We have now surveyed the vast field of Jesuit missionary activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and can appreciate the effect when, in a few years time, the voice of the Pope will summon them to lay aside for ever their black robes and their proud name. It would be hypocritical to say that we cannot sum up in few words the impressions gathered from this survey. Let us recognise in the first place that thousands of the fathers displayed heroic zeal in discharging the work which the Society laid on them. Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians, often of noble birth and brilliant parts, faced the perils of a mediæval voyage, wandered afoot over leagues of desolate mountain or deadly forest, and laid down their lives courageously under the plague or the sword. Yet there is another aspect which we perceive just as clearly: another quality which we find in the silken courts of China or Siam or Persia, the blaze of Indian or Brazilian villages, on the plains of Paraguay or Mexico, and amid the snows of Canada. It is everywhere, it is identical, and it is palpable. These men have fallen from their ideals. In virtue of a vast and hypocritical system of commerce they amass wealth and power, defend it with mean intrigue and violent assault, blunt their moral sense in pursuit of more, relax into sensuality and are lifted to arrogance. It is time that they have a severe lesson.
[Footnote 29: This _taly_ is described by the other missionaries as a gross image representing a Hindu divinity equivalent to the Latin Priapus. It was certainly mythological, and was suspended on a cord of very clear mythological import. The Jesuits first declared that it was a "civil custom," and then said that a "direction of intention" on the part of the convert made it harmless. When Rome brought pressure to bear on them, they invented a _taly_ with the cross on one side and the emblem of Pillear on the other.]
[Footnote 30: It is difficult to estimate the value of the Paraguay reductions. Robertson, in his _Letters on Paraguay_, calculates that the average Indian earned at least a hundred dollars yearly, and that his food, hut, and clothing did not cost fifty. He estimates the total value of a hundred thousand such workers and the property as about £5,641,200.]