Such is not the view of those who write about the "Exercises" without knowledge or who are carried away by prejudice, an exalted imagination, an overwhelming conceit or religious bias or perhaps because of a refusal to recognize the existence of any spiritual element in humanity. It is difficult to persuade such men that there are no "mysterious devices" resorted to in the Exercises; no "subterraneous caverns," no "orgies," no "emerging livid and haggard from the struggle," no "illuminism," no "monoideism" as William James in his cryptic English describes them; no "phantasmagoria or illusions;" no "plotting of assassinations" as the Parliament of Paris pretended to think when examining Jean Chastel, who had attempted the life of Henry IV; no "Mahommedanism" as Müller fancies in his "Origins of the Society of Jesus," nothing but a calm and quiet study of one's self, which even pagan philosophers and modern poets assure us is the best kind of worldly occupation.
Even if some writers insist that "their excellence is very much exaggerated," that they are "dull and ordinary and not the dazzling masterpieces they are thought to be," or are "a Japanese culture of counterfeited dwarf trees," as Huysmans in his "En Route" describes them; yet on the other hand they have been praised without stint by such competent judges as Saints Philip Neri, Charles Borromeo, Francis de Sales, Alphonsus Liguori, Leonard of Port Maurice, and by Popes Paul III, Alexander VII, Clement XIII, Pius IX and Leo XIII. Camus, the friend of St. Francis of Sales, thought "they were of pure gold; more precious than gold or topaz;" Freppel calls them "a wonderful work which, with the 'Imitation of Christ' is perhaps of all books the one which gains the most souls for God;" Wiseman compares the volume to "an apparently barren soil which is found to contain the richest treasures," and Janssen tells us that "the little book which even its opponents pronounced to be a psychological masterpiece of the highest class, ranks also as one of the most remarkable and influential products of later centuries in the field of religion and culture in Germany.... As a guide to the exercises it has produced results which scarcely any other ascetic writings can boast of" (Hist. of the German People, VIII, 223).