though zealously attached to Romish opinions, gave them a severe blow in the Austrian dominions, about the year 1753, by bestowing her confidence upon Van Swieten and De Haen, two physicians, who were members of the Jansenistic church at Utrecht. University professorships were quickly filled by men of similar principles; and schemes of ecclesiastical reform were far from slow in courting notice from the Austrian public. The monastic bodies were marked out for diminution, their exemptions from episcopal authority were said to demand abolition, the established intercourse with Rome was blamed as excessive, and it was proposed to place the church really under the control of the state'. Under all such attacks, the papal see had long found effectual means of resistance in the Jesuits, but their order now stood very low in public estimation: the Jansenists had rendered it unpopular in the more pious Romish circles; politicians complained of its encroaching spirit; and an infidel school was rising to irresistible importance in France, which fastened upon Jesuitism with peculiar severity, because it was a main prop of the existing religious establishment. This pernicious school may date its origin from the reign of Lewis XIV. when Bayle, and some other men of talent, assumed a freedom and levity in treating serious subjects, that undermined the strength of many prepossessions hitherto thought wholly above assault. The habit of implicit credence being thus broken, Frenchmen turned a scrutinizing eye upon the Romish church, and, confounding its palpable weaknesses with Christianity itself, the country became overspread with an obstinate, scoffing contempt for revelation altogether. Its most active defenders, the Jesuits, naturally became extremely odious; they were, however, not only on the watch to check infidelity, but also to proscribe Jansenism, and this latter kind of activity rendered them quite as agreeable to many influential ecclesiastics, as the former. To discourage Huguenot opinions, it had been an approved practice to deny the sacraments to such as could not produce certificates of confession, signed by an orthodox priest. A clergyman extended this principle to Jansenism; for which he was fined by 1 Continuation of the Summary of Mosheim, by the Rev. C. T. Collins, ii. 193. the parliament of Paris. That court also, in the year 1752, issued a prohibition against all acts tending to schism, and all refusal of sacraments, under colour of obedience to the bull Unigenitus. The archbishop of Paris maintained the propriety of giving to that bull all the force against Jansenism for which it was intended; and the king, Lewis XV., found himself imperiously called upon to interfere. By the advice of Lamoignon, the chancellor, he submitted the points in dispute to deputies from both the contending parties; but this expedient only caused farther irritation. The parliament would not recede from the principle of prosecuting priests who withheld the sacraments, and met a royal order for the discontinuance of all such processes by a warm remonstrance. Lewis now dispersed and exiled the refractory members; but he found public opinion so decidedly in their favour, that he soon recalled them. The archbishop of Paris was next banished from the capital, for keeping the dispute alive; and a council was called in 1755, for the purpose of settling the question. This body applied to the pope, and he wrote an equivocal letter to the king, throwing upon him the decision. Lewis at length held one of those despotic sessions, called a bed of justice, and by this, in connexion with another arbitrary exercise of power, he so disgusted the parliament, that it refused any longer to exercise its functions. The Jesuits were highly elated by the seeming triumph thus gained for them by despotism. It was, however, fatal to their order in France, the nation being now fully persuaded that its influence was quite incompatible with any substantial amelioration of public institutions'. § 2. In Portugal, the Jesuits were grown even still more obnoxious. They had long possessed great power in that country, but the leading men were become weary of it, from its vexatious interference with every public transaction. The reigning monarch, Joseph I. especially, was anxious to emancipate himself and his people from a control which left free agency to neither. As a necessary consequence, he was detested by the order; and when some disappointed nobles conspired against his life, three Jesuits, of whom Malagrida is the one most remembered, 2 Continuation of Mosheim, by Charles Coote, LL.D. Lond. 1826. acted as confessors, and suggested sophistical encouragement to the guilty parties. He had a very narrow escape, on the 3d of September, 1758, and his hatred of the Jesuits now knew no bounds. He suppressed their colleges, accused the order of usurping an authority and using an influence in Paraguay, highly prejudicial to the interests of both Portugal and Spain, and would not rest until it was wholly rooted out from his dominions. In 1759, accordingly, all Jesuits were declared outlaws, and banished from the Portuguese territories: an example which was pressed upon the imitation of other courts'. § 3. In France, the parliament, now reinstated, proved as resolute as ever in prosecuting priests who denied the sacraments, and was keenly upon the watch to ruin effectually that order which had exulted so indiscreetly on the late temporary ascendancy given to it by force of despotism. The desired opportunity came, from one of those commercial transactions which Jesuitism took within its universal range. A mercantile firm, which the superior of the Leeward Islands' mission had engaged to supply with colonial produce, stopped payment, on the seizure of a cargo by British cruisers: due provision for such an untoward circumstance having been omitted, a panic ensued, and creditors crowded with claims upon the order; but it disavowed the acts of that individual member who was ostensibly the trader. This plea was, however, treated as nothing better than a dishonest subterfuge, the trade of Jesuitism, like every thing connected with it, being really under the direction of its head, who was, therefore, with all his inferiors, responsible for commercial payments, and, in fact, for every undertaking in which a Jesuit engages. The prosecution of this plea brought forth a merciless exposure of the order, exhibiting it as a combination of the most dangerous kind, blindly moving, with an admirable machinery, at the discretion of a foreigner, and a small council of artful assistants. These views being warmly pressed upon the king, he proposed to the general a plan for regulating the order. This was, however, declined; and, in consequence, the parliament ordained in 3 "They decided that conspirators would incur a cenial sin, and not a mortal one."-History of the Jesuits, * Coote, 222. 1762, that French Jesuits should lay aside the habit of their order, cease to live in societies, and to obey alien superiors. In some quarters, a violent clamour was raised against this ordonnance, as founded upon ex-parte statements, which were, in fact, untrue. But the French nation was not affected by any such demonstrations; and in 1764, the order was suppressed, by the parliaments of Paris, Normandy, and Britany. The pope vainly interposed his authority against the assumption of such a power by tribunals merely lay; his bull was suppressed in France, by a parliamentary decree; in Portugal, the king was bold enough to declare it inoperative. § 4. Spain would not be behind other Romish countries in the war against Jesuitism. In 1767, the temporalities of the order in that country were seized, and the members of it banished'. Vainly, however, did the Romish powers press for a papal dissolution of the obnoxious body. While Clement XIII. lived, it had a protection upon which it could securely depend. His successor, the celebrated Francis Laurence Ganganelli, a Franciscan friar, proved more tractable; he took the name of Clement XIV., and became known, from the enlightened liberality of his sentiments, as the Protestant pope. But although ready, above most of his predecessors, to consider fully any question proposed to him, he was not willing to take so decided a step as the suppression of the most influential religious order in existence, without mature deliberation. When, accordingly, powerful courts earnestly recommended the suppression of Jesuitism, Ganganelli did not suffer himself to be betrayed into any unjust and impolitic haste: he took four years for deliberation, referred the question to a commission instituted for inquiry, considered everything said both for and against the society, and read every important publication on both sides. At length he came to a conviction, that the Romish world, in the wish that it generally expressed for the extinction of the Jesuitic order, was perfectly right. Accordingly, in 1773, he suppressed it, as no longer answering the ends of 6 Coote, $224. 7" In the year 1766, their expulsion took place from Bohemia and Denmark; in 1767, from Spain, Venice, and Genoa ; and in 1768, from Naples, its institution, and blemished both by principles and practices of an injurious tendency'. The Jesuits were violently enraged by this sentence of annihilation; and Laurence Ricci, their general, after a confinement in the English college, occasioned such a ferment among his partisans, that he was committed to the castle of St. Angelo by the congregation of cardinals. He died in that fortress, after undergoing many examinations, in November, 1775'. The pope himself felt his act likely to bring an untimely death upon him; and this apprehension has been considered as verified by the event. He lived, however, in tranquillity and health, more than eight months after the society was abolished; still, not without occasional apprehensions of the vengeance which he knew himself to have provoked. But he said, that if it were his lot to become a victim, he should be a willing one, being perfectly satisfied that his act was not only just, but even also necessary; and that it had not been determined upon without fervent prayers both from himself and others interested in his welfare. His mortal illness seized him one day after dinner, in the Passion Week of 1774, and it continued with various degrees of intensity, until the 22d of the following September, when he died. After death, his corpse rapidly became excessively discoloured and offensive; which circumstances, taken in connexion with the firm health that he had enjoyed up to the time of his seizure, and the exasperation of the Jesuits, made people consider him to have been poisoned. To account for the accomplishment of this in a manner so gradual, the mischief was attributed to the acquetta, a deadly Calabrian drug, said to have the property of destroying life in a lingering way. Salicetti, an eminent physician, did, indeed, refer his death to natural causes; and the disbelief of slow poisons, which has gained ground with the increase of knowledge, is now highly favourable to the admission of such a view. But contemporaries commonly rejected it with contempt, and attributed Salicetti's report to corruption". ⚫ Coote, 227. 1 Memoirs of Scipio de Ricci, Lond. 1829, i. 8. 28. 2 Circumstantial Narrative detailing the last illness and death of Pope Clement XIV. sent by the Spanish minister to his court. Ibid. 3 Hist. of the Jesuits, i. 267. The writer treats the attack in April as distinct from that which carried Ganganelli off: hence he considers that two attempts were made to poison him. |