CHAPTER III

ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS

While painters and sculptors and architects and poets during the Renaissance period were creating masterpieces that were to influence all succeeding generations, a Spanish soldier, using men as his material, created a human masterpiece for the accomplishment of great purposes that was destined to be as vital and enduring as any of the supreme achievements of the time. As Raphael used color and Michelangelo marble, and Leonardo da Vinci the original ideas of an inventive genius of first rank, Ignatius Loyola formed men's wills to a great creative end that was destined to influence not only Europe but every continent on the globe perhaps more than any other creation of the time. The Company of Jesus, as he called it--and he liked to add the epithet little--the band of trained soldiers whose motto was to be "For the Greater Glory of God" (_Ad Major em Dei Gloriam_) and whose purposes were to be as various as all the activities that can be included under such a standard, came to be within half a century after his death the most powerful body of intellectual men in their influence over mankind that the world has ever seen. It was not so much a deliberate creation as a Providential formation, gradually finding its place in the world under the guiding genius of a great soul living on after the death of the body it had informed.

Born in Spain in the Castle of Loyola the year before Columbus discovered America, the youngest of eleven children, Ignatius until his thirtieth year was a venturous chivalric soldier. Wounded at the siege of Pamplona by the French in 1521, when his leg healed in bad position, he had it rebroken, bearing the awful pain in those pre-anaesthetic days rather than have his pride annoyed by deformity. During the enforced idleness he read, after exhausting all the other reading {207} of the place, especially the romances of chivalry, a life of Christ and lives of various saints, particularly that of St. Francis of Assisi, and came to the conclusion that life was only worth living when lived in imitation of the God Man. Amidst many almost incredible difficulties, for more than a dozen of years, he formed his character by spiritual exercises, took up the study of grammar in a class with little boys, supported himself by begging as one of the beggar students of the time, and gathered around him at the University of Paris a group of seven men, who in 1534 took their vows with him as members of the Company of Jesus. With true Spanish chivalry, their first object was to win over the Holy Land from the infidels by going to Jerusalem and converting it. Prevented by war from doing this, they became teachers and missionaries in Italy. Their zeal was so great and yet so directed by reason, they were so absolutely unselfish and had a charm that attracted so much attention, that they accomplished wonders. The Pope received them with kindness and gave them provisional confirmation of their rule. Pope Paul III had insisted on limiting the number of religious orders because of abuses that had arisen in them, but after reading Ignatius' rule he declared "the finger of God is here," gave them the fullest confirmation and in 1543 they were acknowledged as one of the religious orders of the Church.

Francis Thompson has summed up very strikingly, with a poet's eye for effect, the situation in Europe when Loyola was born. That will give the best idea what a confusion there was all around him at the moment when this son of an obscure nobleman began the work that was finally destined to bring order out of much of the religious and educational chaos of the time at least:

"It was a great, a brilliant, a corrupt epoch, fraught with possibilities of glory and peril to a youth of Spain. The old order was yielding. Throughout Europe the nations were loud with the falling ruins of feudalism, and the consolidation of absolute monarchies was ushering in the new political creation. In a mighty dust of war and revolt Christendom itself was vanishing, leaving in its stead an adjustment of States {208} on a secular basis, to be known as 'the balance of European Power.'

"In the year after little Loyola's birth Columbus sailed to begin the New World. When the boy passed to the Court the day of Ferdinand and Isabella was done; Charles V was waiting to ascend the Spanish throne. Before he began the campaign which ended in the breach of Pamplona, Charles had inherited the sceptre of Spain and been elected to the Empire of Germany. The great captain, Gonsalvo de Cordova, was dead; Francis I was King of France, singing _'Souvent femme varie,_ and preparing to tilt with Charles for the supremacy of Europe. English Harry was still bluff Hal, no gospel light yet dawned from Boleyn's eyes and many an English Queen, little dreaming of that perilous dignity to come, still bore her head on her shoulders. But a thick-necked young German friar, with the Reformation in his cowl, was about to cut the tow-rope between the Teuton nations and the boat of Peter. There was a constable Bourbon who should presently halloo those revolting Teutons to the sack of Rome, there was Cellini, a goldsmith, who should brag to have killed him there: a young Gaston de Foix was to flame athwart Italy, and leave like a modern Epaminondas--the victors weeping at Ravenna: a Bayard, last of chivalry in an unchivalric age, was to leave a name _sans peur et sans reproche._ And there was a young Loyola: what of him? Why, before Cervantes came to laugh Spain's chivalry away, should he not be a Spanish Bayard, a Spanish Gaston de Foix, or indeed both in one?"

A knight he dreamed to be and a knight he was to be, but very different from his dreams. Cervantes did not laugh Spain's nor Europe's chivalry away. Any such thought was farthest from him. Ignatius Loyola was to demonstrate the chivalry still in many hearts and was to form and lead men who should accomplish knight-errant tasks all over the world, thinking not of themselves, but lifting men up, an army, as I have said he preferred to call it "a little company," of leaders of others to what seemed less quixotic in his time than in ours, the greater glory of God, but was not without its visionary quality even then. A knight undaunted, _sans peur et sans reproche,_ {209} he surely was, but when he fell his purpose actively survived him, his own great soul had passed into it and it was destined to survive him apparently forever.

After nearly four centuries the Jesuits, as Ignatius' "little company of Jesus" came to be called, are still at their work--teachers, missionaries, writers, scientists, editors; anywhere and everywhere accomplishing the purpose of their founder, doing anything and everything that seems best fitted to advance according to their motto, "The Greater Glory of God." When they were suppressed in 1773 there were about twenty thousand of them. After a full generation of formal non-existence they rose from the dead, as it were, and now there are some sixteen thousand of them in the world, with some twenty-five thousand pupils in their schools in this country alone, and probably two hundred thousand in their schools all over the world. No body of men have more influence, nor is that influence used more for good, than is true of the Jesuits. They are human, and individual members have their faults.

Ignatius was named as the first General, and to him is due the Constitutions of the Order. His only other writing is the little book of the "Spiritual Exercises," a compendium of the thoughts with which men were to exercise their souls and hearts during the thirty days of retreat which they made in order to strip themselves as far as possible of earthly motives and of all selfishness, so as to take up seriously the following of Christ. It has been said, and probably with justice, that this little book has influenced the conduct of men more since it was written than any that ever came from the hands of man. It was composed within the same quarter of a century while Machiavelli was writing "The Prince." The Jesuit constitutions have been the admiration of all those who have given them deep study and they are the model of those of most of the religious orders, both of men and women, founded since his time. They were not written with ideals alone in mind, but they were a growth in the mind of Ignatius during the years of his generalate and represent the condensed practical experience of the Jesuits during the first ten years of their existence as it passed through the alembic of a genius {210} for government, directed by a saint's absolute desire only to secure the greater glory of God.

The only purpose of Ignatius was to influence men to imitate the life that the God Man had lived on earth, which had become the absorbing motive of his own life. He gave himself as a result to all forms of work for social betterment that would conduce to this. The teaching of catechism to children was considered most important by him, and he took it on himself as a personal obligation. The social evil and the reform of erring women were his special care in Rome, and he did not hesitate to be seen conducting these women to a house of refuge that he had had established for them in the city. His work for them accomplished great and lasting good. He realized that education was the most important means of influencing men, so to this his order was

## particularly devoted.

Ignatius' supreme quality was his marvellous ability to select the men who would be of service in great undertakings. St. Francis Xavier, who became the great Apostle of the Indies, acknowledged that he owed under Providence his call to this sublime work entirely to Ignatius, who had turned his ambition from the pursuit of scholarly distinction to a life directed to the extension of Christianity. The brilliant young professor at the University of Paris who at first rather despised the elderly student, apparently slow-witted because of unaccustomedness to the task of study, came to look upon Ignatius almost as a second father, and his expression "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" became for him the keynote of existence. Once he had given himself to the new purpose in life, Francis Xavier took nothing back, and when Ignatius obtained for him the privilege of going to the Indies as an apostle he succeeded in the ten years between 1542 and 1552 in planting Christianity firmly among the natives in both India and Japan, and was only prevented from accomplishing as much for China by his premature death in 1552. As it was, he left the inspiration of his example to be the spirit of the greatest missionary work in the East that has ever been known.

This work of the missions was to be one of the principal {211} features of Jesuit accomplishment during the after-time. While they conducted some of the most important colleges in Europe and came to have more than one hundred thousand students under their care within a hundred years, their missionaries were soon to be found in every land. The century of Jesuit missions in Japan after St. Francis Xavier's time is one of the most glorious, edifying and romantic chapters in Church history. They succeeded in converting many thousands of Japanese and organizing them into Christian communities. Unfortunately political troubles within, commercial rivalries of various kinds from without eventually led to the persecution of the Christians. The Japanese Christians showed then that they knew how to die with the firmness of the early martyrs. All the priests were put to death or banished, and yet so thorough had been the training of the native catechists that even in our own time, with the opening up of Japan to missionary work again, village communities have been found in which the Christian faith was preserved.

In India their success was not less remarkable and they succeeded in solving the caste problem, which had been up to this time a hopeless obstacle in the path of Christianity. Robert de Nobili, the nephew of Bellarmine, the great theological writer and historian of the Church, adopted the dress and the extremely difficult habits of life of the high-caste Brahmin. In a few years he succeeded in converting over one hundred thousand of this hitherto impossibly exclusive class. He had many worthy companions as his colleagues and successors. Among others Andrada, the first Apostle of Thibet, succeeded in penetrating into the forbidden sacred land of the Lamas and in making many conversions. All the castes of India were taken care of and there were great missionary centres at Goa, Mangalore, Madura, Calcutta and Bombay.

The Chinese missions of the Jesuits were in their own good time not less successful and in certain ways gave the order even greater prestige. Distinguished scholars like Father Ricci impressed themselves upon even the contemptuous Chinese mandarins, established astronomical observatories and succeeded in gaining the favor of the Court. As a consequence, their brethren received permission to evangelize the people, {212} and proceeded to make many thousands of converts. Unfortunately, here as in Japan, political disturbances in China itself and Western commercial jealousies, with the fear that the Jesuits might favor certain nations rather than others in trade, led eventually to their banishment and the destruction of their missions.

It is on the American continent, however, that the story of the Jesuit missions is particularly interesting for Americans. Ignatius himself founded the missions in South America, opening up the missions of Brazil through Father De Nobreza in 1549. Later in Chili, in Peru and in Mexico the Jesuits labored with unexampled success among the Indians. At the beginning of the seventeenth century they established the famous Reductions of Paraguay. These were communities of Christian Indians living in peaceful ways in the most happy community life. The story of the life led by the Indians in these Reductions reads more like some ideal commonwealth than an actual chapter of the history of a savage people gradually being brought to a happy civilization. Students of social order have often gone back to study the ways and means by which this great work was accomplished and have been enthusiastic in their praise of the marvels accomplished. In 1717 these Reductions in Paraguay counted over one hundred thousand Christian Indians. With the suppression of the Society in the Portuguese dominions after the middle of the eighteenth century they fell into decay, and an accomplished ideal of human life that made men happier than has perhaps ever before been the case disappeared from existence.

In North America the labors of the Jesuits were quite as wonderful as elsewhere, perhaps even more marvellous in the heroism displayed than in any other part of the globe. Their labors among the Indians, though they risked and often incurred torture and death and though their lives involved the most difficult kind of labors under the most trying conditions of hardship, lack of food and suffering from the inclemencies of the climate, and the still more uncertain temper of the savages, form a chapter in the history of humanity that is among the most stirring tales of human bravery for a high, unselfish purpose. The lives of such men as Fathers Daniel, Lallemant, {213} Breboeuf, Jogues and Marquette are monuments of supreme human devotion to the great cause of humanity and Christianity. They preceded the pioneers, and their stories of life among the Indians as told in the "Jesuit Relations" are the most precious documents in the early history of exploration on this continent, making important contributions to the sciences of Indian ethnology and of American geography, as well as other departments of knowledge. Bancroft said of them: "The history of their labors is connected with the origin of every celebrated town in the annals of French America; not a cape was turned, nor a river entered but a Jesuit led the way." Parkman has paid a fine tribute to their work as missionaries and pioneers, though it is sad to see how ill he appreciated the motive of their work and how he failed almost completely to realize the sublime humanity of their intentions.

Everywhere they went they devoted themselves not only to the spread of Christianity, but also to the gathering of precious scientific information, which they transmitted to Europe. They brought about the introduction into Europe of valuable botanical specimens, especially of medicinal plants and various substances that they found in use among the Indians. The name Jesuits' bark for quinine is only a testimony to the fact that it was a missionary of the order in Brazil who first learned how valuable this substance was in the treatment of malarial fevers and brought about its introduction into Europe. They compiled dictionaries of the Indian languages, which are now the only remains of some of these native American languages, important contributions to philology. Often these language studies are the only significant evidence of the relationships among the Indian tribes and of their real place of origin in the country. The geographical knowledge that they gathered and transmitted was most precious.

All this was done in the midst of a self-sacrificing life among the Indians that a modern reads with ever-increasing astonishment. It seems almost incredible when it is recalled that the men who bore these sufferings so heroically were always highly educated, scholarly graduates of European colleges and often the descendants of gently nurtured families. Not infrequently the missionaries could see but very little fruit {214} from their labors for long periods and they had to be satisfied if they could make even a few converts among the old and the women and children as the result of years of labor. The contribution to civilization of these men, formed after the mighty saintly mind of Columbus' great contemporary Ignatius Loyola, is one of the greatest things that we owe to Columbus' Century.

The most important function of the Jesuits, however, as planned by Ignatius himself, was not missionary work, but education. Ignatius contemplated that his little Company of Jesus should be, first of all, teachers. His constitutions arranged the training and outlined the methods. Before a generation had passed after his death they had some of the best schools in Europe. Everywhere the Jesuit schools were attended by the better classes, and the first century of the history of the Jesuits had not closed before there were more than one hundred thousand students in attendance in their classrooms. The reason for this was that their system of teaching and of intellectual discipline turned out scholars better than any other. What they taught as the basis of education was the classics. The humanities had come in as a great feature of education with the Renaissance. When the order was founded the Renaissance spirit was at its height and the schools of the New Learning had multiplied all over Europe. The Jesuits adopted it as the best means of training the mind, and how well they used it history shows.

At once, with that careful attention to details so characteristic of the order, they began to systematize education, and the great _ratio studiorum_, probably the most significant contribution to the literature of methods of education ever made, was the result. It emphasized particularly the necessity for the prelection, that is, of preliminary discussion and explanation of the lesson which the students were expected to study for the next day, careful methods of recitation and demonstration and then finally insisted on the need of frequent repetitions. Competition was looked upon as a most precious element for the arousing of student interest. After a period of neglect, we are coming back to this thought once more. Themes, that is, written exercises, and especially those {215} in which the language to be learned was directly employed, were set down as a most important factor in linguistic education. The actual use of the language to be learned in class was dwelt on. After the classics the student was expected to take a course in philosophy, that is, in logic and general metaphysics and psychology, before graduation. Above all, moral as well as intellectual training was insisted on.

In his "Essays on Educational Reformers," Quick summed up in the first paragraph of his book the place of the Jesuits in education rather strikingly: "Since the revival of learning, no body of men has played so prominent a part in education as the Jesuits. With characteristic sagacity and energy, they soon seized on education as a stepping-stone to power and influence; and with their talent for organization, they framed a system of schools which drove all important competitors from the field, and made Jesuits the instructors of Catholic, and even, to some extent, of Protestant Europe. Their skill in this capacity is attested by the highest authorities, by Bacon and Descartes, the latter of whom had himself been their pupil; and it naturally met with its reward: for more than one hundred years nearly all the foremost men throughout Christendom, both among the clergy and laity, had received the Jesuit training, and for life regarded their old masters with reverence and affection."

If the estimation of any body of teachers is to be rightly adjudged, surely there can be no better source of evidence with regard to them than what is to be obtained from their students. Almost without exception pupils of the Jesuits are most ardent in their praise. Only those who do not know them personally have been bitter in denunciation of them. To know them well enough is to love and honor them.

A few of the names of the great pupils of the Jesuit schools will serve to exemplify the sort of men that they were influencing by their education. Among them were: Bossuet, Corneille, Moliere, Bourdaloue, Tasso, Fontenelle, Diderot, Voltaire, Bourdelais, Descartes, Buffon, Justus Lipsius, Muratori, Calderon, Vico the jurisconsult, Richelieu, Tilly, Malesherbes, Don John of Austria, Luxemburg, Esterhazy, Choiseul, St. Francis de Sales, Lambertini, one of the great scholars of his {216} time, afterwards the most learned of Popes under the name of Benedict XIV, and the late Pope Leo XIII, one of the greatest of the moderns.

Some idea of the productiveness of the Jesuits as scientific, philosophic and literary writers may be obtained from the catalogue of their works issued by the Fathers de Backer and which has been brought up to date by Father Sommervogel. Hughes, in "Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits" in the Great Educators Series (Scribner's, 1902), has summed up the significance of these works:

"But at length the two Fathers de Backer published a series of seven quarto volumes, in the years 1853-1861; and the first step they followed up, in the years 1869-1876, with a new edition in three immense folios, containing the names of 11,100 authors. This number does not include the supplements, with the names of writers in the present century, and of the anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Of this last category. Father Sommervogel's researches, up to 1884, enabled him to publish a catalogue, which fills a full octavo volume of 600 pages, with double columns. The writers of this century, whom the De Backers catalogued in their supplement, filled 647 columns, folio, very small print. Altogether the three folios contain 7,086 columns, compressed with every art of typographical condensation.

"Suarez of course is to be seen there, and Cornelius a Lapide, Petau, and the Bollandists. A single name like that of Zaccaria has 117 works recorded under it--whereof the 116th is in thirteen volumes quarto, and the 117th in twenty-two volumes octavo. The catechism of Canisius fills nearly eleven columns with the notices of its principal editions, translations, abridgments; the commentaries upon it, and critiques. Rossignol has 66 works to his name. The list of productions about Edmund Campion, for or against him, chiefly in English, fills in De Backers' folio, two and a half columns of minutest print. Bellarmine, in Father Sommervogel's new edition, fills fifty pages, double column.

"Under each work are recorded the editions, translations, sometimes made into every language, including Arabic, {217} Chinese, Indian; also the critiques, and the works published in refutation--a controversial enterprise which largely built up the Protestant theological literature of the times, and, in Bellarmine's case alone, meant the theological Protestant literature for 40 or 50 years afterwards. Oxford founded an anti-Bellarmine chair. The editions of one of this great man's works are catalogued by Sommervogel under the distinct heads of 54 languages.

"In the methodical or synoptic table, at the end of the De Backers' work, not only are the subjects well-nigh innumerable, which have their catalogues of authors' names attached to them, but such subjects too are here as might not be expected. Thus "Military Art" has 32 authors' names under it; Agriculture 11; Navy 12; Music 45; Medicine 28.

"To conclude then this history of our Educational Order, we have one synoptical view of it in these twelve or thirteen thousand authors, all of one family. We have much more. This one work 'attesting,' as De Backer says in his Preface, 'at one and the same time a prodigious activity and often an indisputable merit, whereof three and a half centuries have been the course in time, and the whole world the place and theatre, is a general record of religion, letters, science and education in every country, civilized or barbarous, where the Society of Jesus labored and travelled.'"

Very often it seems to be thought that, since the basis of Jesuit education was the classics, therefore little or no attention was paid to the sciences and consequently an important phase of human intellectual development was neglected and an essential set of interests of humanity were set back or at least failed of their evolution. Those who think that, however, fail entirely to know the history of the Jesuits and their educational efforts and achievements. As a matter of fact, the Jesuits have always had distinguished scientists among them, and many of the great discoverers and teachers in science for the last three centuries and a half have been members of the order. Very early in their history the Jesuits turned their attention to astronomy, then the one of the physical sciences most developed, and nearly every important Jesuit College soon had an observatory in which good work {218} was done. When Gregory XIII, scarcely more than a quarter of a century after Ignatius' death, wanted to bring about the reformation of the calendar, it was to a Jesuit, Father Clavius, that he turned. Ever since that time there have been distinguished Jesuit astronomers. In our own time, Father Secchi, the Jesuit, probably did more important work than any other single astronomer of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Among the names of the Jesuit astronomers are: Father Scheiner, who made observations particularly on the sun; Father Cysatus, whose papers on comets are justly numbered among the most important concerning this subject; Father Zupi, who first described the dark stripes or bands on Jupiter and first saw the phases of Mercury which Galileo surmised rather than saw; Father Grimaldi, who studied Saturn and drew up one of the first maps of the moon worthy of the name; Father Riccioli, who introduced the lunar nomenclature; Father Maximilian Hell, whose memory our own Newcomb vindicated, and many others.

They were noted for their intimate relations with scholars who were devoting themselves to similar subjects, and they were close correspondents of Kepler and succeeded in helping him to keep his professorship at the University of Gratz when the Emperor of Austria issued a decree banishing all Protestant professors from Austrian Universities. [Footnote 21]

[Footnote 21: About this same time when Harvey on a trip through Europe went to visit the Jesuits in their colleges in a number of towns, the fact was noted by the men who accompanied him, and they jested with him as regards the possibility of his either converting the Jesuits or being converted by them. He said, however, that he found nowhere more sympathetic friends and interested scholars than among these religious. His friendship for them has even given some ground for the declaration that he may have been a Catholic.]

It must not be thought, however, that the Jesuits were interested only in astronomy. They had a large number of mathematicians and of teachers of all the physical sciences. The famous Roman College, founded in St. Ignatius' time, was always looked up to as the type of what a Jesuit College should be. It was here that the great scholarly Father Kircher taught for nearly half of the seventeenth century. He was invited to Rome to begin his teaching there just {219} before the condemnation of Galileo. He would not have received the invitation had there been the slightest feeling of opposition on the part of the Church or his order to the teaching of science. While teaching at the Roman College he wrote a series of text-books on all phases of physical science. There are several text-books on magnetism, one on light, a second on sound, a third on astronomy, a fourth on the subterranean world and many others.

It would be easy to think that these books are mere compilations and that they were probably scarcely more than small hand-books of the imperfect knowledge of the time. On the contrary, they are magnificent large volumes beautifully printed, finely illustrated, bibliographic treasures full of original observation. They are some of the best text-books ever issued. Father Kircher's originality is demonstrated by the fact that he is the perfecter of the projecting stereoscope or magic lantern, which he was led to invent in his desire to be able to make demonstrations to his classes. He also founded the Kircherian Museum, by which the teaching of anthropology and ethnology were greatly furthered through the curiosities sent to Rome by the Jesuit missionaries all over the world. His book, "On the Pest," is full of observations of great value and contains the first suggestions that infectious diseases are carried by insects. There was no subject that he touched that he did not illuminate.

Since that time there have been many distinguished Jesuit scientists, and they have continued their work down to our own day. At the present time, one of the best known of biologists in the special field of entomology is Father Wasmann, S.J., who has published some seven hundred papers on ants, their hosts and guests, and who, taking advantage of the help of his brethren all over the world, has described many hundreds of new species. How successful the Jesuits have been in their pursuit of science will perhaps be best realized from the fact that, while in Poggendorff's "Biographical Dictionary of Science" out of something less than nine thousand names nearly one thousand are Catholic clergymen, about five hundred of these are Jesuits. Their occupations first of all as priests often left them but little leisure {220} for scientific investigations, and yet they succeeded in stamping their names upon the history of science.

Two departments of modern science owe much to them. Father Secchi's wonderful inventions of instruments for meteorology were awarded prizes by the French Academy of Sciences, and other members of the order made successful investigations in the science. The Jesuits in the Philippines and the West Indies have done more to study out the conditions which precede cyclones and hurricanes so as to give warning with regard to them than any others. Their work was fully recognized by the United States Government. Many of the Jesuit colleges and universities throughout the world now have seismological observatories for the study of earthquakes, and undoubtedly their intimate connection and wide distribution will bring important details of information into this department of knowledge from which significant conclusions may be reached.

The work of the Jesuits has come to be better appreciated in English-speaking countries, where old religious prejudices hampered its proper recognition, until comparatively recent times. Macaulay, in his essay on Ranke's "History of the Popes," has summed up the achievements of the Jesuits in his own striking way. When he wrote the Jesuits were unknown personally in England, and so it is not surprising that there are passages in his panegyric that are full of the old prejudices which had accumulated in English history and by which the term Jesuitic has become a word of the worst reproach. Macaulay's wide reading, however, had brought to him a very extensive knowledge of the wonderful work accomplished by Loyola and his sons during the two centuries after their foundation. The passage is too well known to be more than referred to here.

His tribute to their successful work as missionaries all over the world, which undoubtedly set the fashion after which Protestant historians in English-speaking countries have come to acknowledge the marvellous work of the Jesuits among the savages, is not so well known: "The old world was not wide enough for this strange activity. The Jesuits invaded all the countries which the great marine discoveries of the preceding {221} age had laid open to European enterprise. In the depths of the Peruvian mines, at the marts of the African slave-caravans, on the shores of the Spice Islands, in the observatories of China, they were to be found. They made converts in regions which neither avarice nor curiosity had tempted any of their countrymen to enter, and preached and disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West understood a word."

No wonder that Parkman, who in some ways has helped to make us Americans understand them better but who in many ways is utterly lacking in proper sympathy for them probably because he failed to know them well personally, said of them:

"The Jesuit was, and is, everywhere--in the schoolroom, in the library, in the cabinets of princes and ministers, in the huts of savages, in the tropics, in the frozen north, in India, in China, in Japan, in Africa, in America; now as a Christian priest, now as a soldier, a mathematician, an astrologer, a Brahmin, a mandarin, under countless disguises, by a thousand arts, luring, persuading, or compelling souls into the fold of Rome."

He feels sure that there must be much to condemn in them, since they have been the subject of so much criticism and persecution. Like many another, he cannot bring himself to think that their founder's last wish for them, that they should be persecuted even as their Lord and Master was, should be the symbol of their fate. Where he knows them best, however, as in Canada, he has unmixed praise for them, though he declares that it is not for him to eulogize them, but to portray them as they were.

At once the keynote for the proper appreciation of the Jesuits and the summary of what Loyola accomplished through them is to be found in the closing paragraphs of Francis Thompson's "Life of St. Ignatius" (Benzigers': New York, 1909, pp. 318):

"Issuing from this Manresan cave, forgotten by the world which he had forgotten, and rejected in the land which bore him, single and unaided he constructed and set in motion a force that stemmed and rolled back the reformation which had engulfed the North and threatened to conquer {222} Christendom. He cast the foundations of his Order deep; and, satisfied that his work was good, died--leaving it for legacy only the God-required gift that all men should speak ill of it.

"Most singular bequest that Founder ever transmitted, it has singularly been fulfilled. The union of energy and patience, sagacity and a self-devotion which held nothing impossible that was bidden it, were the leading qualities of St. Ignatius; and so far as his Order has prospered, it has been because it incarnated the qualities of its Founder. The administrative genius which, among the princes of Europe or the 'untutored minds' of Paraguay, is perhaps its most striking secular feature, comes to it direct from the man who might have ruled provinces in the greatest empire of the sixteenth century; but chose rather to rule, from the altars of the Church, an army which has outlasted the armies of Spain, and made conquests more perdurable than the vast empire which drifted to its fall in the wake of the broken galleons of the Armada."

The Jesuits are literally one of the greatest creations of this great period. Not to know them as such is to miss the significance of their order and not a little of the true spirit of the epoch from which they sprang. The arts and literature of the Renaissance produced no work destined to live so vividly, nor to influence men in all succeeding generations so deeply, as "the little company of Jesus," as Ignatius of Loyola conceived and organized it.

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[Illustration: HOLBEIN, SIR THOMAS MORE]

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