knowledge to thrust into obscurity or cast out altogether those whom it
discovers to be dull, feeble, or unwilling instruments of its purposes,
but it assigns to every one the task to which his talents or his
disposition may best adapt him: to one, the care of a royal conscience,
whereby, unseen, his whispered word may guide the destiny of nations; to
another, the instruction of children; to another, a career of letters or
science; and to the fervent and the self-sacrificing, sometimes also to
the restless and uncompliant, the distant missions to the heathen.

The Jesuit was, and is, everywhere,--in the school-room, in the library,
in the cabinets of princes and ministers, in the huts of savages, in the
tropics, in the frozen North, in India, in China, in Japan, in Africa,
in America; now as a Christian priest, now as a soldier, a mathematician,
an astrologer, a Brahmin, a mandarin, under countless disguises, by a
thousand arts, luring, persuading, or compelling souls into the fold of
Rome.

Of this vast mechanism for guiding and governing the minds of men,
this mighty enginery for subduing the earth to the dominion of an idea,
this harmony of contradictions, this moral Proteus, the faintest sketch
must now suffice. A disquisition on the Society of Jesus would be
without end. No religious order has ever united in itself so much to be
admired and so much to be detested. Unmixed praise has been poured on
its Canadian members. It is not for me to eulogize them, but to portray
them as they were.




CHAPTER III.