Part I.
EDUCATIONAL HISTORY OF THE ORDER

LOYOLA
AND

THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF THE JESUITS

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.

A learned and elegant work, which narrates the rise and progress of Christian Schools, from the sixtieth year of the Christian era onwards, ends its long journey at the date of the Reformation, and takes leave of its varied subject, and of its lines of Christian Scholars, in these words: "We leave them at the moment when the episcopacy was recovering its ancient jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical seminaries, and when a vast majority of the secular schools of Catholic Christendom were passing into the hands of a great Religious Order, raised up, as it would seem, with the special design of consolidating anew a system of Christian education."1

Two centuries and a half later, when the Society of Jesus had run a long course, from the date of the Reformation which had seen it rise, up to the eve of the Revolution which beheld it extinct, a General of the Order, Ignatius Visconti, addressing the Provincial Superiors over the world, takes note of a new stage in the process of educational development: "The taste for letters now," he says, "is more keen and exquisite, and the number of literary schools has increased so much, that ours may no longer appear so necessary. For I may mention the fact that, besides our schools of polite letters, there were, for a long while, either none or very few. So that parents were forced to send their children to us, even if otherwise they did not want it."2

This refers in a quiet way to what Leopold von Ranke states with more emphasis. Speaking of Grammar classes, the German historian says: "Here also the Jesuits succeeded to admiration. It was found that young people gained more with them in six months, than with other teachers in two years. Even Protestants removed their children from distant gymnasia to confide them to the care of the Jesuits."3 Ranke narrates in the same place how it was "toward the universities above all that the efforts of the Jesuits were directed." And he describes what the results were in Germany.

D'Alembert writes of their progress in France: "Hardly had the Company of Jesus begun to show itself in France, than it met with difficulties without number, in the endeavor to establish itself. The universities especially made the greatest efforts to keep the new-comers out. It is difficult to decide whether this opposition is a praise or a condemnation of the Jesuits who stood it. They announced gratuitous teaching; they counted among their number celebrated and learned men, superior perhaps to those whom the universities could boast of," etc.4

Speaking of the Protestants in the Netherlands, a chronicle, which reviews the first century of the Order's existence, records that "the Jesuit schools were expressly interdicted, under severe penalties, to all members of the Protestant communities. Even in a twelve-year truce which the Order partially enjoyed, a monthly fine of one hundred florins was still imposed upon all delinquents, or on their parents, who persisted in patronizing the Jesuit schools. To escape the fine, parents sent their children under an assumed name.5

In every country, the same drama of struggle and contest evolved itself through two and a half centuries, till a momentous scene was witnessed. It was a scene of such a kind as seldom has occurred in history; and never certainly was any similar event thrown into such relief by the sequel. The event which I refer to was a universal and instantaneous suppression of the Order; with consequences following thereupon which were exceptional, both in the world that witnessed it, and in the subject-body that suffered it.

The sequel in the world at large was that, a few years later, at the close of the eighteenth century, there broke out the great Revolution under the leadership of men, of whom scarcely one had been more than seven years of age at the date of the Jesuits' expulsion.6 They represented in France the first generation which had not been educated by the Society. The remote causes which overwhelmed the Order were the same that ushered in the Revolution. But, among the immediate causes, assigned by historians to account for the precise form which the great convulsion assumed, and for the date at which it occurred, is placed the dissolution of this Order. According to the Count de Maistre, who speaks of the political sentiment of his own times, all observers agreed that the revolution of Europe, still called the French Revolution, was impossible without the preliminary destruction of the Jesuits. And, in keeping with this, it was equally a subject of observation, as being a palpable historical fact, that during two centuries the Jesuits had formed in their College at Paris, the élite of the French nobility; and that, only a few years after the expulsion of the Jesuit Masters, the same college turned out the Robespierres, Camille Desmoulins, Tallien, Noël, Fréron, Chénier, and other such demagogues. This College of Clermont, or Louis-le-Grand, from which the Jesuits were expelled in 1762, had been immediately occupied by the University of Paris. The Revolution broke out twenty-seven years later.

Another sequel, not heard of before in history, affected the Society itself. Europe, having gone through the violent commotions which changed the old order of things into the new, reached the beginning of this nineteenth century, and found the Society alive again. This was in defiance of a political maxim, which we may admit with Baron von Hübner, that in politics, in the affairs of states, in the life of all great social institutions, when once death supervenes, there is no resurrection.

And now, at the end of the nineteenth century, the same forces of repulsion and attraction, of devoted love on the part of friends, of intense hatred on the part of enemies, have been seen operating as always before. It has become a commonplace in the philosophy of history,—this hatred which has been sworn against the Order of Jesus, and the multitude of enemies whom it has made. One explanation suggests itself to the Viscount de Bonald,—the presence in it, he thinks, of something good; of that good which, as it alone is the object of the most ardent love, can alone become the object of the intensest hate; and therefore has always made persecutors and martyrs.

The purpose of this book is to give an historical sketch, with a proportionate analysis, of the educational development effected through the Society of Jesus. Others have taken different fields of Jesuit history to survey, either general and comprehending all the paths of external and internal activity, or particular and comprising only parts of the history. Some of these particular views, especially in later years, are in the line of studies, and are most valuable contributions to the history of pedagogic development. None of them, however, happens to coincide with the scope, purpose, and form which have been designated for this; as the Series to which it belongs, the Editor in charge, and the country for which it is intended, sufficiently indicate.

The subject then is the educational system of the Jesuits, that system which technically is called the Ratio Studiorum. It requires no literary nor historical ingenuity to centre all that has to be said about it in the personality and character of St. Ignatius of Loyola. I shall draw upon Jesuit sources of information, except when it will be necessary to state results, or give estimates, which imply commendation. Then I shall quote freely from sources outside of the Order. Otherwise, for the purpose of explaining and analyzing domestic matters, these extraneous references would be imperfect indeed.

The situation, which met the military view of the cavalier, lately the knightly captain of Loyola, was a new one, on an old field of battle. The demand, which it seemed to make upon tactical resources, was as intense as the political and religious crisis which created the situation. From the year 1522 till 1540, while Ignatius was prospecting the scene in Europe, and preparing to take an active part in it, he had time and the opportunities for observing, what precisely, at that epoch, were the accumulated results of all the Christian ages gone before; and why the results just then were only what they were. The issue appeared fatally determined by social conditions around, which more than neutralized the Christianity visible. Education, in particular, was laboring under the action of causes, which had begun to operate several centuries earlier, and which were then evidently working themselves out to one final effort. That was the undermining of Christian education.

In this respect, it was the same question which had confronted the Augustines, the Basils, and Jeromes, of one thousand years before. But it was a different state of the question. Augustine, the brilliant youth of Hippo Regius in Africa, will serve as an instance of what the issue then had been. He had made himself master of the very best results, which the public schools of the time were able to accomplish in the most gifted of minds. But he had lost his virtue. He lived to complain with bitterness, that it was accounted a grievous error to pronounce homo "a man," without the "h," but it was no error at all to hate a man, signified by the word, homo. The consequence with him was that, when he became a Bishop of the Church, he met the need of providing a Christian education, by instituting in his own house a kind of school, for the moral and spiritual education of his clergy.

Thus arose the cathedral or canonical school. So too, the cloistral schools came to flourish in the abbeys and the monasteries. And, even if these two kinds of educational centres had not also been, as they really were, in the Middle Ages, the preordained means for the salvation of learning in Europe, they would still have had reason enough for their existence, in the paramount necessity of continuing, for the tender age of youth, the ministry of a virtuous education.

Events took a new turn with the rise and progress of the university system. At first, the universities were mostly annexed to cathedral churches. As they developed, the cloistral influence waned. And again, as they developed still more, they presented phenomena which originated the subsequent system of the Jesuits.

From the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, as many as sixty-six of these universities were in existence; sixteen of them are credited to Germany; about as many to France; and the rest to Italy, Spain, and other nations. It is not within my province to describe their formation, or the order of their foundation. They received their charters from the Popes, who used their power thus, and showed it under a form, which no age will be apt to depreciate; least of all, our own. Addressing these habitations of "General Studies" with the appellative, Universitas Vestra, the Sovereign Pontiffs sent them on their course, and encouraged them in every line of Theology, Law, or Medicine; whether all these lines were followed in each centre, or respectively some here, some there. Orleans, Bourges, Bologna, Modena professed Law, either as their specialty, or as their distinguishing faculty; Montpellier, Salerno, Medicine; Padua, the Liberal Arts; Toledo, Mathematics; Salamanca, and, above all, Paris, general culture, Philosophy, and Theology.

These universities became such well-springs of learning, that for Theology the Bishops' seminaries practically ceased to exist; and, to acquire the general culture of the times, the children of the faithful no longer turned to the monastic schools. Nay, in quite a contrary sense, the clergy and the monks themselves, in pursuit of the best learning that the age could give, left their cloisters for a while, and betook themselves to the universities. They followed up that step by settling down there. Paris beheld the great old orders of Augustinians, Benedictines, Carthusians, the Carmelites, the Bernardines, all establishing monasteries or colleges; no otherwise than the newest order of Trinitarians, which was chiefly made up of university men. Two institutes arose, those of the Dominicans and Franciscans; who with men at their head, like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, placed themselves right in the heart of these intellectual centres; and they became bulwarks of sound learning, as opposed to the inanities of a false scholasticism. They kept the leaven of religion and virtue in the midst of what was not quite a perverse generation, but was most certainly, from whatever side we view it, a very dubious multitude, belonging, it is true, to a Christian generation. Consider the 10,000 at Bologna, which was the centre for Law studies; the 30,000 at Oxford; or the 40,000, all at one time studying, or reckoned to be studying, in Paris, the acknowledged centre for Theology.

An indiscriminate mass of humanity like this, pressed, thronged, and crowded together, stimulated with all the ardor, and alive with all the passions of youth, could not fail to be little better than a nursery for indiscriminate license. Whatever might be the vigilance of the Church, or however strenuous the exercise of legitimate authority, nothing in the usual course of human society could prevent its becoming a prolific soil for the propagation of every species of error. And, as during three hundred years the intellectual and educational powers of Europe followed this course, the law of evolution asserted itself in many directions.

On the one side, those tens of thousands of Christian youths, who were aiming at all the posts of influence in Church and State, and who, entering their native university, or journeying to foreign ones, began life there at as early an age as twelve or fourteen years, to remain in this environment some nine or twelve years more, became, as was natural, the living, swarming members of a state of society so dissolute, that successive occupants of the Papal See depicted the condition of things as one of moral contagion. In the manner of thought and mind which prevailed, no form of theoretic error was wanting. In philosophy, there was scepticism; in theology, heresy; while, in politics, Cæsarism and absolutism became rife. Then, at the end of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance came; and one of the first things, which it expressly and formally did, was to renew in life, art, and politics, the same old paganism, upon the ruins of which, so many centuries before, Christianity had begun its upward and laborious ascent. Newly fashioning then much of what was old, Christianity had augmented all this with so much which was new, that in a thousand years it had made a Renaissance possible. And now the form of this Renaissance threatened its own ascendancy in morals and in life.

On the other hand, the old spirit of conservatism in religion, and of preservation in the matter of morals, maintained itself for a time, through those bodies of religious men and clergymen, who had left the cloister or the seminary, to take up their abode in the secular seats of learning. It was this spirit which originated the latest and best development of the universities, that of the "college" system, established in their midst. Salamanca had twenty colleges; Louvain, forty; Paris, fifty. Still, in the final issue, there was now scarcely any reserve force of cloistral or episcopal learning behind the universities, and outside of them. And the religious and the clergy themselves, who at best were not a little out of their element from the moment they migrated into the secular environment, conformed insensibly to the conditions in which they found themselves, and so far ceased to be the power they had been.

Witness, in the time of Ignatius, the Paris University, as described by contemporary records. "It was fallen from its ancient splendor. The bonds of discipline had been gradually relaxed; studies were abandoned; and with masters, as with scholars, all love of letters, and respect for the rule, had given place to sombre passions, to political hate, to religious fanaticism and dissolute habits."7

Here then we have two elements in the educational condition of Europe, which explain the rise of the Jesuit system. One was the positive, concrete fact, embodied in that great developed system of university learning. The other was a negative element, the decline therein of the essential moral life. These two factors are not mere antecedents in the order of time, as being only prior to the method of Loyola. One of them, the university system, supplied the very material out of which his method and matter were taken; yes, and the men themselves, the Jesuits who applied the principles of reform to education. The other factor, which I have called negative, that decline of the essential moral life, was the adequate occasion, which prompted Ignatius to approach the question of education at all. For we may say with confidence that, if the universities of the sixteenth century were still doing the work which originally they had been chartered to do, the founder of the Society of Jesus would not only have omitted to draw out his system as a substitute for them, and as an improvement upon them, but he would have done, what he always did with anything good in existence; he would have used what he found, and have turned his attention to other things more urgent. He did use these university centres for his own young men, until he had better educational institutions, and a better method of his own in progress.

Hence the educational problem, when it falls under the notice of Ignatius, presents itself as the identical one of old, that of moral regeneration. But it is a different state of the same question. In circumstances rendered acutely critical by the agitations of the epoch, social, moral, and religious, it was a favorite contemplation of his to look with compassion on men living like the blind, dying, and sinking into eternal depths; on men talking, blaspheming, reviling one another; on their assaulting, wounding, slaying one another; and all together going to eternal perdition.8 It was from this moral point of view that he descended into the arena of education.

But before he can teach men, or mould teachers of men, or even conceive the first idea of legislating for the intellectual world, he must himself first learn. There are two fundamental lessons which he does learn, and they go to form him. One is that, among all pursuits, the study of virtue is supreme; the other, that, supreme as virtue is, yet, without secular learning, the highest virtue goes unarmed, and at best is profitable to oneself alone. He learns these two lessons, not only in theory, but in practice. To accomplish the purpose of the latter, he takes his seat upon the scholars' bench, and begins to learn with little children. Though he may not meet with brilliant success in the art of learning, still in the art of understanding what learning is, and in the lessons of experience, he becomes a finished scholar. He remains even then too much of a chevalier to give up a cherished idea of his about a spiritual crusade in the East. And it is only when thwarted in this project that, like a true knight, he simply turns to another side of the field. He stays in the West. He is still the Captain of a Company. But he becomes also a legislator among doctors; and, amid his other works, he effects an educational reform.

In his whole campaign, we may discern two characteristics in the spirit of his movements. One is that of defence, the other that of advance. His method of defence showed itself in the reassertion of old principles, in the conservatism of morals,—a plan of campaign, which determines the whole frame of mind, and the social construction of the Company. It rests on the principle of upholding what is, and not moving the ancient landmarks. On the other hand, his advance is towards the solution of the highest questions which can interest mankind. These formed part of the very object and direction of the Order's march. And so it came to pass, that his Company drew to itself that class of minds which are most powerfully arrested by the prospect of solving such questions, especially when times are agitated. His times were agitated, if any ever were, more so than our own, when the same questions still must dominate. His were times of wars with Turks in the East, and with Christians at home; of battles lost and won, with their effects reaching into every household; of royal and imperial administrations confused and overthrown; of new opinions without number; of the Church losing ground along the whole line of the frontier, and withal new worlds looming over an horizon, where from the beginning of time the unknown had brooded in absolute darkness. At such a moment, "Defence and Advance," or as the Papal authority expressed it in the solemn instrument which chartered his Institute, Defensio ac propagatio fidei, were stirring watchwords to men of parts, who felt restive under the inactivity and inefficiency of older methods, on older lines.

I will not pause to say, that the personal poverty and exact obedience, required in the new service, presented no obstacles to the minds and characters which were otherwise attracted to his standard. The antecedents of all antiquity seem to show that such conditions, to such minds, are rather an inducement than a check. And if one takes notice that to this was added, in the Order of Jesus, an absolute equality, whereby every formed member binds himself to accept no dignity within or without, or, at least, to affect no dignity at home or abroad, which will prejudice his full franchise as a member, then, perhaps, the attractiveness of such a life, the conservatism and intense concentration of the Order, as well as the alacrity and endurance manifested in the service, will not appear inexplicable to the minds of this age, in which, under a very different form, the same equality is called liberty, is made to construct republics, to bring down monarchies, and develop some of the most potent agencies for unfolding the energies of men. Yet the liberty of this latter equality reflects but faintly, and as from a broken surface, the freedom of him, who having liberated himself from the shackles of the world, and from all solicitude as to his movements, office, and place, finds in turn, as the German historian expresses it, "his own personal development imposed upon him";9 and, in the firm companionship of one aim, formation, and life, enjoys the manifold support and ready sympathy of individualities as developed as his own.

I shall narrate, in the first part, the facts of Ignatius' career, so far as to indicate the stages of that magisterial art, by which he himself was formed, and which then he reformed in the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum. In the second part, I shall sketch briefly the history of the Ratio itself, and analyze the System as a theory and practice of education.

CHAPTER II.
KNIGHT, PILGRIM, AND SCHOLAR.

The story of the cavalier wounded on the ramparts of Pampeluna has often been told. Loyola was not at the moment governor of the city, nor in any responsible charge. But official responsibility was not necessary for him to see the path of duty and follow it. As one bound to the service of his sovereign by the title of honor and nobility, he retired to the citadel, when the town surrendered; and then, when the ramparts began to give way under the cannonading, he stood in the breach. A ball shattering the rock laid him low, maimed in both his limbs. At once the defence collapsed. Cared for chivalrously by those whose arms had struck him down in battle, he was transported with every delicate attention to his castle of Loyola. It was found that one of his limbs had been ill set. He had it broken again, to be set aright. Meanwhile, instinct with all the ambition of a knight, belonging to a chivalrous nation in an age of chivalry, he was not insensible to the charms of society and affection. And, out of a sensitive care for his personal appearance, he must needs have a protruding bone, which still threatened to mar his figure, sawed off while he looked on. In the loneliness and tedium of a sick-room, he whiled away the hours by dreaming of his ambitions and his aspirations, and he sought to feed them with suitable nourishment. He wanted a romance to read. There was none to be had. So, instead of the novel which was not forthcoming, he took what they gave him, the Life of Christ, and the Lives of some who had served Christ faithfully. The soldier of the field and of blood felt the objects of his ambition change; he became a soldier of the spirit and eternal life. And, after the experiences of his bed of pain, and the protracted communings with another world, he arose another man; he went forth a knight as ever, but not on an expedition terminating as before. An evening and night spent in the sanctuary of Montserrat, as once before he had passed a vigil of arms, when dubbed a chevalier by the King of Navarre; a morning begun with the Holy Sacrifice attended and Holy Communion received, opened to him a new era; and he went forth, bound now by a new oath of fealty to the service of the King of Heaven.

At the side of the altar in this sanctuary of Montserrat, the Abbot of the monastery, eighty-one years later, committed to a marble tablet the record of this event, for the perpetual memory of the future: "Blessed Ignatius of Loyola here, with many prayers and tears, devoted himself to God and the Virgin. Here, as with spiritual arms, he fortified himself in sack-cloth, and spent the vigil of the night. Hence he went forth to found the Society of Jesus, in the year MDXXII."

He first looked about him to find a retreat, and immerse himself in the contemplation of time and eternity. It was a Saturday. John Sacrista Pascual tells us that his mother, a devout lady of Manresa, was in the church that morning; and, accompanied by two young men and three women, she was at her devotions in the chapel of the Apostles. A young stranger came up and accosted them. His clothing was of very common serge; for Ignatius had given away his knightly robes to a poor man. The youth looked like a pilgrim. He was not tall; he was fair in complexion and ruddy in cheek. His bare head was somewhat bald. Altogether he was of a fine and grave presence, and most reserved in look. He scarcely raised his eyes from the ground. Coming up, he asked if there were a hospital anywhere which might serve him for shelter. Regarding his noble and fair features, the lady, as became a Christian woman, offered her services; if he would follow her company, she would provide for him, in the best way possible. Courteously and thankfully he accepted her offer, and followed the party as they left the sanctuary. They proceeded slowly; for they noticed that he was lame. However much they urged him, they could not induce him to ride upon the ass. Three leagues away from Montserrat, they arrived at the little town of Manresa; and he took up his residence in the common hospital for the poor and pilgrims. Whatever alms or food was henceforth sent him first went to others, whom, in these matters, up to the end of his life, he always considered to be more in need than himself.

He now entered on his probation of Christian virtue. In the mind of the Catholic Church, the degree of virtue which he practised is that accounted heroic. As it is not for me to dwell on it here, I will pass it over with one remark. That which is accounted ordinary Christian virtue, resting as it does on faith and hope, on principles not barely natural but supernatural, is not very intelligible to the world at large. Still less the heroic degree of the same. Both however claim to be estimated by their own proper motives and principles. When they enter into the very subject, which the biographer means to treat, it appertains to his art not to ignore the objective motives and reasons of things, as they operated in his subject. In the shortest monograph, like the present, we cannot separate from the work, which he did, the man who did it. And the man is made by his motives. It were bad literary art to describe feats, which are confessedly great, and not to find motives which are proportionate.

Ignatius, after a year more or less spent at Manresa, took his pilgrim's staff and journeyed on foot to Italy, and thence to the Holy Land. It was in the spirit of the old Crusaders, whose chivalry had a charm for him up to the day many years later, when, with his first associates of the Company, he endeavored once more to cross over from Italy to Palestine. Had he succeeded on this later occasion, he would most probably never have known the others who attached themselves to him; nor might history have busied itself with him or with them.

At the date of his return from the Holy Land, we find that he has advanced already to the second lesson in the development of his future. It is, that mature in years as he is, and full of desires for doing good to his neighbors, yet neither does mere piety place in his hands the instruments for such work; nor, if study alone can give the means of apostolic zeal, can he consider himself exempt from the law, that he must labor to acquire what are only the results of labor. He was thirty-one years of age, when he betook himself, after his night's vigil, to the cave of Manresa. He is two years older now. So, at the age of thirty-three, he sits down on the school-bench at Barcelona, and begins his Latin declensions.

Begrudging his studies the time which they demand exclusively, he mistakes the situation, and allows himself the exercises of an apostolic life. At his age, even supposing his earlier pursuits to have been more in harmony with his present life of letters, he is not an apt pupil. However, he labors conscientiously. After two years spent at Grammar, he is judged by his teacher, who takes a lenient view of the case, to be competent for approaching his higher studies.

He himself was dubious. His friends recommended him to ascend. He still hesitated. But, receiving the same favorable opinion from a theologian whom he consulted, Ignatius acquiesced, in accordance with his unvarying rule, to follow competent direction. How unfortunate this step was for the happy progress of his studies, but how advantageous for his experience as a future legislator, I shall proceed to show.

Leaving Barcelona for Alcalà, he meant to enjoy the best advantages which a great university could afford. He lived on alms as ever; and others lived on the alms which he received. It was the year 1626. He entered upon the study of Logic, using the Summa of Di Soto; also the Physics of Aristotle; and he pursued besides the Master of Sentences.

He had stayed only a year and a half in this rich variety of pursuits, scholastic as well as apostolic, when the novelties apparent in his manner of life ended by making him a suspected character to the ecclesiastical authorities. To a few, among the population of the city, his fruitful zeal made him distinctly odious. The result was a juridical process against him, which issued in a complimentary verdict, the Vicar of the diocese pronouncing him and his companions quite blameless. But restrictions were imposed regarding his future ministrations, since Ignatius was not yet in holy orders. During a term of four years he was not to preach. After that time, his progress in studies would enable him to honor that important ministry, without giving offence. This was a deathblow to the aspirations of the student. He made up his mind to go elsewhere, to the famous university of Salamanca; and he turned his back on Alcalà.

The time was soon to come for a pleasant revenge; and apparently he knew of it long before it came. Just six years after the foundation of his Order, when he sent Francis Villanova to open a house at Alcalà, not only did he find men of the university embracing his Institute, but, two years after that, the whilom persecuted pilgrim received, in a single twelvemonth, thirty-four Doctors into the Society, all from that one seat of learning. The mere passing by of Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, who had become an humble follower of Ignatius, made the choicest spirits flock to his standard; and, all over Spain, colleges sprang up as if from the soil.

In Salamanca, where likewise he and his were to figure in the future, the personal history of Ignatius is briefly told. In ten or twelve days after his arrival, he was thrown into chains. He spent twenty-two days in prison. When released, with the same commendation for himself and his doctrine as he had received at Alcalà, but with a similar restriction on his action, he thought it was not worth his while to repeat the same experiences at the same cost. So, in spite of all the eloquence of dissuasion brought to bear on him by friends, he took a new departure, which seemed plausible to him, and therefore feasible. He would try his fortunes in another land, and continue his studies in the greatest philosophical and theological centre of the world, the University of Paris.

To any one who judged of things by an ordinary standard, the project was not feasible. War was raging between Spain and France; the roads were infested with hostile soldiery; many murders and robberies, committed on the persons of travellers, were recently reported. But these and other considerations of the kind had no weight with Loyola, to stay him in a course once deliberately adopted. Accepting some alms from friends at Barcelona, to obtain on the way the necessaries of life, he accomplished on foot the whole journey from Barcelona to the French capital; where he arrived at the beginning of February, A.D. 1528.

He has now had experience of prisons and chains, on the charge of teaching error, or of being a dangerous enthusiast. One of the calmest and coolest of men, who never acted, but he first calculated, and who never allowed himself to approach a conclusion, without first freeing himself from all bias and impulse, he had suffered repeated arrest for setting people beside themselves, for moving them to give up all they had in behalf of piety, or charity, and inducing them to go and live on alms themselves; nay, perhaps throw in their lives, talents and acquirements, to serve others gratis. The founder of the Jesuits, himself the first of an Order which has the reputation of being the staunchest upholder, as well of authority in every rank of society, as of the truths taught by the Catholic Church, was put in chains, or arraigned by the ecclesiastical authorities almost wherever he appeared, though always acquitted as blameless.

In a letter written at a subsequent period of his life to King John III of Portugal, Ignatius sums up his experiences, as including two imprisonments, at Alcalà and Salamanca; three judicial investigations, at Alcalà, Salamanca, and Paris; later on, another process at Paris; then one at Venice; finally another at Rome;—eight investigations about this one man in Spain, France, and Italy.10 Wherever he came, in after life, it passed as a proverb among the Fathers, that his appearance was the sure harbinger of a storm, soon to break out against them somewhere, in the social or religious world. He braved all this fury in his own manner, weighing as deliberately every word he spoke, and measuring every step he took, as when he had stood in the breach of the ramparts at Pampeluna. But his personal experience made him commit to the sacred keeping of the "Spiritual Exercises" an important principle of liberal and humane prudence. It is couched in the first words of his little book, to guide teacher and learner alike. He says:—

"In the first place, it is to be supposed that every pious Christian man should be more ready to interpret any obscure proposition of another in a good rather than a bad sense. If, however, he cannot defend the proposition in any way, let him inquire of the speaker himself; and, if then the speaker is found to be mistaken in sentiment or understanding, let him correct the same kindly. If this is not enough, let him employ all available means to render him sound in principle and secure from error."

How far the personal experiences of its founder attached by a law of heritage to his Order, I can hardly undertake to describe. But, just for the sake of completing the family picture, I will mention the heads of a doleful list, which an historian of the Society catalogues. He enumerates, as objects of attack and misrepresentation, the founder himself, the name of the Society of Jesus, the dress, rules, manners, books, doctrine, schools, sermons; the poverty, obedience, gratuitous service of the Jesuits; that they affected a kind of literary empire, under the spur of an intolerable ambition; that they were lightly tinctured, and had just sipped of many things, of which they had nothing solid to offer; yes, that they wanted to have it believed there was no sanctuary of the Muses, no shrine of sacred or human wisdom in existence, outside of their own colleges; that, from these offices of theirs, all arts and sciences came forth, done up in the best style. "In fine, whatever they do or don't do, granted that there are many false charges which their enemies concoct against them,—things too extreme to be believed,—granted that they are acquitted of many vices laid to their account, never certainly will they escape the suspicion, at least, which these charges excite."11 We believe it. There is a good homely English proverb which expresses the very same idea—about the happy adhesiveness of a clayey compound when cleverly thrown.

This retrospect of history was taken, exactly one hundred years after the foundation of the Order. The story had begun some thirteen years before it was founded. When Ignatius became a responsible leader with associates, he had recourse more than once to the process of justice, to clear his reputation in full form. But, beyond the cases which rendered such defence prudent and necessary, his practical policy was expressed in a practical maxim, which after him his successor, James Laynez, had often in his mouth: Deus faxit ne unquam male loquantur et vera dicant! "God grant they never talk ill of me and be saying the truth!" Indeed, as there is no use in trying to change men, for they will never be born anew, Ignatius looked rather in another direction for the solution of difficulties; expecting that troubles, which defied other treatment, might still not survive their authors. Speaking of a powerful adversary, who was raising a great storm at Toledo and Alcalà, and whom it took the royal council and then a brief from the Pope to quell, Ignatius said of him to Ribadeneira: "He is old, the Society is young; naturally the Society will live longer than he will." The same dignitary, suppressed though he was, rose again in violent opposition. Whereupon Jouvancy makes the apt remark: "So difficult is it for even the most eminent men, and so rare a thing, when once they have conceived a notion, to get it out of their heads again!"12 No, men are not born anew.

It is time now to contemplate Ignatius of Loyola at Paris, where some of the most precious elements in his educational experience are to be acquired.

CHAPTER III.
THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS. ROME.

Voluntary poverty, the austerest manner of life, the ungrateful labor of studies, and the perpetual self-discipline of a mind like his, ever bent on lofty thoughts and endeavoring to dominate the very first movements of his soul, all these conditions, added to the climate and the nature of the situation in which Ignatius found himself at Paris, brought such a strain to bear on his broken-down constitution, that, to keep up his course at all, he had to interrupt it awhile, and give some relief to his overtaxed body, or, as he held it to be, his "beast of burden."

And what about the studies themselves? If they had been a brilliant success thus far, they could scarcely have outlived such conditions of existence. As it was, they were as good as if they had never begun; or somewhat worse. He had gone about them the wrong way. Whatever solidity of learning he had kept objectively in view, something else, equally important with solidity, had been unwittingly omitted. That was a good method. Logic, Philosophy, and Theology, all taken up together, and with such compendious haste, now went together in his mind like a machine out of joint; and his speed was nil! The Latin language itself, the indispensable vehicle of all learning, was just so far possessed by him as to show him that, to be of any real use, it had better be commenced all over again.

Here his character asserted itself. And in no particular of his life is he more like himself, more thorough, more of a brave cavalier, "governing himself, in great things and small, by reasons most high," than when, having little facility for such pursuits, and less inclination, he makes up his mind, after a short breathing spell, to sit down again at the age of thirty-seven years, and resume his Latin declensions! In the college of Montague, he spends about two years acquiring this tongue. Meanwhile, he tries various plans to find wherewithal to live.

I need not dwell on the nature of this great centre into which Ignatius had penetrated, an unknown stranger, just one of its tens of thousands of scholars. It had more than two scores of colleges. To this, the queen of universities, though she was going to be no kind alma mater to him and his Order, still the recollections of Loyola in his future legislation would always turn back with reverence. His first Professors for the Roman College, the typical institution of the Society, would be taken from those of his men who were Doctors of this university. And, whatever might be the moral condition and the religious lassitude of the university men, as compared with this penniless stranger, in 1529, occasions were to come in after times, when they showed themselves not unworthy of the enemy whom they fought to the death. When the plague of 1580 made a desert about them, the university men and the Jesuits, otherwise never seen together, save in the lists and face to face, now were everywhere, and fell fast, side by side on the field of Christian charity.