The pedagogical aim of the Jesuits was the development of the memory with scant regard for other faculties of the mind. To learn the catechism, or in the case of advanced pupils to receive unquestioningly the dogmatic instruction offered by clerical pedagogues, was the ideal honored throughout the Bavarian schools. Books which bore the slightest taint of Protestant influence, or which in any other way gave evidence of a liberalizing spirit, were ruthlessly banned.[1]
Such were the conditions of life under which the great mass of the people lived. There was, however, a relatively small group of cultivated people in Bavaria who, despite the clerical oppression and bigotry from which they suffered, had contrived to share in the liberalizing spirit of the larger world. The censorship exerted by the Jesuits had found no adequate means to guard against the broadening influences of travel or of contact with travelers from other lands, or even to prevent the introduction of all contraband journals and books. The effect of the former had been to create a humiliating and galling sense of inferiority on the part of liberal-minded Bavarians,[2] while the latter had served to stimulate a thirst for the new knowledge which the rationalism of the age made available. To this small group of discontented and ambitious spirits the ancient faith had ceased to be satisfactory, and the burden of clericalism had become insufferable.
The University of Ingolstadt, established in 1472, was destined to become a rallying point for these radical tendencies. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Jesuits had
- ↑ The suppression of the Jesuits by Pope Clement XIV, in 1773, did not greatly diminish the influence and power of the order in Bavaria. Refusing to accept defeat, the new intrigues to which they gave themselves inspired in their enemies a new sense of their cohesion, with the result that they appeared even more formidable than before their suppression.
- ↑ Forestier, op. cit., pp. 105 et seq.
