A Vanished Arcadia | Page 4

and will remain so with me to the end. So to the readers (if I chance to have them) of this short attempt to give some faint idea of the great Christian Commonwealth of the Jesuit Missions between the Parana and Uruguay, I now address myself. He who attacks a subject quite fallen out of date, and still not old enough to give a man authority to speak upon it without the fear of contradiction, runs grave risk.
Gentle, indulgent reader, if so be that you exist in these the days of universal knowledge and self-sufficient criticism, I do not ask for your indulgence for the many errors which no doubt have slipped into this work. These, if you care to take the trouble, you can verify, and hold me up to shame. What I do crave is that you will approach the subject with an open mind. Your Jesuit is, as we know, the most tremendous wild-fowl that the world has known. `La guardia nera' of the Pope, the order which has wrought so much destruction, the inventors of `Ciencia media',* cradle from which has issued forth Molina, Suarez, and all those villains who, in the days in which the doctrine was unfashionable, decried mere faith, and took their stand on works -- who in this land of preconceived opinion can spare it a good word? But, notwithstanding, even a Jansenist, if such be left, must yet admit the claim of Francis Xavier as a true, humble saint, and if the sour-faced sectary of Port Royale should refuse, all men of letters must perforce revere the writer of the hymn.
-- * The doctrine of the `Ciencia Media' occurs in the celebrated `Concordia gratiae et liberi arbitrii', by Luis de Molina (1588). The concilium de Auxiliis was held to determine whether or not `concordia' was possible between freewill and grace. As the Jesuits stuck by Molina and his doctrines in despite of councils and of popes, the common saying arose in Spain: `Pasteles en la pasteleria y ciencia media en la Compan~ia.' --
But into the whole question of the Jesuits I cannot enter, as it entails command of far more foot and half-foot words than I can muster up. Still, in America, and most of all in Paraguay, I hope to show the Order did much good, and worked amongst the Indians like apostles, receiving an apostle's true reward of calumny, of stripes, of blows, and journeying hungry, athirst, on foot, in perils oft, from the great cataract of the Parana to the recesses of the Tarumensian woods. Little enough I personally care for the political aspect of their commonwealth, or how it acted on the Spanish settlements; of whether or not it turned out profitable to the Court of Spain, or if the crimes and charges of ambition laid to the Jesuits' account were false or true. My only interest in the matter is how the Jesuits' rule acted upon the Indians themselves, and if it made them happy -- more happy or less happy than those Indians who were directly ruled from Spain, or through the Spanish Governors of the viceroyalties. For theories of advancement, and as to whether certain arbitrary ideas of the rights of man, evolved in general by those who in their persons and their lives are the negation of all rights, I give a fico -- yes, your fig of Spain -- caring as little as did ancient Pistol for `palabras', and holding that the best right that a man can have is to be happy after the way that pleases him the most. And that the Jesuits rendered the Indians happy is certain, though to those men who fudge a theory of mankind, thinking that everyone is forged upon their anvil, or run out of their own mould, after the fashion of a tallow dip (a theory which, indeed, the sameness of mankind renders at times not quite untenable), it seems absurd because the progress of the world has gone on other lines -- lines which prolonged indefinitely would never meet those which the Jesuits drew. All that I know is I myself, in the deserted missions, five-and-twenty years ago often have met old men who spoke regretfully of Jesuit times, who cherished all the customs left by the company, and though they spoke at secondhand, repeating but the stories they had heard in youth, kept the illusion that the missions in the Jesuits' time had been a paradise. Into the matter of the Jesuits' motives I do not propose to enter, holding that the origin of motives is too deeply seated to be worth inquiry until one has more information about the human mind than even modern `scientists' seem able to impart. Yet it is certain the Jesuits in Paraguay had faith fit