into the hands
of the inquisitors, were burned as heretics.

The time was now come for effecting a permanent organization of the
society and for installing a chief at its head. With these purposes in
view, Loyola summoned his colleagues to Rome from the cities of Italy
where they were severally laboring. The fathers being assembled, he
commended to them anew the proposal which they had already accepted, but
which he seemed anxious to fix irrevocably upon their consciences by
often-repeated challenges of the most solemn kind. To impart the more
solemnity to this repetition of their mutual engagements, and to
preclude, by all means, the possibility of retraction, he advised that
several days should be devoted to preliminary prayer and fasting, during
which season each should, with an absolute surrender of himself to the
will of God, await passively the manifestation of that will.

"Heaven," said Loyola to his companions, "heaven has forbidden Palestine
to our zeal--nevertheless that zeal burns with increasing intensity from
day to day. Should we not hence infer that God has called us--not,
indeed, to undertake the conversion of one nation or of a country, but
of all the people and of all the kingdoms of the world?"

Such was the founder's profession and such the limits of his ambition.
The spiritual mechanism which he had devised, and which he was now
putting in movement, intends nothing that is partial or circumscribed;
its very purport is universality; it is absolutism carried out until it
has embraced the human family and has brought every human spirit into
its toils.

But so small a band could hope for no success that should be indicative
of ultimate triumph unless they would surrender themselves individually
to a common will, which should be to each of them as the will of God,
articulately pronounced. After renewing, therefore, the vows of poverty,
of chastity, and of unconditional obedience to the Pope, the fathers
assented to the proposal that one of their number should, by the
suffrages of all, be constituted the superior or general of the order,
and as such be invested with an authority as absolute as it was possible
for man to exercise or for men to submit to. Yet to whose hands should
be assigned--and for life--this irresponsible power over the bodies,
souls, and understandings of his companions?

It had not been until after a lengthened preparation of fasting, prayer,
and night-watching that a resolution