Jesuits invaded all the countries which the great maritime
discoveries of the preceding age had laid open to European
enterprise. They were to be found in the depths of the Peruvian
mines, at the marts of the African slave-caravans, on the shores
of the Spice Islands, in the observatories of China. They made
converts in regions which neither avarice nor curiosity had
tempted any of their countrymen to enter; and preached and
disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West
understood a word.

The spirit which appeared so eminently in this order animated the
whole Catholic world. The Court of Rome itself was purified.
During the generation which preceded the Reformation, that Court
had been a scandal to the Christian name. Its annals are black
with treason, murder, and incest. Even its more respectable
members were utterly unfit to be ministers of religion. They were
men like Leo the Tenth; men who, with the Latinity of the
Augustan age, had acquired its atheistical and scoffing spirit.
They regarded those Christian mysteries, of which they were
stewards, just as the Augur Cicero and the high Pontiff Caesar
regarded the Sibylline books and the pecking of the sacred
chickens. Among themselves, they spoke of the Incarnation, the
Eucharist, and the Trinity, in the same tone in which Cotta and
Velleius talked of the oracle of Delphi or the voice of Faunus in
the mountains. Their years glided by in a soft dream of sensual
and intellectual voluptuousness. Choice cookery, delicious wines,
lovely women, hounds, falcons, horses, newly-discovered
manuscripts of the classics, sonnets, and burlesque romances in
the sweetest Tuscan, just as licentious as a fine sense of the
graceful would permit, plate from the hand of Benvenuto, designs