The Jesuits - James Aitken Wylie
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arrier, and commit the most horrible crimes, on<br />
the mightiest possible scale, and neither feel<br />
remorse of conscience nor fear of punishment? But<br />
this unbounded liberty of wickedness did not<br />
content the sons of Loyola. <strong>The</strong>y panted for a<br />
liberty, if possible, yet more boundless; they<br />
wished to be released from the easy condition of<br />
imagining some good end for the wickedness they<br />
wished to perpetrate, and to be free to sin without<br />
the trouble of assigning even to themselves any end<br />
at all. This they have accomplished by the method<br />
of directing the intention.<br />
This is a new ethical science, unknown to those<br />
ages which were not privileged to bask in the<br />
illuminating rays of the Society of Jesus, and it is<br />
as simple as convenient. It is the soul, they argue,<br />
that does the act, so far as it is moral or immoral.<br />
As regards the body's share in it, neither virtue nor<br />
vice can be predicated of it. If, therefore, while the<br />
hand is shedding blood, or the tongue is<br />
calumniating character, or uttering a falsehood, the<br />
soul can so abstract itself from what the body is<br />
doing as to occupy itself the while with some holy<br />
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