of all. Many besides Mr. Taylor are fully qualified to translate Josephus; but very few are able to set forth, or to set forth so well, that kind of original work which flows with such forceful grace from his pen. May he, therefore, say we, let Josephus alone, and proceed with his present undertaking. Still the completion of Josephus is needed and is due to those who have laid out their money upon the early parts, which remain all but useless to them till the translation is finished. The remedy is obvious. Let Mr. Taylor free himself from this anxiety and labour, by transferring it to the hands of some one who has more leisure and appetite for the task, and devote himself to the production of those fine books-so full of thought, of feeling, yet of research, enshrined in clear and beautiful writing-on which his usefulness in this age and his reputation in the ages to come will mainly rest. We are quite sure that every one of our readers will agree in this wish when he hears what the design the author contemplates really is. It is thus expressed in the closing paragraph of the Preface::

The present religious existence of the European commonwealth-if indeed the continental nations can be said to retain any of the elements of a religious existence -various as it is in its features, might be described under the names of some twelve or twenty illustrious leaders of past times. Nothing on any side exists which may not be fairly brought under review in connection with a name, or which would not involuntarily suggest itself to every well-informed mind on the mere mention of such a name.

'I will confess to have entertained the idea of bringing the several existing religious systems under separate review-each considered as the product of the mind which principally gave it its form and character. The execution of a task such as this in a manner fully proportioned to its magnitude and importance, would demand qualifications to which I make no pretension. The qualification which I do profess, and apart from which such a task assuredly should not be attempted, is -on the one hand, a profound belief of the truth of that Gospel which "is not of man,"—and on the other, a thorough freedom of mind in relation to all those forms of Christianity which bespeak a lower origin.'

Not

But why commence such a series with Loyola and Jesuitism? certainly, Mr. Taylor states, from any desire to step forward and signalize his Protestant zeal, at a time of political and ecclesiastical commotion, by an attack upon the ever-to-be-dreaded 'Society of Jesus;' or because he regards that Society as now especially formidable:

On the contrary, it is because Jesuitism is now, as I think, falling into its place among schemes that may be analysed without alarm, and that may be treated in all calmness, according to its merits, that I have selected it from among those institutes which are still extant, and likely to subsist a while, and to exert some dying influence, although they be hastening to their end. The same may be said of all these products of the middle ages, or of the season of convulsion which brought the medieval era to a close-namely, that as things about to "vanish away," they offer themselves as fit subjects of tranquil and instructive contemplation.?

The work is divided into two equal parts, the first being devoted to the personal history of Loyola; and the second to 'Jesuitism in its Rudiments,' that is, as set forth in what may be regarded as the canonical writings of Jesuitism.

The first portion is an admirable dissertation on the career of a most remarkable man. The history of Loyola is here related with much

animation

animation and strength of style; his character is delineated with masterly discrimination; and the principles developed in his career are indicated with marvellous distinctness. In every page we trace the mind of one who is gifted with a rare tact for the discovery of the beautiful and the true, wherever it may be found; and for detecting the foul and the false, in whatever dark corners it may be hidden. Loyola has never till now had a biographer so willing and so able to do full justice to all the good in his character and principles, and so resolute and keen in laying bare all the evil in both. Many will think the picture too favourable, and some may deem it the reverse. But upon the whole it seems to us in all essential points a perfectly truthful delineation, from which the reader may rise with the conviction that he has obtained a more clear and correct impression of the great founder of Jesuitism than any other work in our own or in any other language will enable him to realize. We should like to give the reader some larger specimens of the quality of this part of the work than our space allows, but for one or two morsels we must find room. first is one of many examples in recent literature of the tendency to seek for indications of character in the personal appearance of the hero. This used to be thought a poor test; but the writings and lectures of the phrenologists have in the course of years had more effect than we may be willing to acknowledge: :

The

Iñigo, high-born, slenderly educated, or, as it seems, wholly untaught in letters, yet accomplished in all graceful and chivalrous art, wanted no advantage that might secure to him in ample measure the smiles and favours which are to be won in courts, palaces, pavilions, and camps. He is described by contemporaries as of middle stature, with an aspect full of grace and dignity; a complexion between the fair and swarthy; an ample and prominent forehead; an eye sparkling, and full of life; the nose somewhat long and curved. He limped slightly, but not awkwardly, in consequence of the injury his leg had sustained in the hands of the surgeons. It is affirmed that he would never grant permission to painters or sculptors to exercise their art upon him, and that the extant portraits and medallions were all derived from a cast taken after death. If authenticity could be attributed to a medallion, the execution of which might seem to vouch for its genuineness, and which accords well with the description given of their friend and master by his followers, we may assume him to have been handsome, after the Spanish type, and decisively of military mould and aspect. The air is that of the ecclesiastic, induced upon a form and temperament which was thoroughly that of the soldier. The contour, symmetrical and rotund, is expressive of a hopeful, enterprising, and chivalrous, rather than of a reflective turn. One would say that the outward life was more to this man than the inward life. The intense attitude is that of one whose own emotions and impressions rule his animal system, leaving him little under the control of persons and things around him. He is self-prompted, self-possessed, sure, determined, unhesitating, firm; but not remorseless or inexorable. He is fertile in resources; nor ever desponds because he has no means of help left him. He is nice in his perceptions; has a keen relish of enjoyment, and-must it not be said? is of a pleasureloving constitution. One would not think him the ascetic, or the self-tormentor. He is well-fleshed and sanguineous,* and is accustomed-so one might surmise-to adjust all differences between flesh and spirit in a reasonable manner. If imaginative, it is only within the narrowest limits: his imagination lights up at a spark, but as it has little oil of its own, it does not burn with any rich, copious, or continuous splendour. Yet assuredly there is nothing malignant in this physiognomy; it

*This we do not see in the medallion, a copy of which is prefixed to the volume.

indicates

indicates no acerbity, no sullen pride, no retention of anger. This man is too happy in himself to harbour a resentment.

Thus far, then, the medallion consists with the history of "Saint Ignatius;" but it must be confessed that if any score of portraits, unnamed, were placed on the table, and it were demanded that the founder of the order of the Jesuits should be singled out from among them, several probably of that number would be selected sooner than this. If indeed this be the image of the author of that Institute, how shrouded was that intelligence ;-how many fathoms deep was that mind seated, which conceived a scheme for ruling the world, and which went far toward actually ruling it!'-(p. 20.)

The following is a curious trait of the force of that will which is constantly indicated in the career of Ignatius-and which indeed appears to be the source of all real distinction for good or for evil. Loyola has his leg fractured by a ball at the siege of Pampeluna. The bone is badly set, and his life is in great danger; but things turn out favourably, and he rallies:

:

A fresh illustration, however, was yet to be afforded of Loyola's energy of will, for as his recovery advanced it was found that the fractured-the re-fractured bone, had so united as to present an unsightly protrusion, just where the well-turned limb should show a graceful outline. This deformity was in his esteem an intolerable ill; for what is life with all its splendours to one whose stocking could never be made to fit without a rumple? Although forewarned that the removal of this bony excrescence could not be effected without inflicting the most exquisite anguish, Loyola yielded himself once again to the martyrdom of a terrible operation. While his attendants fainted in witnessing the horrors of it, he, unbound and without a groan, endured the surgeon's tools, indicating his anguish only by the tight clench of his hands. That the motive for undergoing this anguish was such as is alleged, his biographer asserts-et quod me audiente narravit-ut habiles atque elegantes urbanus ocreas gestare posset, secare os jussit.'-(pp. 25, 26).

This same strength of will is still more strikingly indicated when, with the view to future usefulness and to the necessary qualifications for his new vocation, Loyola resolved to repair the defects of his early education :

At Barcelona and during his former sojourn there, Loyola had gained the goodwill of a devout lady, named Isabella Rosella, to whom now, on his return, he communicated his design of going through a course of elementary instruction, the better to fit him for the work to which he wished to devote himself, namely, the care of souls. This lady and patron, along with a schoolmaster of the city named Ardebal, highly approved his plan; and the latter benevolently undertook to direct his studies without fee; while the former pledged herself to supply the means of his support. Thus confirmed in his purpose, and thus assisted, he took his Latin grammar in hand. Resolutely, therefore, he now addressed himself to his task; and how arduous and how repulsive must have been the daily effort of acquiring the very rudiments of learning to a man trained as he had been, and now past his thirtieth year! And yet this mere difficulty of learning was not the only trial of constancy which he had to encounter, for so fixed had the devotional habits of his mind now become, and with such impetus and velocity did his thoughts rush forward in the channel of the pious affections, that as often as, in the declension or the conjugation of verbs, the words were such as to suggest ideas of religion, his whole soul was on the wing; grammar-teacher, all was forgotten, and whatever he might already have learned was clean erased from his memory; everything was to be commenced afresh! Of this new perplexity the tempter took advantage, using the lure of things sacred for the purpose of diverting Ignatius from his studies, and sometimes even giving him sudden insights into the mysteries of faith! He however discerned this artifice, learned how to baffle his adversary on his own ground, and thus acquired a species of skill of which he afterwards often availed himself, to the great benefit of the many souls that came under his care.

'Near

'Near to the school he attended there was a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, where, after having duly poured forth his petitions to God and the Virgin, he opened all his mind to his friend and master Ardebal; he professed anew and more explicitly his determination to persist in his studies two years longer, or longer if needful, and to yield himself without distinction to every task, and submit to every chastisement, which, according to the usage of the school, would be inflicted upon boys not making more progress than himself. This profession, made in all sincerity by Loyola, was accepted, and, it is affirmed, was acted upon by his master; and it has been thought an edifying device to place before the world some touching representations of the scene when the great founder submissively and with tears was yielding his adult person to a smart infliction, administered by his faithfully wrathful pedagogue! "Saint Ignatius whipped at school!"'-(pp. 66-68.)

The idea which Mr. Taylor entertains of Ignatius is ably and finely wrought out in the chapter devoted to his 'Character,' and from this our readers may claim a few paragraphs :—

'Loyola, we must remember, had reached adult years at the time of his conversion; and his mind at that period was a waste: the reasoning power had not been trained, scarcely at all had it been quickened. Although with him the purely intellectual faculties were of extraordinary grasp, they had slumbered through what might be called a babyhood of thirty years; and when at length they were awakened, the moral emotions and the religious impulses had already taken a form with which reason never afterwards interfered. Loyola's reason mastered every impulse, even the strongest, which his religious convictions disallowed; but it never ventured to bring those convictions to its tribunal. It is thus that he stands before us at once the boldest of all innovators, and as the most unquestioning and submissive of the Church's dutiful sons. His intellect was of giant strength; but a silken thread was always enough to bind it in allegiance to the usages and faith of the Church. No spirit more daring than his, or more purely original and self-informed, in relation to whatever he held to be free to him, or to be at his full disposal; none more abject in relation to what from his cradle he had regarded as sacred. Loyola could never have been the reformer of established systems: for he worshipped every shred of the ecclesiastical tatters of past ages. But he was the inventor of a scheme essentially his own, and with marvellous sagacity, and a tact fertile in resources, he contrived to lodge the prodigious novelty-the Society of Jesuswithin the very adytum of the old system, and to do so without noise, without any displacement of parts or the breaking off even of a moulding! By his hands a house was built within a house; yet none had heard the din of the builder's tools while it was yet in progress.

'Loyola understood, too, the respective offices of faith, or religious motive, and of reason. He was wary of emotion when it might influence those determinations over which it was the province of reason to preside. It was his professed practice, on all occasions of moment, to implore the Divine guidance, with a simple-hearted fervour, as if Heaven was to do it all: and having done this, then apply himself with all his might to every natural means of success, by aid of energy, sagacity, and the calculation of causes, as if the event were wholly dependent upon human forethought and assiduity-"Let us pray as if we had no help in ourselves; let us labour as if there were no help for us in heaven."

'What is said of him by all his biographers as to that impassioned style of his devotions, and as to the copiousness of that torrent of tears which seemed, at length, to have quite exhausted his natural moisture and to have brought him almost to the physical condition of a mummy, must be admitted as authentic in the main, aud therefore as proving that his temperament was far from cold or purely intellectual. But he had learned a secret which perhaps very few passionate spirits ever learn or ever attempt to put in practice, namely, during the paroxysms of emotion to unharness Reason and to let her stand by in her place. Loyola's emotions, how impetuous soever they might be, never ran away with his mind. At whatever time his bark was driven before the hurricane of religious fervour, Reason was found to be

safe

"Im

safe on shore, and ready to resume her place at the helm when the winds were hushed. He did nothing without emotion, but he did nothing at its bidding. pulse and feeling," he would say, "man shares with the inferior orders around him; but reason is his distinction, and with him therefore it should be supreme."

A less pure reason than Loyola's could never have conceived the idea of the Society; nor could an inferior sagacity have governed it. Yet a spirit less profoundly impassioned than his must have failed to breathe it into the soul and vital force which have carried it over the world and given it perpetuity.’—(pp. 173— 180.)

The second portion of this work is devoted to the examination of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, his Letters on Obedience, the Constitution, and the Directorium. The writer witnesses this phenomenonthat the Society speedily became the object of the darkest suspicions and the most vehement hatred, not only to Protestant but to Catholic states and people-and the question arises whether these suspicions and this odium were altogether unwarrantable and groundless; or, being in the main well founded, whether the Society had in the brief period of a few years lost the spirit and forgotten the intentions of its founder, or had merely developed the principles of its constitution, and given effect to the spirit and letter of its code. The analysis of that code, as exhibited in the just named documents, is held by Mr. Taylor to establish the latter of these suppositions, by exhibiting the germs of those evils which have rendered, and which must ever render Jesuitism a vicious institution, and must make it a source of mischief moral and political in the bosom of nations;' it is also the only supposition that can be adhered to consistently with the facts of the case.

The chapter, near the close, on the purport of Jesuitism, contains many sagacious and profound observations which will be read by many with great interest. It might have appeared from the commencement that Mr. Taylor regarded Jesuitism as rapidly approaching its extinction but it here appears that he regards it as likely merely to close one mode of operation to open another suited to the altered condition of the world. Dynasties have disappeared, strong thrones have been shaken, state-craft has passed away and lost its old advantages. Those movements which affect the welfare of nations spring less and less from the individual will-from the mind and purpose of the governing few, and are more and more dependent-not so much upon the articulate voice of the people-as upon abstruse and uncontrollable influences— moral, physical, commercial, and social.

'It is probable, therefore,' our author thinks, that the Jesuit Society, not slow to read the lesson which events are placing in its view, will abandon what it may deem a desperate endeavour to rule the world as from the depths of closets and cabinets, and may at once address itself to a task which, if it be more arduous and more perilous, is more stimulating—that of ruling it by placing itself in immediate communication with the masses of the people, and by offering itself to ride foremost upon the surges of popular agitation.

'Henceforward, as we may surmise, it will not be in the way of intrigue that the Society will make itself felt-for intrigue is not an engine that can be brought to bear on millions of men, but as the promulgators of a political and social creed acceptable to these masses in a sense of which it may seem to be susceptible when expounded to rude ears; but which in its inner and true meaning carries entire the principles of an absolute despotism. In times gone by, Jesuitism sought to

rule