heir society proved, that the original spirit was not
decayed. Whoever had caught it from the institute of Ignatius was a scholar
without pride; a man disengaged from his own conveniences; indifferent to
his employment, to country, to climate; submissive to guidance; capable of
living alone, and of edifying in public; happy in solitude, content in
tumult; never misplaced. In a word, great purity of manners, cultivated
minds, knowledge without pretensions, close study without recompence,
obedience without reasoning though not without reason, love of labour,
willingness to suffer, and, finally, fervor of zeal; such were the
qualifications, which Ignatius's discernment directed his successors in
government to seek, to select, or to form; and it is an acknowledged truth,
that, at every period of the society, they always found men of this
description to lead out their sacred expeditions to the four quarters of
{188} the world. These men planted Christian faith in the extremities of
the East, in Japan, in the Molucca islands; they announced it in China, in
the hither and further India, in Ethiopia and Caffraria, &c. Others, in the
opposite hemisphere, appeared on the snowy wastes of North America; and,
presently, Hurons were civilized, Canada ceased to be peopled only by
barbarians. Others, almost in our own days, nothing degenerate, succeeded
to humanize new hard-featured tribes, even to assemble them in Christian
churches, in the ungrateful soil of California, to which angry Nature seems
to have denied almost every necessary for the subsistence of the human
species. They were but a detachment from the body of their brethren, who,
at the same time, were advancing, with rapid progress, through Cinaloa,
among the unknown hordes of savages, who rove through the immense tracts to
the north of Mexico, which have not yet been trodden by the steps of any
evangelical herald. Others, again, in greater numbers, from the school of
Ignatius, with the most inflexible {189} perseverance, amidst every species
of opposition, continued to gather new nations into the church, to form new
colonies of civilized cannibals, for the kings of Spain and Portugal, in
the horrid wilds of Brazil, Maragnon, and Paraguay. Here truly flowed the
milk and honey of religion and human happiness. Here was realized more than
philosophy had dared to hope, more than Plato, in his republic, or the
author of Utopia, had ever ventured to imagine. Here was given the
demo