heir churches, were bound to subsist on alms; they preached,
administered the sacraments of the Church, and educated gratis. They
could inherit nothing, and were not allowed to receive money for their
journeys. But here appeared the wisdom of restricting the numbers of the
professed to a small percentage of the whole Society. The same rigid
prohibition with regard to property was not imposed upon the houses of
novices, colleges, and other educational establishments of the Jesuits;
while the secular coadjutors were specially appointed for the
administration of wealth which the professed might use but could not
own.[168] In like manner, as they lived on alms, there was no objection
to a priest of the order receiving valuable gifts in cash or kind from
grateful recipients of his spiritual bounty. A separate article of the
constitutions furthermore reserved for the General the right of
accepting any donation whatsoever, made in favor of the whole Company,
and of assigning capital or revenue as he judged wisest.

[Footnote 168: Quinet calculates that at the close of the sixteenth
century there were twenty-one houses of the professed (incapable of
owning property) to 293 colleges (free from this inability).]

Scholastics, even after they had taken the vow of poverty, were not
obliged to relinquish their private possessions. Sooner or later, it was
hoped that these would become the property of the order. In a word, the
principle of this solemn obligation was so manipulated as to facilitate
the acquisition and accumulation of wealth by the Jesuit like any other
corporation. Only no individual Jesuit owned anything. He was rich or
poor, he wore the clothes of princes or the rags of a mendicant, he
lived sumptuously or begged in the street, he traveled with a following
of servants or he walked on foot, according as it seemed good to his
superiors. The vow of poverty, thus interpreted in practice, meant a
total disengagement from temporalities on the part of every member, an
absolute dependence of each subordinate upon his superior in the
hierarchy.

Having thus far treated the organization of the Jesuits as implicit in
Loyola's own conception and administration, I ought to add that it
received definite form from his successor, Lainez. The founder
pronounced the Constitutions in 1553. But they were thoroughly revised
after his death in 1558, at which date they first issued from the press.
Lainez, again, supplemented these laws w