The Velvet Glove eBook

Hugh Stowell Scott
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 272 pages of information about The Velvet Glove.

The Velvet Glove eBook

Hugh Stowell Scott
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 272 pages of information about The Velvet Glove.

Sarrion, like all who knew their strange story, was ready enough to recognise the fact that the Jesuit body must be divided into two parts of head and heart.  The heart has done the best work that missionaries have yet accomplished.  The head has ruined half Europe.

It was the political Jesuit who had earned Sarrion’s deadly hatred.

The political Jesuit has, moreover, a record in history which has only in part been made manifest.

William the Silent was assassinated by an emissary of the Jesuits.  Maurice of Orange, his son, almost met the same fate, and the would-be murderer confessed.  Three Jesuits were hanged for attempting the life of Elizabeth, Queen of England; and later, another, Parry, was drawn and quartered.  Two years later another was executed for participating in an attempt on the Queen’s life; and at later periods four more met a similar just fate.  Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV of France was a Jesuit.

The Jesuits were concerned in the Gunpowder Plot of England and two of the fathers were among the executed.

In Paraguay the Jesuits instigated the natives to rebel against Spain and Portugal; and the holy fathers, taking the field in person, proved themselves excellent leaders.

Pope Clement XIV was poisoned by the Jesuits.  He had signed a Bull to suppress the order, which Bull was to “be forever and to all eternity valid.”  The result of it was “acqua tofana of Perugia,” a slow and torturing poison.

Down to our own times we have had the hand of the Society of Jesus gently urging the Fenians.  O’Farrell, who in 1868 attempted the life of the Duke of Edinburgh in Australia, was a Jesuit sent out to the care of the society in Australia.

The great days of Jesuitism are gone but the society still lives.  In England and in other Protestant countries they continue to exist under different names.  The “Adorers of Jesus,” the Redemptionists, the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, the Brothers of the Congregation of the Holy Virgin, the Fathers of the Faith, the Order of St. Vincent de Paul—­are Jesuits.  How far they belong to the heart and not to the head, is a detail only known to themselves.  Those who have followed the contemporary history of France may draw their own conclusions from the trials of the case of the Assumptionist Fathers.

“Los mismos perros, con nuevos cuellos”—­said Sarrion to any who sought to convince him that Spain owed her downfall to other causes, and that the Jesuits were no longer what they had been.  “The same dogs with new collars.”  And he held that they were not a progressive but a retrogressive society; that their statutes still held good.

“It is allowable to take an oath without intending to keep it when one has good grounds for so acting.”

“In the case of one unjustifiably making an attack on your honour, when you cannot otherwise defend yourself than by impeaching the integrity of the person insulting you, it is quite allowable to do so.”

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Velvet Glove from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.