are historically groundless, and the suppression of the Order in the last century was due entirely to the tyrannical violence of Ministers of State. It is only our duty to justice to silence the folly of such as declare the Jesuit system of education to be nothing but fanatical malice and a corruption of the young. The Jesuits were the first educators of their time. Protestants must with envy acknowledge the fruitfulness of their labors; they made the study of the ancient classics a practical study, and training was with them as important as education. They were the first schoolmasters to apply psychological principles to education; they did not teach according to abstract principles, but they trained the individual, developed his mental resources for the affairs of practical life, and so imparted to the educational system an important influence in social and political life. From that period and from that system, scientific education takes its rise. The Jesuits succeeded in effecting a moral purity among their pupils which was unknown in other schools during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."
Indeed, the Society has ever been most anxious to preserve her pupils from the taint of impurity, the vice to which youth most easily falls a prey. She takes most effective means to preserve what Chaucer calls the "sweet holiness of youth." She will inexorably expel a boy whose presence is dangerous to others, especially in the matter of purity. "There are some faults," says Shea,[1] "for which the Jesuit system of discipline has no mercy, and in the first place is found the vice of impurity. For this crime the only punishment is expulsion, since contamination is looked upon
- ↑ History of Georgetown, p. 85.
