generation, carried all before it, was stopped in its progress,
and rapidly beaten back from the foot of the Alps to the shores
of the Baltic. Before the Order had existed a hundred years, it
had filled the whole world with memorials of great things done
and suffered for the faith. No religious community could produce
a list of men so variously distinguished: - none had extended its
operations over so vast a space; yet in none had there ever been
such perfect unity of feeling and action. There was no region of
the globe, no walk of speculative or of active life, in which
Jesuits were not to be found. They guided the counsels of Kings.
They deciphered Latin inscriptions. They observed the motions of
Jupiter's satellites. They published whole libraries,
controversy, casuistry, history, treatises on optics, Alcaic
odes, editions of the fathers, madrigals, catechisms, and
lampoons. The liberal education of youth passed almost entirely
into their hands, and was conducted by them with conspicuous
ability. They appear to have discovered the precise point to
which intellectual culture can be carried without risk of
intellectual emancipation. Enmity itself was compelled to own
that, in the art of managing and forming the tender mind, they
had no equals. Meanwhile they assiduously and successfully
cultivated the eloquence of the pulpit. With still greater
assiduity and still greater success they applied themselves to
the ministry of the confessional. Throughout Catholic Europe the
secrets of every government and of almost every family of note
were in their keeping. They glided from one Protestant country to
another under innumerable disguises, as gay Cavaliers, as simple
rustics, as Puritan preachers. They wandered to countries which
neither mercantile avidity nor liberal curiosity had ever
impelled any stranger to explore. They were to be found in the