r effecting
his designs.

Some of his companions, meanwhile, journeyed to Rome. There they
obtained from Paul III. permission to visit Palestine upon a missionary
enterprise, together with special privileges for their entrance into
sacerdotal orders. Those of the ten friends who were not yet priests,
were ordained at Venice in June 1537. They then began to preach in
public, roaming the streets with faces emaciated by abstinence, clad in
ragged clothes, and using a language strangely compounded of Italian and
Spanish. Their obvious enthusiasm, and the holy lives they were known to
lead, brought them rapidly into high reputation of sanctity. Both the
secular and the religious clergy of Italy could show but few men at
that epoch equal to these brethren. It was settled in the autumn that
they should all revisit Rome, traveling by different routes, and
meditating on the form which the Order should assume. Palestine had now
been definitely, if tacitly, abandoned. As might have been expected, it
was Loyola who baptized his Order, and impressed a character upon the
infant institution. He determined to call it the Company of Jesus, with
direct reference to those Companies of Adventure which had given
irregular organization to restless military spirits in the past. The new
Company was to be a 'cohort, or century, combined for combat against
spiritual foes; men-at-arms, devoted, body and soul, to our Lord Jesus
Christ and to his true and lawful Vicar upon earth.'[159] An Englishman
of the present day may pause to meditate upon the grotesque parallel
between the nascent Order of the Jesuits and the Salvation Army, and can
draw such conclusions from it as may seem profitable.

[Footnote 159: These phrases occur in the _Deliberatio primorum
patrum_.]

Loyola's withdrawal from all participation in the nominal honor of his
institution, his enrollment of the militia he had levied under the name
of Jesus, and the combative functions which he ascribed to it, were very
decided marks of originality. It stamped the body with impersonality
from the outset, and indicated the belligerent attitude it was destined
to assume. There was nothing exactly similar to its dominant conception
in any of the previous religious orders. These had usually received
their title from the founder, had aimed at a life retired from the
world, had studied the sanctification of their individual members, and
had only contemplated an indirect operation upon society.