In the domain of education, the Society of Jesus does not swerve far from Spain. And the will of Spain accepts man as he is found. Isabel creates her empire by use of her countrymen’s frailties and lusts. The Jesuit proceeds in the same spirit. He will work, not from the departure of an ideal concept of what man should be: he will work with man, with this miserable, forkèd, naked son of sin--and build from him the City of his God. Man in his weakness, man in his vice and blindness, will be a note in the cosmic Song: his muddy heart will be strong as marble. There is a magic to enact this. Its name is Faith. There is a philosophy to enact this. It is the traditional sense, in Spanish thought, of God’s immanence and of earth as the immediate pattern of God’s will. The Jesuits are not pantheists: but their tolerance and their practical acceptance of _the fact_ are the unconscious fruits of five centuries of pantheistic feeling. The Jesuits are not Evangelists. But in their attitude toward Faith as a universal magic, they are close to the Apostles. They take the Christian mystery as a present truth. The age of miracle is eternal. God is here and everywhere: the assertion of a magic Word--as in the Kabbala--transfigures immanence to revelation. The doctrine of Grace, as an inborn personal trait to be achieved (if at all) only by spiritual acts, is too hierarchic. It is the doctrine of peoples tending toward individualism. (In the East, it becomes the doctrine of Caste.) Moreover, in accepting man as he is, the Jesuit cannot place the magic virtue in any of his inherent traits. The divine virtue must be at once impersonal and social. Man is frail and corrupt: his will is frail and corrupt. His life is only in God, even as God’s life through Christ is eternally in man. There is no work to be done, beside the assertion that the work _is_ done. If grace depended upon man’s efforts, we should all be damned. If reason or will or any personal trait had been sufficient, why was Christ crucified? No: the commonest human stone is holy, when it becomes a stone of the House of God. Likewise, man’s corruptions, however vile, can be architected by faith into the Church where they are sanctified and transfigured. The philosophy of the Jesuits explains their methods. Does the builder of a house consult the stones? What can the stone do but put itself into the hands of the builder? The builder must be aggressive, dominant, ruthless. But the Jesuit is more than an architect: he is a soldier. When he sets aside the sword for the word, the cause is strategy. His tactics remain warlike. War is pragmatic. Subtlety, surprise, mobility, deceit are warlike arms. The world stands at a crisis. The grandiose structure of medieval Rome--the highest spiritual Form ever achieved by Europe--crumbles and sags. Spain strips to save it. _d._ _The Jurist_