Paul Bert and the Jesuits.
A LATE number of Harper's Monthly contains a striking article on "The New French Minister of Public Instruction," published, however, after his fall with the Gambetta ministry, the substance of which we lay before our readers. M. Bert has been active in the measures to get the Jesuits out of the public schools in France. His activity brought on him the denunciation of the whole Jesuit Order, and drove him at last to a reply, which it concerns all free people to consider. M. Bert did not commit the common mistake of "warming up" again the substance of Pascal's assault; but determined to show what the Jesuits teach in 1879–80. To do this he selected the "Compendium Theologiæ Moralis" and the "Casus Conscientiæ" of John Peter Gury, S. J., the last edition of which was published in 1875, with the highest official approbation. Of these works M. Bert made a careful analysis, and now publishes his results in a volume entitled "La Morale des Jesuites." In this volume he charges that for three hundred years the Society has been corrupting the youth of all nations; that it teaches as morals a set of doctrines which strike at the foundations of society; that it countenances debauchery, theft, incest, robbery, and murder, and that it has everywhere undermined the authority of the civil power, and promoted communistic morality. For proofs, he goes to the works we have named, where, for the first thing, he finds conscience so treated as to confuse the minds of scholars and destroy the solidity of moral distinctions. These principles are applied, in a long list of "cases" quoted from the Jesuit works named above, in which Father Gury advances "views of lying which Ananias and Sapphira would have thought liberal." Formulas are given by which persons who have an interest in concealing the truth may do so without prejudice to their Catholic standing. Recipes are furnished by which a man may preserve his secret even under the interrogation of a court of justice, and swear that he has told all. M. Bert takes up these instructions as to theft, and shows that the right to steal is affirmed in the case of necessity, which may be extreme, as where there is danger of death, grave where the need is serious and common, as in the case of mendicants; but in all these cases the right to steal is affirmed. It may be practiced, also, innocently where the thief makes secret compensation. No wonder that, with such a conscience, communism should be rife where Jesuits have been at the head of the schools. So, with regard to petty theft and the plague of thieving domestics, the Jesuit casuistry contained in these works countenances them, or, at least, so confuses the conscience of plain people as to create a certainty that, with proper training, they would be practiced.—Independent.