Our survey of the growth and evolutions of this spiritual army warns us to avoid generalisations. It is not true that from the start the Jesuits were avaricious, ambitious, and unscrupulous: it is not true that they maintained their spirit untainted for half a century, and then degenerated. No epithet will apply to them as a body, except that they differed, corporately, from all other religious bodies in the diplomatic nature of their action. Every variety of man was found in their ranks: the austere flagellant and the genial courtier, the man who served the poor because they were poor, and the man who served them in order to edify the rich; the man who flung himself with a smile into the arms of death, and the man who loved disguises and the adventurous evasion of death, the saint and the sinner, the peasant, the noble, and the scholar. No uniform stamp effaced their individual characters. The weak or sensual or casuistic degenerated in the first decade: the strong maintained their idealism to the last. But that original tendency to consecrate worldly devices to a high end, to regard the effectiveness rather than the intrinsic propriety of means, to seek wealth and power because they procured speedier success, was running its inevitable course, and from the recommendation of lying in the cause of Christ we shall soon see some of them go on to the condonation of vice and the counsel of crime. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 4: I have previously explained the distinction between simple and solemn vows, and the advantage which the Jesuits had in confining the latter to a chosen few of their body. See p. 30. These "simple" vows are now admitted in other orders, but they were for centuries peculiar to the Jesuits, and were very distasteful to the older orders.] [Footnote 5: It will appear later that Manares was a man of robust conscience, and later incurred the censure of his brethren for improper conduct.] [Footnote 6: I may draw attention to a curious illustration of the difficulty of reaching a verdict on the St. Bartholomew massacre. In the same volume of the _Cambridge Modern History_ we are told (p. 20) that "Gregory XIII. is said to have expressed dismay," and (p. 285) that he heard the news with "triumphant acclamation." There is surely no serious doubt that the second statement is correct.] [Footnote 7: See a selection in the _Annales de la Société des soi-disans Jésuites_ (1764), vol. i. pp. 132-159.] [Footnote 8: It did not become a dogma of the Church until 1854.] CHAPTER V PROGRESS AND DECAY UNDER ACQUAVIVA