enforced upon the body, there rise up, from some mysterious region, influences that penetrate and subdue the waking consciousness, thoughts and beliefs that have been sown unnoticed, subtle experiences that have left no trace in the work-a-day memory, and these, under the heat of emotion, germinate and grow, and become the guides and masters of conduct and theory. Many good spirits crowded to his bedside; the strength that had come to him in youth when he lifted up his eyes to the Pyrenees and saw their tops flattered by the morning sun or consecrated by the deepening hues of evening; the lesson of chivalry, that a man of honor must enlist in the service of what to him is the noblest and most beautiful; the simple words of some good priest; his mother's smile, his father's expectations. And with Ignatius the good spirits prevailed, and marked him for their own.

In this state of mind his sensibility became so delicate, his power of imaginative concentration so vivid, that the objects of his thought seemed to appear in bodily presence before his corporeal eyes. One night as he lay awake, he beheld Our Lady with her Child in her arms. This vision gave him great consolation, that is, it "increased his hope, faith and charity, and called him to heavenly things and the salvation of his soul." The old Adam was cast out. He conceived so great a loathing for the lusts of the flesh that all the voluptuous images that had been wont to rise up and disturb his mind, departed from him forever. Never once again, so he told Father Gonzalez in 1555, had he known the temptations of the flesh. He surrendered completely to these religious impulses. Much of the time he spent in prayer. And he seems to have become for the time being as a little child, and did childish acts of devotion. For instance, he took the two books I have mentioned, the Life of Christ and the Anthology of Saints, and made a compendium of their contents, writing the words of Christ in vermilion, and those of Our Lady in blue, all in most careful calligraphy, an art in which he excelled. It was the childhood of his new life. That was but one aspect of his condition. At night he loved to look up at the starry sky,

for while gazing he felt within him a mighty power to serve the Lord. This lifting up his eyes to the stars was a practice all his life.

I have often seen him, in his old age [says Father Ribandeneira], standing out on the balcony, or on some place of vantage where he could look at the sky, fix his gaze upward, and remain motionless, lost in thought, for a long time, and then, overcome by emotion, shed tears of joy. And I have often heard him say: "How contemptible the world seems when I look up at the sky."

Besides his prayers and his gazings at the heavens, he sought for strength in the Bible, and would quote to himself: "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." (Phil. IV, 13.)

CHAPTER III

SELF-DEDICATION

In some such manner Loyola's conversion took place; and the first fruits were plans for his new life. According to tradition and authority there were two ways of purifying oneself from past sins. One of these was to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and many did so, for instance among Spaniards of note, Juan de la Enzina, the earliest of Spanish playwrights, who had gone but two years before. The other way was to practise vigils, fasts, flagellations and whatever other acts of penance the example of ascetics might suggest, or ingenuity devise. Ignatius proposed to take both ways, and he became impatient to set about them.

Toward the end of February, 1522, his health was pretty well re-established, and he decided that the time had come to go. His elder brother, Martin Garcia, who had become the head of the family on their father's death, suspected something, and, being quite out of sympathy with this renunciation of the world, spoke out his mind to Ignatius. From worldly considerations he was right. The times were full of promise for a soldier; Spanish influence was spreading over the world and Spanish opportunity travelled in its wake; the young King had been elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and ruled over more lands than Charlemagne had done; the regent of Spain, Charles's old tutor, who was at Vittoria, a scant day's ride from the castle of Loyola, had just received news that he had been chosen Pope; the struggle with France for Milan and domination in Italy was on; the reputation of Spanish infantry was at its height; a military career offered a straight road to honor. Ignatius, however, was not to be diverted from his purpose, and fearing hindrance gave an evasive answer.

His biographer says that "he did not depart from the truth as to which he was very scrupulous," but the answer did not contain the whole truth. Let me say here that, in view of the opinion popular among Protestants that Jesuits are inclined to equivocate, I shall set forth in full any equivocation, dissimulation or subterfuge, or suspicion thereof, that may appear in any of the sources of his biography; at this moment I recall no other. (He said: "Sir, as you know, the duke of Najera is aware that I am well again. It will be no more than my duty for me to go to Navarrete where he is." So he went; but once there, having paid his respects to the duke, he dismissed his brother's servants, turned his back on Azpeitia, and took the road to Montserrat, the seat of an ancient and far-famed Benedictine monastery.

At this period of his life, Ignatius was wholly dominated by medieval ideas. He had probably never been outside the little district between Azpeitia, Arevalo and Pamplona. Stories of Spanish prowess had reached him no doubt, but he knew nothing of the great intellectual stirrings which had set a new glory on Italy, as resplendent as the crown of the Cæsars or the tiara of the Popes, and was affecting peoples north of the Alps like new wine. He had lived in the mental atmosphere of an earlier century, and in many ways he always remained an intellectual contemporary of St. Francis and St. Dominic; the singularity of his career lies in this, that, in spite of these medieval ideas, he was destined to divine with clearer eye than any other supporter of the Roman Church just what was necessary to be done in his and in succeeding generations in order to rally the forces of conservatism to the support of the ancient ecclesiastical order.

After leaving Navarrete, he began a course of penitential discipline such as the anchorites of the Thebaid had practised, without regard, as he himself avows, to discretion, patience or humility, or any notion of proportioning the discipline to his sins, out of a desire to undergo all that the saints he had read of had undergone for the glory of God. I will give a specific instance of this mediæval state

of mind. On the road a Moor chanced to ride alongside; the two fell into conversation, and talked about Our Lady. The Moor was willing to admit that she was still a virgin after she had conceived, but averred that he could not understand how her virginity continued after the birth of her child. Nothing Ignatius said could shake him; and the Moor, weary perhaps of his fellow traveller's persistency, rode ahead and was lost to sight. As Ignatius reflected over this blasphemy, he thought he had done wrong to let the infidel go unpunished, and was nearly carried away by a sudden impulse to gallop after and stab him. Should he or should he not? He hesitated. The Moor had told him just where he would turn off from the highway, by a side path on his way to a village in the neighborhood. When Loyola reached this fork in the road he was still in doubt as to what he ought to do. Stories were rife of vengeance inflicted by indignant Spanish gentlemen upon Mohammedan dogs for just such blasphemy. Ignatius dropped the reins on his mule's neck; he would appeal to the judgment of God. (If the mule turned and followed the Moor, he would run him through; otherwise not. The mule, in brutal indifference to theological errors, kept to the main high road. The incident not only reveals the literal simplicity of Loyola's piety, but also, I think, judging by the usual behaviour of Spaniards at that time towards the Moors, rather a high standard of self-restraint.

The mountain of Montserrat lies in Aragon, a day's ride to the west of Barcelona. There is no place similar to it anywhere. It rises abruptly out of the plain above the river Llobregat, like a mad fancy of Doré's pencil, to a height, at its topmost peak, of twelve thousand feet, one great mass of fantastic shapes, pillars, pinnacles, pyramids, in a savage heap, "ad nubes quasi elevatus." The Benedictine monastery stood on a sort of table-land about two-thirds of the way up, and scattered about in wild places higher still were hermitages for as a traveller justly noticed "elegantissimus locus est pro heremitis"-hardly to be reached except by climbing on all fours. The way to the monastery was very long, narrow and rugged. James Howell, the English letter