyssinia. It is said the General wants a man for some secret mission. He opens his list and there he finds a man especially fitted to influence the court of St. Petersburg, or the Padisha in Constantinople; then one who knows so well how to ingratiate himself with Cromwell as to become his friend, dine at his table, play chess with him;[1] then one who is fitted for guiding his Celestial Majesty in Pekin; here one to rouse the starving peasants of Ireland to enthusiasm for their 'Romish' faith, then one who by all sorts of devices tames the savages of Paraguay; one who disputes with the bonzes in Japan, or becomes a Brahmin in India, as the famous Robert de Nobili; there is one who is best suited to conquer the refractory Professors at the University in Louvain, and the Doctors of the Sorbonne, then another who wins the confidence of the townspeople and villagers in Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Germany – in short men for
- ↑ Taunton, l. c.
