every possible mission.[1] Such are the opinions of the adversaries of the Society. But is not the greatest variety of characters needed for all these employments? And yet, they are supposed to be deprived of individuality! Or is that unpersonal trait which is infused into every Jesuit so universal that all other individualities are contained in it, as the scholastic philosophers express it, eminenter, in a subtle and mysterious form? Is every Jesuit a sort of Proteus, who could change himself into a lion, a serpent, a pard, a boar, a tree, a fountain? A wonderful system of training, indeed, for which the diplomats of our modern courts might envy the Jesuits. To be serious, that depriving of personality, attributed to the Jesuit system, is nothing but one of the numerous Jesuit myths.
We have left our young Jesuit in his philosophical course. But what becomes in the meantime of the study of the classical languages? It is not neglected during the course of philosophy, at least the Ratio Studiorum provides special means to foster and promote this important branch of study. The lectures in mathematics and natural sciences are given in the mother tongue, but the lectures and disputations in philosophy are all conducted in Latin, so that the young Jesuit is in the habit of speaking Latin and may speak it with ease and fluency. It is true, the Latin of these disputations and lectures in not exactly Ciceronian, still it is by no means as barbarous as the
- ↑ There was a time "when behind every Roman Catholic Court in Europe there stood a Jesuit confessor, and a Jesuit emissary ascended the back stairs of every Protestant palace." English Review, vol. V, 1846, p. 65.
