CHRISTENDOM ON THE EVE OF THE RISE OF THE GREAT SOCIETY.
HISTORIANS are agreed that never before the rise of Ignatius Loyola’s great secret society had there been a similar fraternity.
The ostensible object of these grim antagonists of Truth was the recovering of lost ground to the Papacy; in reality, it was the acquiring of supreme power for themselves. Men of consummate tact, intelligence, and influence, they sought to rivet afresh every broken manacle of superstition ; and, in so doing, unfolded and carried out a program of State intrigues, plots, and revolutions, of torturings, poisonings, and massacres such as only the Spirit of Evil himself could have devised! By and by, in the story of their enrolment and training, we shall take our mental measurement of Loyola’s soldiers as they stand before us equipped by their general.
For a moment, however, let us continue to trace the footsteps of Reformation Truth in Christendom, which had hitherto lived and breathed in the Papacy, until its subtle pursuer, Jesuitism, overtook it. With Wiclifs English Bible came the first streak of dawn. Thirst for the Water of Life was created on every side. Rome fiercely condemned the translator as having “committed a crime unknown to former ages;” but such a foe as the Book of God could not be silenced by burning its followers. The Papacy shook with rage and consternation. But where the Bible came it came to stay.
In 1413, Christendom was scandalized at the sight of three men, equally profligate and criminal, each claiming the Papal throne, each hurling abuse at his rival, and all of them not hesitating to go to war with each other! For the needful gold, these “Vicars of Christ” put up for sale “pardons,” “dispensations,” and places― in paradise—an example quickly followed by the lower ecclesiastics. Popes, bishops, and clergy carried on the iniquitous traffic, and became leaders of armed bands, until Europe was a theatre of war and plunder. A newly-elected bishop once asked to be shown his predecessors’ library. He was led into an arsenal! “Those,” said his guide, pointing to the swords and guns, “are the books which they made use of to defend the Church; imitate their example!”
Germany, Bohemia, Italy, France, and Spain were convulsed with internal strife. The Turk was threatening an invasion, which would mean Mohammedanism forced upon Christendom at the point of the sword. Distressed at the disgraceful spectacle being perpetrated in the name of the holy Roman religion, the Emperor Sigismund called a General Council at Constance to settle the claims of the rival Popes and to stamp out heresy. One of its first decrees was that the bones of the noble John Wiclif should be dug up and burned―the only vengeance left for Rome to wreak upon him!―and next, that his brave disciple, John Huss, the Bohemian Reformer, be consigned to the flames. Of the three Popes, John XXIII. was the only one who answered the summons; he approached Constance beneath a panoply of gold cloth, preceded by the solemn mockery of the Sacrament carried on a white palfrey. The written accusation against this man “contained,” says his own secretary, “all the mortal sins, and a multitude of others not fit to be named”!
Thirty-seven witnesses bore testimony to the unholy life of “his Holiness,” even to the poisoning of his predecessor! The guilty man fled by night from Constance to escape answering the charges laid against him, and abdicated his throne.
As the eventful sixteenth century opened, the world’s stage became crowded with remarkable personages. It was at a moment of intellectual awakening and agitation that two notable figures appeared, each destined to send forth a powerful stream of influence over Christendom. Widely opposite in aim, Martin Luther, of Germany, and Ignatius Loyola, of Spain, were yet intimately connected as representing march and counter-march to truth. Before telling the story of the Jesuits, we shall find it interesting to follow Luther first, as we shall trace Loyola afterwards.
Born at Eisleben in 1483, Martin Luther spent a childhood of much privation as the son of a humble German miner. He gained his education at a Franciscan school in Magdeburg under the stern discipline of the rod―to the extent of “fifteen floggings a day,” he tells us!―and the hardship of begging his daily bread from door to door. Such rugged training produced, however, a fine quality of resistance and endurance in his strong, impulsive nature. Entering Erfurt College in 1501 to study law, one day, while ransacking the library shelves, he discovered a volume unlike all the others―a Latin Bible. Fascinated by the old Book he devoured its pages. New, strange thoughts burned within him, and those struggles in soul never ceased until they produced “a new man, a new age, a new Europe.”
His religious impressions deepened until he determined to devote himself to God’s service, and, as in those days to serve God meant to become a monk, Luther entered the Augustine order, and took the cowl in 1505. His unintellectual brethren found a spiteful pleasure in giving the brilliant scholar the meanest employments in the monastery. But he accepted all such mortification for the good of his soul, also inflicting severe penances on himself as the price of the salvation he so ardently desired to earn. At night Brother Martin, though worn out with the day’s drudgery, would repair to the chapel to read the chained Bible. But it was not until upon a sick bed, where his conflicts at last laid him, “more like a corpse than a living man,” that the despairing monk grasped the true meaning of the words he was feebly reciting, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” In a moment the principle of Popery―pardon by payment—was shaken in Luther’s heart.
Appointed Professor of the Wittemberg University in 1510, Dr. Martin Luther unfolded to the learned men and common people alike, who crowded round him, the truth of free pardon learned amid his tearful agonies of soul in the monastery cell. The ordinary preaching monks of the day were too ignorant to instruct, and therefore fell back on entertaining the congregations they wished to keep.
Luther entered. Rome. There he found, after a while, to his horror, behind the scenes, priests of the Eternal City who were mere actors in a play in which they did not believe. While Luther performed one mass they would hurry through seven. They could not afford decorum, since every mass meant money. And the more they could sing in a given time the heavier grew their purses. The bishops too, would boast with uproarious laughter, as they sat at table, of the way in which they had amused themselves by deceiving the people at the consecration of the wafer. Instead of the words, “Hoc est meum Corpus” ―This is My body―they would mutter, “Panis est et panebis manebis” ―Bread thou art, and bread thou shalt remain. Rome religious, in its mocking impiety, was coupled with Rome social, in its sinful revelry. Luther exclaimed, “If there be a hell, Rome is built over it!”
Still the Romish fetters that bound the Reformer were not all snapped. Painfully ascending the “holy staircase” on his knees, thereby earning at every step a year’s indulgence from the Pope, Luther was startled by a voice as it were from heaven, saying, “The just shall live by faith.” Amazed that he had not grasped the meaning of those words before, he started to his feet.
From that moment Luther set forth to preach “JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH” ―the Gospel in a single sentence―and to be the sworn champion of God’s Word to his life’s end.
Pope Leo X. was the link in Rome’s “apostolical succession” then on the papal throne―a man who was wont to vent his skepticism thus: “What a profitable affair this fable of Christ has been to us!”
To make his saying good, he conceived the idea of opening a special sale of indulgences, so that a stream of gold should flow into his coffers for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s at Rome, to add to his renown.
Accordingly the great Pardon Market was opened in 1517, and a Dominican monk, by name John Tetzel, by fame an ex-inquisitor, and ex-criminal under reprieve, was chosen to exhibit the Pope’s wares for sale. He began a march through Germany. Accompanied by drums, flags, tapers, and bells, Tetzel, himself carrying a huge red cross bearing the arms of the Pope, was preceded by the Bull of Grace on a velvet cushion, and followed by a mule laden with bales of paper “pardons.” Before the high altar in each parish church, Tetzel would plant his cross, and beside it a strong iron money box; then, mounting the pulpit, he would exclaim with a stentorian voice, “Come, and I will sell you Indulgences by which even the sins you intend to commit will be pardoned. More than this, Indulgences avail for the dead; your friends in the bottomless abyss are crying to you to be delivered. At the very instant that the money rattles in the chest the soul escapes from purgatory and flies to heaven.” To his shuddering hearers, purgatory was the most terrible of realities. The stream the Pope coveted, began to flow. The scale of charges varied according to the rank and wealth of the purchaser and also the heinousness of the sin in the eyes of the Romish Church. For instance, while church robbery cost nine ducats, the price of an Indulgence to commit murder was only eight ducats! Thus the very vilest characters obtained license to sin. Society itself became unhinged, and a flood of iniquity set in.
Luther’s indignation knew no bounds. Some of his penitents, who had confessed their sins to him, produced Indulgence papers to exempt them from even the need of amendment! It was then that he propounded his memorable Theses, and on the eve of All Saints’ Festival, 1517, with his own hands nailed his magnificent protest to the door of Wittemberg Castle church. “Those who fancy themselves sure of salvation by Indulgences,” ran one of its ninety-five clauses, “will go to perdition along with those who teach them so.”
The Theses mark an epoch in the life of Christendom. The printing press, prepared and bestowed by God, as it would seem, for the diffusion of His Truth at this critical moment, multiplied copies of the famous document, and strewed them like snowflakes over Germany. In a month’s time, translated into numerous languages, Luther’s tract had become a household book throughout Europe. They were “words on wheels” and “the Spirit was in the wheels.” In the Press the Papacy perceived a new and formidable foe. Depending for her very existence upon men’s ignorance and credulity she had hitherto kept complete control over their minds, tongues, and pens. Suddenly Rome was deprived of her power to suppress freedom of thought!
From the moment that Luther’s hammer resounded on Wittemberg church door a controversy was aroused which has never ceased. It circled round the momentous question, “Who is man to believe God, or the Church?” “The Bible is the sole infallible authority,” said the men of the Reformation. “No, the Church is the supreme guide,” said the voices at the Vatican.
In vain Rome summoned the incorrigible Luther to the Diet of Augsburg (1517), demanding that he should retract, unconditionally. Cardinal Cajetan’s flimsy theology was beaten to shreds by the Scriptural arguments of the great, calm man before him. “I will have no more disputing with that beast,” said he. In vain the Pope excommunicated “that son of iniquity, Martin Luther,” consigning him to perdition unless he recanted and burnt all his writings within sixty days. Unmoved by its fulminations, the Reformer seized the opportunity for publicly renouncing Rome, and hurled the Bull into the flames of a bonfire he had kindled outside Wittenberg gates on a December morning, 1520.
Again the enraged Mistress of the Seven Hills cited her enemy to appear before her. If Luther’s conduct at Augsburg thrilled his nation, his defense at the Diet of Worms shook the world. Again Rome lost the battle. Notwithstanding her power, her ban, her edict to arrest and destroy, she felt feeble in the presence of a poor monk.
Nine years later, the Diet of Spires, convoked for the express purpose of exterminating Protestantism, established it. No more glorious, inspiriting declaration of independence was ever uttered than that made by the Christian Reformers who were first called PROTESTANTS at Spires (1529). The twofold tyranny of Rome’s exclusive right to interpret the Scriptures, and the Emperor’s right to enforce obedience to her by the sword, were swept away.
The Protest was succeeded by a Confession the next year at Augsburg, where the representatives of Rome, instead of carrying out the long-deferred Edict of Worms, found themselves obliged to listen―and that spell-bound―to the articles of the Protestant faith, compiled with matchless literary eloquence by Philip Melancthon, Luther’s lifelong friend. Blow after blow fell with unerring precision on Romish error, until the Papacy staggered and reeled, and was at its wits’ end!
She might well be dismayed. Powerful princes were passing from the Romanist to the Protestant side at every Council she convoked. “Diet” was but “defeat” writ short. One by one her most sacred institutions were losing their hold upon the people. Monasteries and convents were being emptied on every hand. Everywhere men rebelled against the traffic in human souls, carried on by the rapacious and evil-living priesthood of a Church, powerless to reform itself. Time after time she found herself unable at the critical moment to carry out the Edict of Worms; for again and again the much talked-of General Council which was to deal the decisive blow that would annihilate Protestantism was postponed.
Rome as yet had no general in her army of sufficient skill to devise new stratagems and carry out fresh tactics with the foe. She was still struggling with her old and antiquated weapons of summons, abuse, and anathema against the Reformers’ testimony. Then it was that there sprang suddenly to herald the society of the Jesuits, a battalion trained in a new and immeasurably superior system of warfare to her own. Between the old armaments of Roman Catholicism and the machinery of Jesuitism, there was to be as much difference as between the crossbow and the rifle, or the galley and the torpedo.
Yet, as we begin the story of the famous general and his society we must bear in mind an important fact. The Jesuits never were an integral part of the Roman Catholic army. Jesuitism is not alone an emphatic Romanism. The dangerous polity of the society is independent; it yields obedience to no Church, and, if its own ends can only be secured, would, and perhaps will ultimately, conspire against the life of the Papacy which gave it birth.
The story of the Jesuits exhibits a group of men who, finding Christendom eager to learn, gives them subtle controversy, and “teaches them how to wrangle forever.” And by skill, craft, cleverness, and specious morality, achieves an influence on the minds of countless thousands of mankind to their destruction, body and soul. Enlisting every human art, and sanctifying all manner of trickery, the disciples of Loyola to this day are multiplying, and holding their resources of wealth and power with a clutch and grip that are inextricable. Ever suspected, though, alas! too little feared now-a-days, nooks and corners are their working places. Its members today are prosecuting their ends with old-time vigor, as unabated as when one of its generals boasted long ago to a Spanish duke: “See, my lord, from this room, from this room I govern not only Paris, but China ; not only China, but the whole world, without anyone knowing how ‘tis managed!”