Concerning Jesuits Author:John Gerard General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1902 Original Publisher: Catholic Truth Society Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where ... more »you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: BOGEYS AND SCARECROWS BY THE REV. JOHN GERARD, S. J. Quousque tandem ? How long is every assertion, however ridiculous, to be at once accepted, or at least tolerated, if only it tends to discredit the Catholic Church ? How long in regard of her, and of her alone, are all rules of criticism and of common sense to be cast to the winds ? How long shall the well- meaning and usually not unintelligent multitude be scared away from her by clumsy calumnies which proclaim themselves 'as frauds far more clearly than do the tatterdemalion figures set up by farmers with the vain purpose of keeping the crows out of their cornfields ? Questions such as these must constantly rise in the mind of any one who observes the attitude of so many of our countrymen towards the Church of their forefathers. Nothing is more heartbreaking than to find how impotent is Reason in a province wherein she ought to be supreme, and how slanders that have been exposed and refuted time out of mind seem never to be one penny the worse, coming forward again and again to court public attention, and beingeach time warmly received, as though nothing had ever been heard to their disadvantage. A signal illustration is furnished by the appearance of " Henry Seton Merriman's" latest romance, The Velvet Glove.1- It is true that nothing in the field of religion from the pen which gave us The Slave of the Lamp is likely to exhibit anything very novel or calculated to arouse much interest on its own account. Stage villains and villainies afford little opportunity for artistic variety of treatment, and wer...« less