Note 919 — Chapter XVII · The Moral Scope.

Thus the Protestant Sir Henry Howorth, who attacked the Jesuits so bitterly in recent years, must confess: “The Jesuits have been a very powerful agency in framing history. They have some things to be proud of. So far as I know, the austerity and purity of their lives was one of the greatest, probably the greatest of all, reforming agencies in the purifying of the clergy of the sixteenth century, and they strenuously leavened religious life with the stricter rules of life, which the Council of Trent tried hard to introduce into the religious world.” (The London Tablet, Nov. 23, 1901, p. 817.)