a world where no two men are not as distin- | Our minds are steeped in imagery; and where guishable in their mental as in their physical the visible form is not, the impalpable spirit aspect; where every petty community has its escapes the notice of the unreflecting multiseparate system of civil government; where tude. In common hands, analysis stops at the all that meets the eye, and all that arrests the species or the genus, and cannot rise to the ear, has the stamp of boundless and infinite order or the class. To distinguish birds from variety! What are the harmonies of tone, of fishes, beasts from insects, limits the efforts of colour, and of form, but the result of contrasts the vulgar observer of the face of nature. But -of contrasts held in subordination to one Cuvier could trace the sublime unity, the uni pervading principle, which reconciles without versal type, the fontal Idea existing in the confounding the component elements of the creative intelligence, which connects as one music, the painting, or the structure? In the the mammoth and the snail. So, common obphysical works of God, beauty could have no servers can distinguish from each other the existence without endless diversities. Why different varieties of religious society, and can assume that in religious society-a work not rise no higher. Where one assembly worships less surely to be ascribed to the supreme with harmonies of music, fumes of incense, author of all things-this law is absolutely ancient liturgies, and a gorgeous ceremonial, reversed? Were it possible to subdue that and another listens to the unaided voice of a innate tendency of the human mind, which single pastor, they can perceive and record compels men to differ in religious opinions and observances, at least as widely as on all other subjects, what would be the results of such a triumph? Where would then be the free comparison, and the continual enlargement of thought; where the self-distrusts which are the springs of humility, or the mutual dependencies which are the bonds of love? He who made us with this infinite variety in our intellectual and physical constitution, must have foreseen, and foreseeing, must have intended, a corresponding dissimilarity in the opinions of his creatures on all questions submitted to their judgment, and proposed for their acceptance. For truth is his law; and if all will profess to think alike, all must live in the habitual violation of it.

the differences; but the hidden ties which unite them both escape such observation. All appears as contrast, and all ministers to antipathy and discord. It is our belief that these things may be rightly viewed in a different aspect, and yet with the most severe conformity to the divine will, whether as intimated by natural religion, or as revealed in holy scripture. We believe that, in the judgment of an enlightened charity, many Christian societies, who are accustomed to denounce each other's errors, will at length come to be regarded as members in common of the one great and comprehensive church, in which diversities of forms are harmonized by an allpervading unity of spirit. For ourselves, at least, we should deeply regret to conclude that Zeal for uniformity attests the latent dis- we were aliens from that great Christian comtrusts, not the firm convictions of the zealot. monwealth of which the nuns and recluses In proportion to the strength of our self-reli- of the valley of Port-Royal were members, ance, is our indifference to the multiplication and members assuredly of no common excelof suffrages in favour of our own judgment.lence.

IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND HIS ASSOCIATES.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1842.]

On the dawn of the day which, in the year martyrdom. With a stately though halting 1534, the Church of Rome celebrated the feast of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, a little company of men, whose vestments bespoke their religious character, emerged in solemn procession from the deep shadows cast by the towers of Notre Dame over the silent city below them. In a silence not less profound, except when broken by the chant of the matins appropriate to that sacred season, they climbed the hill of martyrs, and descended into the crypt, which then ascertained the spot where the apostle of France had won the crown of

*Exercitia Splritualla S. P. Ignatii Loyola, cum Ver

sione literali ex Autographo Hispanico promittuntur R. P. JOANNIS ROOTHMEN, propositi Generalis Societatis, Jesu, Litere Encyclia ad Patres et Fratres ejusdem Societatis, de Spiritualium Exercitiorum S. P. N. Studio et Usu. Londini, typis C. Richards. 1837.

gait, as one accustomed to military command,
marched at their head a man of swarthy com-
plexion, bald-headed and of middle stature,
who had passed the meridian of life: his deep-
set eyes glowing as with a perennial fire, from
beneath brows, which, had phrenology then
been born, she might have portrayed in her
loftiest style, but which, without her aid, an-
nounced a commission from on high to subju-
gate and to rule mankind. So majestic, indeed,
was the aspect of Ignatius Loyola, that, during
the sixteenth century few, if any of the books
of his order appeared without the impress of
Beside him in the
that imperial countenance.
chapel of St. Denys knelt another worshipper,
whose manly bearing, buoyant step, clear blue
eye, and finely-chiseled features, contrasted
strangely with the solemnities in which he was

engaged. Then in early manhood, Francis Xavier united in his person the dignity befitting his birth as a grandee of Spain, and the grace which should adorn a page of the queen of Castile and Arragon. Not less incongruous with the scene in which they bore their parts, were the slight forms of the boy Alphonso Salmeron and of his bosom friend Jaygo Laynez, the destined successor of Ignatius in his spiritual dynasty. With them Nicholas Alphonso Bobadilla, and Simon Rodriguez-the first a teacher, the second a student of philosophyprostrated themselves before the altar, where ministered Peter Faber, once a shepherd in the mountains of Savoy, but now a priest in holy orders. By his hands was distributed to his associates the seeming bread, over which he had uttered words of more than miraculous efficacy; and then were lifted up their united voices, uttering, in low but distinct articulation, an oath, at the deep significance of which the nations might have trembled or rejoiced. Never did human lips pronounce a vow more religiously observed, or pregnant with results

more momentous.

Descended from an illustrious family, Ignatius had in his youth been a courtier and a cavalier, and if not a poet at least a cultivator of poetry. At the siege of Pampeluna his leg was broken, and, after the failure of mere vulgar leeches, was set by a touch from the hand of the prince of apostles. Yet St. Peter's therapeutic skill was less perfect than might have been expected from so exalted a chirurgeon; for a splinter still protruded through the skin, and the limb was shrunk and shortened. To regain his fair proportions, Ignatius had himself literally stretched on the rack; and expiated, by a long confinement to his couch, this singular experiment to reduce his refractory bones and sinews. errantry relieved the lassitude of sickness, and, Books of knightwhen these were exhausted, he betook himself to a series of still more marvellous romances. In the legends of the Saints the disabled soldier discovered a new field of emulation and of glory. Compared with their self-conquests and their high rewards, the achievements and the renown of Roland and of Amadis waxed dim. Compared with the peerless damsels for whose smiles Paladins had fought and died, how transcendently glorious the image of feminine loveliness and angelic purity which had irradiated the hermit's cell and the path of the wayworn pilgrims! Far as the heavens are above the earth would be the plighted fealty of the knight of the Virgin mother beyond the noblest devotion of mere human chivalry. In her service he would cast his shield over the church which ascribed to her more than celestial dignities; and bathe in the blood of her enemies the sword once desecrated to the mean ends of worldly ambition. Nor were these vows unheeded by her to whom they were addressed. Environed in light, and clasping her infant to her bosom, she revealed herself to the adoring gaze of her champion. vision, all fantasies of worldly and sensual At that heavenly delight, like exorcised demons, fled from his soul into an eternal exile. He rose, suspended

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at her shrine his secular weapons, performed there his nocturnal vigils, and with returning day retired to consecrate his future life to the glory of the Virgo Deipara.

ties; convulsive agonies of prayer, wailings of To these erotic dreams succeeded stern realiremorse, and self-inflicted bodily torments. Exchanging dresses with a beggar, he lined his gaberdine with prickly thorns, fasted to the verge of starvation, assumed the demeanour of an idiot, became too loathsome for human contact, and then, plunging into a gloomy cavern, surrendered himself up to such wrestlings with the evil spirit, and to such vicissitudes of rapture and despair, that in the storm of turbid passions his reason had nearly given way. Friendly hands dragged him from his hiding-place; and hands, in intention at least, not less friendly, recorded his feverish ravings. At one time he conversed with voices audible to no ear but his; at another, he sought to propitiate him before whom he trembled, by expiations which would have been more fitly offered to Moloch. Spiritual doctors ministered to his for their subtilized perception was the simple relief, but they prescribed in vain. Too simple truth, that in revealing himself to mankind in the character of a father, that awful Being has claimed as peculiarly his own the gentlest, the kindest, and the most confiding affections of our nature.

That noble intellect was not to be whelmed At the verge of madness Ignatius paused. beneath the tempests in which so many have sunk, nor was his deliverance to be accomplished by any vulgar methods. Standing on the steps of a Dominican church he recited the office of Our Lady, when suddenly heaven itself was laid open to the eye of the worshipper. That ineffable mystery, which the author ciate in words, was disclosed to him as an of the Athanasian creed has laboured to enunobject not of faith but of actual sight. The past ages of the world were rolled back in his presence, and he beheld the material fabric of things rising into being, and perceived the motives which had prompted the exercise of the creative energy. To his spiritualized sense was disclosed the actual process by which the host is transubstantiated; and the other Christian verities which men to receive but as exercises of their belief, now became to him the objects of immediate is permitted to common inspection and of direct consciousness. For eight successive days his body reposed in an unbroken trance; while his spirit thus imbibed disclosures for which the tongues of men have no appropriate language. In a volume of fourscore leaves he attempted indeed to impart them; but, dark with excess of light, his words held the learned and the ignorant alike in speechless wonder.

with a mission not unmeet for an envoy from Ignatius returned to this sublunary scene the empyrean world, of which he had thus become a temporary denizen. He returned to establish on earth a theocracy, of which he to which every tribe and kindred of men should should himself be the first administrator, and be subject. He returned no longer a sordid half-distracted anchorite, but, strange to tell, a L

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man distinguished not more by the gigantic | but enhance the wonder. To transmute promagnitude of his designs, than by the clear fligates into converts, by a process of which, good sense, the profound sagacity, the calm during any one of her revolutions round our perseverance, and the flexible address with planet, the moon is to witness the commencewhich he was to pursue them. History affords ment and the close, might perhaps seem like a no more perfect illustration how readily deliri- plagiarism from the academies of Laputa. ous enthusiasm and the shrewdness of the ex- But in his great, and indeed his only extant change may combine and harmonize in minds work, Ignatius Loyola is no dreamer. By of the heroic order. A Swedenborg-Franklin, force of an instinct with which such minds as reconciling in himself these antagonist pro- his alone are gifted, he could assume the character to which the shrewd, the practical, and pensities, is no monster of the fancy. the worldly-wise aspire, even when abandoning himself to ecstasies which they are alike unable to comprehend or to endure. His mind resembled the body of his great disciple, Francis Xavier, which, as he preached or baptized, rose majestically towards the skies, while his feet (the pious curiosity of his hearers ascertained the fact,) retained their firm hold on the earth below. If the spiritual exercises were designed to excite, they were not less intended to control and to regulate, religious sensibilities. To exalt the spirit above terrestrial objects was scarcely more his aim, than to disenchant mankind of the self-deceits by which that exaltation is usually attempted. The book, it is true, indicates a tone of feeling utterly removed from that which animates the gay and the busy scenes of life; but it could not have been written except by one accustomed to observe those scenes with the keenest scrutiny, and to study the actors in them with the most profound discernment. To this commendation must be added the praise (to borrow terms but too familiar) of evangelical orthodoxy. A Protestant synod might indeed have extracted from the pages of Ignatius many propositions to anathematize; but they could also have drawn from them much to confirm the doctrines to which their confessions had given such emphatic prominency. If he yielded to the demigods of Rome what we must regard as an idolatrous homage, it would be mere prejudice to deny that his supreme adoration was reserved for that awful Being to whom alone it was due. If he as

On his restoration to human society, Ignatius reappeared in the garb, and addressed himself to the occupations of other religious men. The first fruits of his labours was the book of which we have transcribed the title-page. It was originally written in Spanish, and appeared in an inaccurate Latin version. By the order of the present pope, Loyola's manuscript, still remaining in the Vatican, has been again translated. In this new form the book is commended to the devout study of the faithful by a bull of Pope Paul III., and by an encyclical epistle from the present general of the order of Jesus. To so august a sanction, slight indeed is the aid which can be given by the suffrage of northern heretics. Yet on this subject the chair of Knox, if now filled by himself, would not be very widely at variance with the throne of St. Peter. The "Spiritual Exercises" form a manual of what may be called "the act of conversion." It proposes a scheme of selfdiscipline by which, in the course of four weeks, that mighty work is to be accomplished. In the first, the penitent is conducted through a series of dark retrospects to abase, and of gloomy prospects to alarm him. These ends obtained, he is during the next seven days to enrol himself-such is the military style of the book-in the army of the faithful, studying the sacred biography of the Divine Leader of that elect host, and choosing with extreme caution the plan of life, religious or secular, in which he may be best able to tread in his steps, and to bear the standard emblematic at once of suffering and of conquest. To sustain the soldier of the cross in this protracted war-cribed to merely ritual expiations a value of fare, his spiritual eye is, during the third of his solitary weeks, to be fixed in a reverential scrutiny into that unfathomable abyss of wo, into which a descent was once made to rescue the race of Adam from the grasp of their mortal enemies; and then seven suns are to rise and set while the still secluded but now disenthralled spirit is to chant triumphant hallelujahs, elevating her desires heavenward, contemplating glories hitherto unimaginable, and mysteries never before revealed; till the sacred exercises close with an absolute surrender of all the joys and interests of this sublunary state, as a holocaust, to be consumed by the undying flame of divine love on the altar of the regenerate heart.

He must have been deeply read in the nature of man, who should have predicted such first fruits as these from the restored health of the distracted visionary, who had alternately sounded the base strings of humility on earth, and the living chords which vibrate with spontaneous harmonies along the seventh heavens. A closer survey of the book will

which we believe them to be altogether destitute, yet were all his mighty powers held in the most earnest and submissive affiance in the divine nature, as revealed under the veil of human infirmity and of more than human suffering. After the lapse of two centuries, Philip Doddridge, than whom no man ever breathed more freely on earth the atmosphere of heaven, produced a work of which the Spiritual Exercises might have afforded the model-so many are still the points of contact between those who, ranging themselves round the great object of Christianity as their common centre, occupy the most opposite positions in that expanded circle.

From the publication of the "Spiritual Exercises" to the Vow of Montmartre, nine years elapsed. They wore away in pilgrimages, in feats of asceticism, in the working of miracles, and in escapes all but miraculous, from dangers which the martial spirit of the saint, no less than his piety, impelled him to incur. In the caverns of Monreza he had vowed to scale the heights of 'perfection and it therefore be

hooved him thus to climb that obstinate emi- | traversing the Netherlands and England as a nence, in the path already trodden by all the beggar. Unheeded and despised as he sat at canonized and beatified heroes of the church. the feet of the learned, or solicited alms of the But he had also vowed to conduct his fellow-rich, he was still maturing in the recesses of pilgrims from the city of destruction to the his bosom designs more lofty than the highest land of Beulah. In prison and in shipwreck, to which the monarchs of the houses of Valois fainting with hunger or wasted with disease, or of Tudor had ever dared to aspire. In the his inflexible spirit still brooded over that University of Paris he at length found the bright, though as yet shapeless vision; until at means of carrying into effect the cherished length it assumed a coherent form as he knelt purposes of so many years. It was the heroic on the mount of Olives, and traced the last in- age of Spain, and the countrymen of Gonsalvo delible foot-print of the ascending Redeemer and Cortes lent a willing ear to counsels of of mankind. At that hallowed spot had ended daring on any field of adventure, whether sethe weary way of Him who had bowed the cular or spiritual. His companions in study heavens, and came down to execute on earth thus became his disciples in religion. Nor a mission of unutterable love and matchless were his the common-place methods of making self-denial; and there was revealed to the pro- converts. To the contemplative and the timid, phetic gaze of the future founder of the order he enjoined hardy exercises of active virtue. of Jesus, (no seer-like genius kindled by high To the gay and ardent, he appeared in a resolves,) the long line of missionaries who, spirit still more buoyant than their own. To animated by his example, and guided by his a debauchee, whom nothing else couid move, instructions, should proclaim that holy name he presented himself neck-deep in a pool of from the rising to the setting sun. It was in- frozen water, to teach the more impressively deed a futurity perceptible only to the tele- the duty of subduing the carnal appetites. To scopic eye of faith. At the mature age of an obdurate priest, he made a general confesthirty, possessing no language but his own, no sion of his own sins, with such agonies of rescience but that of the camp, and no literature morse and shame, as to break up, by force of beyond the biographies of Paladins, and of sympathy, the fountains of penitence in the saints, he became the self-destined teacher of bosom of the confessor. Nay, he even engaged the future teachers of the world. Hoping at billiards with a joyous lover of the game, against hope, he returned to Barcelona, and on condition that the defeated player should there, as the class-fellow of little children, com- serve his antagonist for a month; and the vicmenced the study of the first rudiments of the torious saint enforced the penalty by consignLatin tongue. ing his adversary a month of secluded devotion. Others yielded at once and without a struggle to the united influence of his sanctity and genius; and it is remarkable that, from these more docile converts, he selected, with but two exceptions, the original members of his infant order. Having performed the initiatory rite of the Spiritual Exercises, they all swore on the consecrated host in the crypt of St. Denys, to accompany their spiritual father on a mission to Palestine; or, if that should be impracticable, to submit themselves to the vicar of Christ, to be disposed of as missionaries at his pleasure.

Among the established faceti of the stage, are the distractions of dramatic Eloisas under the tutorship of their Abelards, in the attempt to conjugate Amo. Few play-wrights, probably, have been aware that the jest had its type, if not its origin, in the scholastic experiences of Ignatius Loyola. At the same critical point, and in the same manner, a malignant spirit arrested his advance in the grammar. On each successive inflection of the verb, corresponding elevations heavenwards were excited in his soul by the demon, who, assuming the garb of an angel of light, thus succeeded in disturbing his memory. To baffle his insidious enemy, the harassed scholar employed the pedagogue to make liberal use of that discipline of which who can ever forget the efficacy or the pain? The exorcism was complete. Amo, in all her affectionate moods, and changeful tenses, became familiar as household words. Thus Thomas à Kempis was made to speak intelligibly. Erasmus also revealed his hidden treasures of learning and wit, though ultimately exiled from the future schools of the Jesuits, for the same offence of having disturbed the thoughts of his devout reader. Energy won her accustomed triumphs, and, in the year 1528, he became a student of the Humanities, and of what was then called philosophy, at the University of Paris.

Of the seven decades of human life, the brightest and the best, in which other men achieve or contend for distinction, was devoted by Ignatius to the studies preparatory to his great undertaking. Grave professors examined him on their prælections, and, when these were over, he sought the means of subsistence by

Impetuous as had been the temper of Ignatius in early life, he had learned to be patient of the slow growth of great designs. Leaving his disciples to complete their studies at Paris under the care of Peter Faber, he returned to Spain to recruit their number, to mature his plans, and, perhaps, to escape from a too familiar intercourse with his future subjects. In the winter of 1536, they commenced their pilgrimage to the eternal city. Xavier was their leader. Accomplished in all courtly exercises, he prepared for his journey by binding tight cords round his arms and legs, in holy revenge for the pleasure which their graceful agility had once afforded him; and pursued his way with Spartan constancy, till the corroded flesh closed obstinately over the ligatures. Miracle, the prompt handmaid of energies like his, burst the bands which no surgeon could extricate; and her presence was attested by the toils which his loosened limbs immediately endured in the menial service of his fellow travellers. At Venice they rejoined their leader, and there employed themselves in mi

nistering to the patients in the hospitals. Fore- ten successive years their initiatory discipline most in every act of intrepid self-mortification, had been conducted. Wildly as their leader Xavier here signalized his zeal by exploits, may have described his survey of the celestial the mere recital of which would derange the regions, and of their triumphant inmates, he stomachs of ordinary men. While courting had anxiously weighed the state of the world all the physical tortures of purgatory, his soul, in which he dwelt, and the nature of his fellow however, inhaled the anticipated raptures of sojourners there. He was intimately aware Paradise. Twice these penances and raptures of the effects on human character of self-acbrought him to the gates of death; and, in his quaintance, of action, and of suffering. He last extremity, he caused himself to be borne therefore required his disciples to scrutinize to places of public resort, that his ghastly as the recesses and the workings of their own pect might teach the awful lessons which his hearts, till the aching sense found relief rather tongue was no longer able to pronounce. than excitement, in turning from the wonders and the shame within, to the mysteries and the glories of the world of unembodied spirits. He trained them to ceaseless activity, until the transmutation of means into ends was complete; and efforts, at first the most irksome, had become spontaneous and even grateful exercises. He accustomed them to every form of privation and voluntary pain, until fortitude, matured into habit, had been the source of enjoyments, as real as to the luxurious they are incomprehensible. He rendered them stoics, mystics, enthusiasts, and then combined all into an institute, than which no human association was ever more emphatically practical, or more to the purpose and the time.

Of all the occupations to which man can devote the earlier years of life, none probably leaves on the character an impress so deep and indelible as the profession of arms. In no other calling are the whole range of our sympathetic affections, whether kindly or the reverse, called into such habitual and active exercise; nor does any other stimulate the mere intellectual powers with a force so irresistible, when once they are effectually aroused from their accustomed torpor. Loyola was a soldier to the last breath he drew, a general whose authority none might question, a comrade on whose cordiality all might rely, sustaining all the dangers and hardships he exacted of his followers, and in his religious cam

Such prodigies, whether enacted by the saints of Rome or by those of Benares, exhibit a sovereignty of the spiritual over the animal nature, which can hardly be contemplated without some feelings akin to reverence. But, on the whole, the hooked Faqueer spinning round his gibbet is the more respectable suicide of the two; for his homage is, at least, meet for the deity he worships. He whose name had been assumed by Ignatius and his followers, equally victorious over the stoical illusions and the lower affections of our nature, had been accustomed to seek repose among the domestic charities of life, and to accept such blameless solaces as life has to offer to the weary and the heavy-laden; nor could services less in harmony with his serene self-reverence have been presented to him, than the vehement emotions, the squalid filth, and the lacerated frames of the first members of the society of Jesus. Loyola himself tolerated, encouraged, and shared these extravagances. His countenance was as haggard, his flagellations as cruel, and his couch and diet as sordid as the rest. They who will conquer crowns, whether ghostly or secular, must needs tread in slippery places. He saw his comrades faint and die with the extremity of their sufferings, and assuming the character of an inspired prophet, promoted, by predicting, their recovery. One of the gentlest and most patient of them, Rodriguez, flying for relief to a solitary hermit-paigns a strategist of consummate skill and age, found his retreat obstructed by a man of terrible aspect and gigantic stature, armed with a naked sword and breathing menaces. Hosez, another of his associates, happening to die at the moment when Ignatius, prostrate before the altar, was reciting from the Confiteor the words, et omnibus sanctis,' that countless host was revealed to the eye of the saint; and among them, resplendent in glory, appeared his deceased friend, to sustain and animate the hopes of his surviving brethren. As he journeyed with Laynez, he saw a still more awful vision. It exhibited that Being whom no eye hath seen, and whom no tongue may lightly name, and with him the eternal Son, bearing a heavy cross, and uttering the welcome assurance, "I will be propitious to you at Rome."

These, however, were but the auxiliary and occasional arts (if so they must be termed) by which the sovereignty of Ignatius was established. It behooved him to acquire the unhesitating submission of noble minds, ignited by a zeal as intense and as enduring as his own; and it was on a far loftier basis than that of bodily penances or ecstatic dreams, that for

most comprehensive survey. It was his maxim that war ought to be aggressive, and that even an inadequate force might be wisely weakened by detachments on a distant service, if the prospect of success was such, that the vague and perhaps exaggerated rumour of it would strike terror into nearer foes, and animate the hopes of irresolute allies. To conquer Lutheranism, by converting to the faith of Rome the barbarous or half-civilized nations of the earth, was, therefore, among the earliest of his projects; and his searching eye had scanned the spirits of his lieutenants to discover which of them was best adapted for enterprises so replete with difficulty and hazard. It was necessary that he should select men superior, not only to all the allurements of appetite, and the common infirmities of our race, but superior, also, to those temptations to which an inquisitive mind and abilities of a high order expose their possessor. His missionaries must be men prepared to do and to dare, but not much disposed to speculate. They must burn with a zeal which no sufferings or disappointment could extinguish; but must not feel those impulses which might prompt men of large capa