tion of the members from devotional exercises and attendance in
the choir. The aversion he felt for ascetic discipline is evinced in a
letter he addressed to Francis Borgia in 1548. It is better, he writes,
to strengthen your stomach and other faculties, than to impair the body
and enfeeble the intellect by fasting. God needs both our physical and
mental powers for his service; and every drop of blood you shed in
flagellation is a loss.

[Footnote 161: See Philippson, _op. cit._ pp. 61, 62.]

The end in view was to serve the Church by penetrating European society,
taking possession of its leaders in rank and hereditary influence,
directing education, assuming the control of the confessional, and
preaching the faith in forms adapted to the foibles and the fancies of
the age. The interests of the Church were paramount: 'If she teaches
that what seems to us white is black, we must declare it to be black
upon the spot.' There were other precepts added. These, for instance,
seem worth commemoration: 'The workers in the Lord's vineyard should
have but one foot on earth, the other should be raised to travel
forward.' 'The abnegation of our own will is of more value than if one
should bring the dead to life again.' 'No storm is so pernicious as a
calm, and no enemy is so dangerous as having none.' It will be seen that
what is known as Jesuitry, in its mundane force and in its personal
devotion to a cause, emerges from the precepts of Ignatius. We may
wonder how the romances of the mountain-keep of Loyola, the mysticism of
Montserrat, and the struggles of Manresa should have brought the founder
of the Jesuits to these results. Yet, if we analyze the problem, it will
yield a probable solution. What survived from that first period was the
spirit of enthusiastic service to the Church, the vast ambition of a man
who felt himself a destined instrument for shoring up the crumbling
walls of Catholicity, the martial instinct of a warrior fighting at
fearful odds with nations running toward infidelity.

He had no doubt where the right lay. He was a Spaniard, a servant of S.
Peter; and for him the creed enounced by Rome was all in all. But his
commerce with the world, his astute Basque nature, and his judgment of
the European situation, taught him that he must use other means than
those which Francis and Dominic had employed. He had to make his
Company, that forlorn hope of Catholicism, the exponent of a decadent
and rotten faith. He ha