in discovering, well aware that lightning is not more rapid and ready than the dagger to reach me wherever I may be." The new member having taken this oath, was then introduced into a neighbouring cell, where he took a bath, and was clothed in garments of new and white linen. He finally repaired with the other brethren to a banquet, where he could with choice food and wine compensate himself for his long abstinence and the horrors and fatigues he had passed through.

In its

336. Blessing the Dagger.-Blessing the dagger was a ceremony performed when the society thought it necessary for their interests to assassinate some king, prince, or other important personage. By the side of the Dark Chamber there usually was a small cell, called the "Cell of Meditation." centre arose a small altar, on which was placed a painting covered with a veil, and surrounded by torches and lamps, all of a scarlet colour. Here the brother whom the Order wished to prepare for the deed of blood received his instructions. On a table stood a casket, covered with strange hieroglyphics, and bearing on its lid the representation of the Lamb. On its being opened, it was found to contain a dagger, wrapped up in a linen cloth, which one of the officers of the society took out and presented to the hierophant, who, after kissing and sprinkling it with holy water, handed it to one of the deacons, who attached it like a cross to a rosary, and hanging it round the neck of the alumnus, informed him that he was the Elect of God, and told him what victim to strike. A prayer was then offered up in favour of the success of the enterprise, in the following words:-"And Thou, invincible and terrible God, who didst resolve to inspire our Elect and Thy servant with the project of exterminating N. N., a tyrant and heretic, strengthen him, and render the consecration of our brother perfect by the successful execution of the great Work. Increase, O God, his strength a hundredfold, so that he may accomplish the noble undertaking, and protect him with the powerful and divine armour of Thine Elect and Saints. Pour on his head the daring courage which despises all fear, and fortify his body in danger and in the face of death itself." After this prayer the veil was withdrawn from the picture on the altar, and the elect beheld the portrait of the Dominican James Clement, surrounded by a host of angels, carrying him on their wings to celestial glory. And the deacon, placing on the head of the chosen brother a crown symbolic of the celestial crown, added: "Deign, O Lord of Hosts, to bestow a propitious

glance on the servant Thou hast chosen as Thine arm, and for the execution of the high decrees of Thine eternal justice. Amen." Then there were fresh dissolving views of ghosts, spectres, skeletons, phantoms, angels and demons, and the farce, to be followed by a tragedy, was played out.

The Jesuits openly advocated tyrannicide, whenever the tyrant was against them. Even that soft-hearted Jesuit and Inquisitor Bellarmine, who would not allow vermin to be killed, because their present life was their only one, wrote a book to show that heretics deserved death; he also advocated the doctrine of tyrannicide.

337. Similar Monkish Initiations.—I may here incidentally remark that the candidate for initiation into some other monkish orders had to undergo similar trials. The novice about to enter the Dominican order had to spend some time in the Cave of Salvation (the pastos of the Ancient Mysteries and of the Freemasons), where he was surrounded by hideous monsters, fierce-looking beasts, and skeleton monks, uttering savage and threatening howls; and he was finally carried about in a coffin. Father Antonio, who about 1820 was elected prior of the Hieronymites at Madrid, declared that, though he would rather be the prior of his convent than a grandee of the first class, yet he would have forgone that dignity if he had been obliged, in order to obtain it, once more to pass through the trials of initiation. He said that instead of the Cave of Salvation, the place of initiation ought to be called the Cave of Hell. "If I believed in the devil," he added, "I should be certain I had seen him with his train of demons and imps."

338. Secret Instructions.-It will suffice to give the headings of the chapters forming the Book of Secreta Monita, or Secret Instructions of the Society of Jesus. The Preface specially warns superiors not to allow it to fall into the hands of strangers, as it might give them a bad opinion of the Order. The chapters are headed as follows:-I. How the Society is to proceed in founding a new establishment. II. How the Brethren of the Society may acquire and preserve the friendship of Princes and other distinguished Personages.-III. How the Society is to conduct itself towards those who possess great influence in a state; and who, though they are not rich, may yet be of service to others. IV. Hints to Preachers and Confessors of Kings and great personages.-V. What conduct to observe towards the clergy and other religious orders.—VI. How to win over rich widows.-VII. How to hold fast widows and dispose of

VOL. I.

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their property.-VIII. How to induce the children of widows to adopt a life of religious seclusion.-IX. Of the increase of College revenues.-X. Of the private rigour of discipline to be observed by the society.-XI. How "Ours" shall conduct themselves towards those that have been dismissed from the society.-XII. Whom to keep and make much of in the society.-XIII. How to select young people for admission into the society, and how to keep them there.XIV. Of reserved cases, and reasons for dismissing from the society.-XV. How to behave towards nuns and devout women. XVI. How to pretend contempt for riches.-XVII. General means for advancing the interests of the society.

339. Authenticity of "Secreta Monita" Demonstrated.-The Jesuits deny the authenticity of this work, but they have never been able to disprove the history of its discovery, which is as follows:

When the society was suppressed by Clement XIV. in 1773, it possessed in the Low Countries, among other property, a college at Ruremonde. Government had appointed a Commission to liquidate the affairs of the Company, and Councillor Zuytgens was specially appointed at Ruremonde to draw up the inventory; but being suspected of having abstracted, in order to favour the Fathers, certain documents, he received a peremptory command to forward all the papers found. Among these the MS. of the Secreta Monita was discovered. The proof of this may be seen in the “Protocol of the Transactions of the Committee, appointed in consequence of the Suppression of the Society of Jesus in the Low Countries," which is deposited in the archives of Brussels. The above MS. was collated, and found to agree with a Latin MS. left by Father Berthier, the last librarian of the Society in Paris, before the Revolution. It also agrees with the edition of the Monita, printed at Paderborn in 1661.

340. Jesuitic Morality.—And even if these Monita were not drawn up by a Jesuit, they yet fully exhibit the actual principles on which, as we know from history, the society has always acted, and that every kind of deception, assassination, regicide, poisoning, seduction, unnatural crimes, spoliation, perjury have ever been practised and approved by them, whenever their doing so could promote their own ends, ad majorem Dei gloriam!

When, in 1760, the Jesuits, in consequence of the bankruptcy of Lavalette, a member of the society, were compelled to produce their "Constitutions," such doctrines as the following were found to be contained in them :

According to Father Taberna, a Jesuit, "If a judge has received money to give an unjust judgment, it is probable that he ought to keep the money; for this is the judgment of fifty-eight Jesuit doctors."

In answer to the question on what occasion a monk may leave off his monk's dress without incurring excommunication, his reply is: "He may leave it off if it is for a purpose that would cause shame; to go, for instance, incognito into places of debauchery."

Emmanuel Sa, another Jesuit teacher: "Promises are not binding if, in making them, you have no intention of keeping them.'

"Potest et fœmina quæque et mas, pro turpo corporis usu pretium accipere et petere, et qui promisit tenetur solvere." "Christian children," says Fagundez, "may accuse their parents of heresy, though they know that their parents will be burnt."

One quite recent instance of Jesuit morality may close these quotations. In 1852 the Jesuits of the rue de Sèvres in Paris had determined to build a splendid Gothic chapel on their land. One day money ran short; every expedient had already been tried to raise some, when one of the fathers, the youngest, the most in demand in the noble faubourg, the most popular confessor, proposed a lottery, and himself as the prize. He wrote a hundred tickets, and made it known in a discreet manner that the female penitent who had the winning number should for three days dispose of Father Lefèvre at her discretion. The ladies fought for the tickets, and, in spite of the laughter and sarcasms of the sceptics and heretics, the chapel was completed.

The public history of the Jesuits, revealing a system of turpitude such as has never been equalled, does not enter into the scope of this work; but as our government endeavours to exterminate dynamiters, so, in the opinion of many, it ought to crush the Jesuitical fraternity-the "Black International," as it has justly been called.

IX

THE SKOPZI

341. Various Russian Sects.—As Russia has always been a hotbed of political secret societies, so it has always been overrun by secret religious sects. Among these we may name the Soshigateli, or Self-burners, who regard voluntary death by fire as the only means of purification from the sins and pollution of the world. They abound in Siberia; within the last twenty years groups of such fanatics, numbering fifteen, twenty, fifty, yea, a hundred men and women, burned themselves in large pits or solitary buildings filled with brushwood. About the year 1867 no less than seventeen hundred are reported to have voluntarily chosen death by fire near Tumen, in the Eastern Ural Mountains. Another sect with similar tendencies, the Morelstschiki, or Self-sacrificers, prefer iron to fire, and consider it a religious duty to kill one another. In 1868 such a mystical sacrifice took place on the estate of a Mr. Gurieff, on the Volga, when forty-seven men and women massacred one another with daggers. Another mad sect are the Flagellants, whose fanaticism sometimes becomes dangerous to other members of the community. In the summer of 1869 the Flagellants of Balashoff (government of Saratoff), to the number of several hundred, on returning from a field where they had practised their fanatical rites, suddenly attacked the lookers-on, and so belaboured them with their scourges and knotted ropes as to kill several of them. Others were trodden to death, and others driven between carts loaded with wood, to which the wretches set fire, so that their victims were suffocated and burnt to ashes.

342. The Skopzi.-But the sect which has during the last generation attracted most attention are the Skopzi or Castrated; and whilst the sects mentioned above consist almost wholly of ignorant, wild fanatics, the Skopzi reckon among their members men of comparative culture and position, as we shall show further on.