THE JESUITS AND THEIR WORKS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 185, 13 October 1876, Page 12

THE JESUITS AND THEIR WORKS.

( Continued.) No religious community could produce a list of men so variously distinguished; none had extended its operation 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 sflobe, 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 of controversy, casuistry, history, treatises on optics, Alcaic odes, editions of the Fathers — madrigals, catechisms, and lampoons. They were to be found in the garb of mandarins superintending the observatory at Pekin. They were to be found, spade in hand, teaching the savages of Paraguay the rudiments of agriculture : yet whatever might be their employment, their spirit was always the same entire devotion to the common cause, the game absoute obedience to the central authority. None of them liad chosen his dwelling place or his vocation for himself. Whether the Jesuit should live under the Arctic Circle, or under the Equator, whether he should pass his life in arranging gems, and collating manuscripts at the Vatican, or in persuading native barbarians under the Southern Cross not to eat each other, were matters which he left with profound submission to the decision of others. If he was wanted at Lima, he was on the Atlantic in the next fleet. If his ministry was needed in some country where his life was more insecure than that of a wolf, where it was a crime to harbor him, where the heads and quarters of his brethren fixed in the public places, showed him what he had to expect, he went ■without remonstrance or hesitation to his doom. Nor is the heroic spirit yet extinct. "When, in our time, a terrible pestilence passed around the globe, when, in some great cities, fear had dissolved all the ties which, hold society together, when the secular clergy had forsaken their flocks, when medical succor was not to be purchased with gold, when the strongest natural affections had yielded to the love of life, even then the Jesuit was found by the pallet, which Bishop and curat°, physician and nurse, father and mother, had deserted, bending over infected lips to catch the faint accents

of confession, and holding to the last, before the expiring penitent" the image of the crucified Redeemer. ' These are the men whom every smug, vulgar " Stigo-ins " delights in reviling. Almost immediately after the foundatfon of the Order, that illustrious Christian hero, Francis Xavier, the " Apostle of the Indies," started for the East. He travelled through India Malacca, the Philippine islands, Ceylon and Japan. To Father Ricci we are indebted for the first work published on China. He and his companion, Father Schall, gained a footing in that country by utilising their scientific knowledge— astronomy, hydrooraphv mathematics and clock-making. They began, as Ranke observes' with mathematics, and ended with religion. The accuracy with which they predicted three eclipses of the moon in 1610 and 162<H I raised them immensely in the estimation of the Mandarins, especi-J ally as the native astronomers were about an hour at fault on eaclf I occasion. j Ricci sent the Emperor a striking clock, which he had made, and was invited to Pekin in consequence. Schall conducted the j public mathematical school in that city, compiled the calendar, and was created a Mandarin. Fourteen volumes of his writings in , Chinese, of which language he acquired a perfect mastery, are" preserved in the Vatican library. j (Concluded next weeJc.J