Alpha Book

They aided considerably in maintaining Catholicism in
Ireland. At the hourly risk of their lives, they ministered to their
fellow-Catholics in England under Elizabeth and the Stuarts. And what
the Catholic Church lost in numbers through the defection of the
greater part of northern Europe was compensated for by Jesuit missions
among the teeming millions in India and China, among the Huron and
Iroquois tribes of North America, and among the aborigines of Brazil
and Paraguay. No means of influence, no source of power, was neglected
that would win men to religion and to the authority of the bishop of
Rome. Politics and agriculture were utilized as well as literature and
science. The Jesuits were confessors of kings in Europe and apostles of
the faith in Asia and America.
[Sidenote: Political and Economic Factors in the Catholic Reformation]
It has been pointed out already that the rapid diffusion of
Protestantism was due to economic and political causes as well as to
those narrowly religious.


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