Dr. Gillabos, a good, intelligent man, who came out with a great panegyric upon the holiness and miracles of Saint Ignatius. The preacher did not like the panegyric; he burst out laughing and said, with a disdainful and contemptuous air, that the Founder of the Jesuits, if he used all his influence, might perhaps cure a toothache, but that he could not do more. This pleasantry, quite out of place in a priest, scandalized the company and cast a damper on the subsequent conversation; for the family entertained a great devotion to Saint Ignatius. This was on the Monday before mid-Lent. Out of regard for the good of the people thereabouts, God postponed His vengeance; and the preacher was able to finish his course of sermons. On Easter Monday he was again invited by the same doctor. This time he received the just reward for his improper pleasantry. He was holding a glass of wine in his hand, and was about to carry it to his lips, when he suddenly began to tremble and shriek that his teeth were being pulled out and that he could not open his mouth. And in fact his jaws were so locked that he could not utter a word; all he could do was to roar in despair. Then came a fit of terror, convulsions, and such transports of madness that five or six men could hardly hold him down. All the physicians roundabout were called in; but as the illness came from heaven, the art of man could do nothing. The wretch lived on for three days in these torments,-a severe lesson on the respect due to saints. At the end of the three days he died miserably, without being able to say a single word, even of repentance.

To have helped produce, or render possible, such credulity in Père Bartoli, or anybody else, as to believe or tell so silly a story, is surely evidence of failure.

My second passage concerns Father Brébeuf, the Norman gentleman whom Francis Parkman, through his book The Jesuits in North America, introduced to Protestant readers. There is enough to do honor to the Society in the mere record of Brébeuf's hardships from the time he left Samuel de Champlain at Quebec until reaching a village of the Hurons, to quote his own words-"Where poor Estienne

Brulé had been barbarously and treacherously murdered, which made me think that some day we might be treated in the same manner, and to wish that at least it might be while pursuing the glory of Our Lord." Some three years later, that day seemed close at hand. In a letter to his Superior, he writes:

Mon. R. Père, Nous sommes peut-estre sur le point de respandre notre sang, et d'immoler nos vies pour le service de nostre bon Maistre Jésus-Christ. It seems that His goodness is willing to accept this sacrifice from me in expiation of my great and numberless sins, and to crown now the past services and burning desires of all the Fathers here. . . . En tout, sa sainte volonté soit faite; s'il veut que dès cestre heure nous mourions, ô la bonne heure pour nous!

But the day did not come for eleven years, until almost the very time that Père Bartoli was writing the miraculous story, that I have just quoted. Les Relations des Jésuites for the year 1649, Chapter IV, “De l'heureuse mort du P. Jean de Brébeuf," tells the story of his capture and torture by the Iroquois. It is too terrible to recount. Parkman says:

Thus died Jean de Brébeuf, the founder of the Huron mission, its truest hero and its greatest martyr. He came of a noble race, the same, it is said, from which sprang the English Earls of Arundel; but never had the mailed barons of his line confronted a fate so appalling, with so prodigious a constancy. To the last he refused to flinch, and "his death was the astonishment of his murderers."

Heroism, scarcely if at all inferior, was shown by many another member of the Society in the endeavor to save the souls of Indians in la Nouvelle France. To have helped produce, or render possible, such courage in Père Brébeuf and many, many others, as to brave horrors unspeakable for the greater glory of God, is surely triumphant success.

CHAPTER XXXIV

EPILOGUE

SUCH, then, are the usual charges that are brought up by ill-informed persons who are out of sympathy with the Order of Jesus. I repeat: the doctrine that the end justifies the means was devised for use in party warfare at some period or other after Loyola's death; as a weapon of assault, it can scarcely be praised too highly, it is insulting, harmful, hard to refute and easy to remember. Perhaps no phrase ever carried more mud that sticks. It so happens, however, that the maxim, at least as a rule of conduct, is far older than the Jesuits, and has been said to obtain, now and again, with Secretaries of State, Ministers of War, or Captains of Industry, in countries which are not under Jesuit control. With establishing the Inquisition in Italy and in Portugal, Ignatius had but little to do, with establishing it in Spain, nothing.

As to the doctrine of obedience, to hear some Protestant critics you might almost suppose it to be a diabolical invention of Loyola's. It is, of course, as essential in an ecclesiastical army as on board ship, or on the parade ground, or on the football field, or in the trenches. It is said of Phillips Brooks,-"no ancient Roman, pagan or Christian, ever asserted more strongly the claim of obedience to be the highest virtue." In addition to the necessity of obedience in order to secure the united action among any body of men in the accomplishment of any purpose, it had always been the favorite mediæval method of teaching humility. You will find the simile of the dead body as the type of perfect obedience set forth with elaboration by St. Francis of Assisi. His biographers, Thomas of Celano, in both the First and Second Life, and the Three Companions, lay special emphasis upon his insistence on this point.

Some people may regard with disfavor Loyola's habit of worship, for instance his devotion to the Eucharist. He was a child of the middle ages, and passionately accepted its elementary creed. In our world of Protestantism and agnosticism we think of that mediæval creed as over and done with; but that is because we do not travel beyond the bounds of our own religious sympathies. These mediaval Christian beliefs, as we call them, still justify themselves by the service they render to individual souls. Newman and Manning are instances to prove this. The great schoolmaster, Dr. Coit, wrote:

I think the simple attendance on the Blessed Sacrament, week by week, and forming the habit of careful preparation and frequent reception, remembering into Whose presence we come, and for what we hang upon His grace, will do more for stable peace and true growth in moral strength than any other means whatever.

And Phillips Brooks speaks of this Sacrament as "the rallying-place for all the good activity and worthy hopes of man.' To Ignatius partaking of the Eucharist was eating the bread of spiritual life.

In addition to these three criticisms there is a fourth, which is usually thought, but taken so much for granted as not often to be specifically directed against Ignatius; or rather it is crowded out by the more clamorous protests against "The end justifies the means" and his supposed connection with the Inquisition. This fourth criticism concerns the practice of asceticism, which Loyola enjoined and exemplified to so extreme a degree. Hunger, thirst, dirt, scourgings, an emaciated, maltreated body, scarred with welts, are not merely unattractive to us, they are odious. We are all agreed that comfort is a great good; we usually act as if it were our chief good, and when some rude force shatters it, our very bowels cry out against the sacrilege. There have always been a few men-bigots or fanatics we call them-who have felt an imperious compulsion to illtreat the flesh. The Cynics felt this; the hermits of the

Thebaid much more so; also St. Francis and a long line of mediæval saints. The usual explanation of this disregard of what we deem our great good, is that the primitive fear of a cruel Power constrains timorous men to seek to placate it by torturing themselves. Let us not forget that this superstition is found in company with very noble human qualities. Epictetus says that the true Cynic is free from anger, envy, resentment, that his conscience and his life are pure, that he loves modesty, and is a friend worthy of the gods. St. Anthony of the Desert was pure in heart, sober in judgment, equable in spirit, full of courtesy, tender to the sorrowful; "Seek ye wisdom (he said), chastity, justice, virtue, watchfulness, care of the poor, hospitality, and a mind that overcomes anger." The charm of St. Francis's character is known to everybody. To maltreat oneself seems, in these classes of men, to be correlated with kindness to one's neighbor. But it is not on behalf of any such correlation that I wish to argue here. This compelling need of selfmortification, whether or not a relic of primitive superstitions, is still dominant with some men, and as I think, is a trait of great social value.

I will quote a French gentleman, Charles Foucauld, who died but a few years ago. After his training as an officer at Saint-Cyr, he served in Algiers as a chasseur d'Afrique, distinguished himself as a daring explorer in Morocco, then took to religion, plunged, as it were, into mediæval Christianity, and lived all the rest of his life in the desert, partly in Syria, mostly in Sahara, hermit, priest, missionary and scholar. His self-mortification was extreme; he fasted, he prayed, he kept vigils, he adored the Holy Sacrament, he trampled self-indulgence, bodily appetites, human affections, under his feet. He was ravished by the passion of self-sacrifice. He rejoiced in suffering. With a fervor, equal to Loyola's, he writes of parting from dearly beloved friends as a great good,

a good that gives us the chance to offer a sacrifice to the good Lord, and it is indeed the greatest good, the only real good that there is in life, one that unites us closest to our