George Lincoln Burr

“ Nor does it trouble Father Hughes that the system of education he expounds takes thought neither for the search of truth as truth nor for the development of man as man. He does not, indeed, urge the system as a final one, and he points out the changes it has undergone; but he has neither strictures for its past nor suggestions for its future.
But, if Father Hughes is so blind to Jesuit defects as even, with touching naiveté, to take for sober praise the irony of Frederic of Prussia, he is keen-eyed to the real merits of his order's work ”

“ Of criticism, indeed, in the current sense there is nothing in Father Hughes's book. Painfully conscious though he is of the odium resting on his order, he never tells us the precise charges against its work. To him emulation and artificial rewards are incentives to study as blameless as they are effective. ”

“ Not in their learning, not in their method, not in their manners, lay the essence of that strange power which for centuries drew to their schools and then into their order, regardless of wealth and career, of pleading fathers and of weeping mothers, of threatening courts and often of a frowning church, the flower of young manhood from both Catholic and Protestant Europe. ”