This general mediocrity of intellect is accompanied by a general mediocrity of character. Just as their vaunted system of education is singularly unsuccessful in developing higher ability, so their equally lauded spiritual exercises leave the great body at a very common level of character. When we have justly admired the apostles who here and there exhibit heroic self-sacrifice on the foreign missions, the communities which here and there brave the horrors and dangers of a plague-stricken town, the few whose integrity of life wins the respect of people unattached to the Society, we find ourselves confronting a general body of men of no moral or spiritual distinction. During generation after generation the largest provinces of the Society persist in comfortable idleness, and the efforts of superiors to assert the despotic power they are supposed to possess are met with resentment and intrigue, and are nearly always foiled. The theoretical corpse-like passivity of the Jesuit is a sheer mockery of the facts of their history.
They stand out from the other religious congregations of the Roman world only in the attainment of greater power and wealth, and the means by which they attain them. Here alone is there a distinctive strand in the story of the Jesuits, perceptible from the foundation of the Society. Unquestionably they did far more for their Church in the first century after the Reformation than any other religious body; and they did this specifically by seeking wealth and power. They strained every nerve to secure the ear of popes, princes, and wealthy people. That was the plain direction of their founder. But we may be confident that Ignatius would not have sanctioned the fraud, hypocrisy, slander, intrigue, and approval of violence which this eagerness for power brought into the Society. In India and China, in England and Sweden, they assumed a right to lie in the service of God; and in the same high cause they counselled or connived at murder, slandered their fellow-priests, violated their sacred obligations, fostered wars, and accommodated the Christian ethic to the passions of wealthy or influential sinners. It was never necessary for a Jesuit theologian to declare that "the end justifies the means."[22] If the phrase is regarded, not as a citation from a written book of rules, but as an interpretation of the conduct of the Jesuits, it expresses the most distinctive feature of the character of the Society during its first hundred years.