The Jesuits, 1534-1921: A History of the Society of Jesus from Its Foundation to the Present TimeCampbell, Thomas J. (Thomas Joseph)
History
The Jesuits, 1534-1921: A History of the Society of Jesus from Its Foundation to the Present Time
Campbell, Thomas J. (Thomas Joseph)
Jesuits -- History
The association of the term Jesuit with Pharisee and hypocrite is
unpleasant enough, but connecting it with Beguine is particularly
offensive. The word Beguine had come to signify a female heretic, a
mysticist, an illuminist, a pantheist, who though cultivating a saintly
exterior was credited with holding secret assemblies where the most
indecent orgies were indulged in. The identity of the Beguines with
Jesuits was considered to be beyond question, and one of the earliest
Calvinist writers informed his co-religionists that at certain periods
the Jesuits made use of mysterious and magical devices and performed a
variety of weird antics and contortions in subterraneous caverns, from
which they emerged as haggard and worn as if they had been struggling
with the demons of hell (Janssen, Hist. of the German People, Eng. tr.,
IV, 406-7). Unhappily, at that time, a certain section of the
association of Beguines insisted upon being called Jesuits. There were
many variations on this theme when the genuine Jesuits at last appeared.
In Germany they were denounced as idolaters and libertines, and their
great leader Canisius was reported to have run away with an abbess. In
France they were considered assassins and regicides; Calvin called them
_la racaille_, that is, the rabble, rifraff, dregs. In England they were
reputed political plotters and spies. Later, in America, John Adams,
second President of the United States, identified them with Quakers and
resolved to suppress them. Cotton Mather or someone in Boston denounced
them as grasshoppers and prayed for the east wind to sweep them away;
the Indians burned them at the stake as magicians, and the Japanese
bonzes insisted that they were cannibals, a charge repeated by Charles
Kingsley, Queen Victoria's chaplain, who, in "Westward Ho," makes an old
woman relate of the Jesuits first arriving in England that "they had
probably killed her old man and salted him for provision on their
journey to the Pope of Rome." No wonder Newman told Kingsley to fly off
into space.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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