To set up an ideal of aggrandizement, to fill a body of men with a fanatical enthusiasm for that ideal and then to provide an organization and discipline marvellously adapted to conquest, that is what the Prussian schoolmaster who {411} proverbially won Sadowa, and the Jesuits who beat back the Reformation, have known how to do better than anyone else.

Their methods took account of everything except the conscience of mankind.
Moreover, there can be no doubt that in their eager pursuit of tangible results they lowered the ethical standards of the church.

Wishing to open her doors as widely as possible to all men, and finding that they could not make all men saints, they brought down the requirements for admission to the average human level.

One cannot take the denunciations of Jesuitical "casuistry" and "probabilism" at their face value, but one can find in Jesuit works on ethics, and in some of their early works, very dangerous compromises with the world.

[Sidenote: Jesuitical compromises] One reads in their books how the bankrupt, without sinning mortally, may defraud his creditors of his mortaged goods; how the servant may be excused for pilfering from his master; how a rich man may pardonably deceive the tax-collector; how the adulteress may rightfully deny her sin to her husband, even on oath.[1] Doubtless these are extreme instances, but that they should have been possible at all is a melancholy warning to all who would, even for pious ends, substitute inferior imitations for genuine morality.
[1] Substantiation of these statements in excerpts from Jesuit works of moral theology, printed in C.Mirbt: _Quellen zur Geschichte des Papst-tums_[3], 1911, pp.