MR. SCOBIE MACKENZIE AND A 'JESUITICAL EXPRESSION.'

New Zealand Tablet, Issue 43, 26 October 1899, Page 18

MR. SCOBIE MACKENZIE AND A 'JESUITICAL EXPRESSION.'

TO THE EDITOR.

Sib, — The Evening Star of the 17th inst. reports Mr. Scobie Mackenzie as follows : — ' Mr. Scobie Mackenzie, in his speech op the Public Works Statement, exposed what ha, called the "Jesuitical expression " made use of in the Statement on the subject of the Otago Central Railway, etc.' You would oblige me very much if you would inform me what is the meaning of a ' Jesuitical expression,' or what sort of a thing it is. — Yours, etc., Dunedin, October 23. A Catholic.

[We do not profess to know what idea Mr. Scobie Mackenzie had in his mmd — if, indeed, he had any idea at all— when he made use of the term ' Jesuitical expression.' Is it not unusual for our legislators to use words the meaning of which they know not, or to speak of things whereof they know nothing, or to use words, words, words, to cover over mere vacuity of intellect, justj ust as hunters in India cover over empty tiger pits with withered leaves and branches. The term ' Jesuitical ' has come to have an evil secondary significance, and to mean 'crafty' or 'deceitful.' One Bide of this coined word was struck in the same mint that produced ' Good Queen Bess ' and ' Bluff King Hal ' and other samples of verbal currency that sober Protestant historians now universally regard as spurious. The other side was struck in the mint of Pascal's brain. In both cases religious hate cut the die and pulled the lever that stamps what Lord Lytton terms ' the splendid Jesuit ' as the personification of craft and deception. Cheap Protestant controversialists evolved from their own inner consciousness, and not from the works of members of the Society, the calumny that the Jeßuits taught the doctrine that ' the end justifies the means,' and that it is lawful for subordinates to act against their conscience at the command of a superior. It is, however, a sign of comin? sanity on the part of our Protestant friends, that men of such distinction as the late Mr. J. Addington Symonds and the well-known historian, Mr. R. S. Gardiner, made a public retraction of statements of this kind made by them before they had acquired a "knowledge of the true facts of the matter. It is needless to say that such sweeping doctrines are repudiated by the Jesuits and by the whole Catholic Church.

Pascal was, however, the chief defamer of the Jesuits. Justin McCarthy says of his Pens'eet — a very popular book, by the way, with many Protestants : ' Never in literature was there known a satire more piercing, more destroying, more deadly, than that of Pascal. He brought to his work an unmeasured and an uncontrolled hatred— hatred purposely let loose to do its business— and a literary capacity which has hardly ever been surpassed. It is not too much to say that in every community since the time of Pascal, the Jesuit has stood at a disadvantage.' Pascal's calumnies have been time and again torn to ribbons, but his book lives on, partly because of its charms of style, partly for the same reason that the insane and filthy story attributed to the poor,, half-witted Presbyterian fallen woman, Maria Monk, still enjoys a tolerably extensive vogue. The words ' Jesuitry,' ' Jesuitical,' ' Jesuitism,' in fact, furnish a conspicuous example of the formation of that tradition which, a* Newman has shown, is the sustaining power of the Protestant view of the Catholic Church. It is based on ignorance and buttressed up by prejudice, but will die out as education spreads and the sons of St. Ignatius oome to be better known. We are convinced that much of this ignorance is without malice. And in the meantime it is pleasant to remember that the terms referred to— ' Jesuitry,' ' Jesuitical,' ' Jesuitism ' — are so far known to be unwarranted and offensive that people of good manners and of education no more resort to their use than they would to such vulgar theological slang as ' Romish,' ' popish,' ' papist,' ' papistical,' etc. The monopoly of such terms is fast being left to Orange lodges, no-popery preachers, and tenth-rate controversy. If Mr. Scobie Mackenzie's expression was anything more than a Blip of the tongue he needs both to go to school and to mend his manners. Voltaire hated the Jesuits with the whole of whatever heart was left him ; bit in a letter of his dated February 7, 1746, he felt himself constrained to say : ' During the seven years that I lived in a college of the Jesuits, what have I seen there ? taves the most laborious and the most frugal, the hours of the day divided between their oare of us and the exercises of their austere profession. I call as witnesses the thousands of men educated as I was. Therefore it is that I am lost in astonishment at any one daring to' accuse them of teaching a relaxed or corrupt morality. . '; ._ I make no scruple in proclaiming that there is nothing more iniquitous, more contradictory, more shameful to humanity than to accuse of relaxed morality men who live "in Europe the.seterest lives, and who go seeking the most cruel deaths to the extremities of Asia and America!' In his Endymion, Lord Beaconsfield (Pisraeli) puts— evidently with approval— the following true words in the mouth of one of his characters : ' The influence of the Jesuits Is the influence of divine truths. The Jesuits never fell except from Conspiracy against them. It is never the public will against' 'them. It is never the publio voice that demands their expulsion, or the public effort that accomplishes it.'— Ed. N.Z.T.]