ABSTRACT
On Christmas Day, 1750, Father John Lewis, SJ. celebrated the Lord’s Nativity in Maryland for the first time since arriving from England to serve as a missionary in the Chesapeake—an occupation that would fill the remainder of his life. If a practice was not specifically banned in scripture, then Jesuits were free to pick it up or discard it according to their ongoing sense of whether it was practically helpful at the moment or not. A major reason that the Spiritual Exercises became important for Jesuit slaveholding was that Ignatius regarded his book as a manual for making practical daily decisions as well as momentous and longterm ones. Lewis asked his listeners to consider how they might become like the generous Christ described in Philippians and so “be guided entirely according to ye sacred self-denying principles of the Gospel.” To Lewis, the drama of moral life was the imperative that one take a stand either against or for Christ.
