but hundreds of thousands of men and women, not only of almost every nation in Europe, but also of every race and every class from Paraguay to Ethiopia, from Ethiopia to Japan, have had their lives influenced by what Ignatius Loyola did.

In the year 1538 this little Spaniard-he stood not quite five feet one and three-quarter inches-with deep-set, deepseeing eyes, and high, smooth brow, trudged barefoot, slightly limping, from Venice to Rome, and petitioned the Pope to bestow upon him and nine other soldiers of Christ leave to serve their God and their neighbor under the name of the Company of Jesus. When he died some fifteen years later, these soldiers were a thousand strong, and their houses and colleges, like castra Romana, held fast against the Protestant aggression in Europe, won lost provinces back, and were spreading the Roman Catholic faith far and wide in Asia and America. Two generations later this little Spaniard was proclaimed by the Roman Catholic Church to have been one of that small band of holy men, called Saints, through whom the Spirit of God has wrought marvelous things for their fellows. At that time the Jesuit army numbered over 13,000, and an enumeration of its provinces maps out great regions of the world-Lombardy, Tuscany, Rome, Sicily, Aragon, Castile, Andalusia, Portugal, Lithuania and Poland, Austria, Germany, Bohemia, Belgium, Mexico, Philippine Islands, Peru, Paraguay, and so on, to the number of thirty-two. And as generations rolled by, through the pulpit, the confessional, and the schools, the Jesuits came near to dominate secular society. They directed the education of the upper classes, and held in subjection, so Protestants thought, the consciences of kings. Lord Macaulay's rhetorical passage concerning them is but a sober and moderate statement: "With what vehemence, with what policy, with what exact discipline, with what dauntless courage, with what self-denial, with what forgetfulness of the dearest private ties, with what intense and stubborn devotion to a single end, with what unscrupulous laxity and versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits fought the battle of their Church, is written in

every page of the annals of Europe during several generations." And Guizot in his History of Civilization says: "Ils ont eu la grandeur de la pensée et la grandeur de la volonté Greatness of thought and greatness of will has been theirs."

The greatness of the Order is plainly measured by the host of enemies that banded together to pull it down. And yet, in spite of all its enemies, it rose again, and to-day its colleges and schools continue to maintain and propagate the Holy Catholic Faith, Apostolic and Roman, in every quarter of the globe. This is Ignatius's doing. You may run over the whole list of famous Spaniards-whether warriors, Charles V, Gonsalvo de Córdova, Cortez, Pizarro, Alva; or adventurers, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, Ponce de León, Hernando de Soto; or men of letters, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Quevedo; or painters, El Greco, Ribera, Murillo, Zurbaran, Goya; or saints, Dominic, Theresa, John of the Cross, Louis of Granada-and you will find that none have left a monument comparable to the Society of Jesus.

Lord Acton calls him "that extraordinary man in whom the Spirit of the Catholic Reaction is incorporated," and the most eminent of modern Spanish scholars, Menendez y Pelayo, says, "Ignatius more than any other man is the living embodiment of the Spanish spirit in its golden age." In this aspect, then, as the representative of Spain at the time of her glory, Loyola has a claim on our general interest.

Second: the great heritage that our world of to-day has received from Spain, or, perhaps I should say though it is all one so far as the Jesuits are concerned-from the Iberian peninsula, is the civilization of South America; and in that civilization, as I am told, the Order of Jesus has been the chief individual factor. I quote from a very recent book by a French scholar: "The greater part of whatever was good and useful that had been accomplished for the civilization of South America [he is speaking with reference to the date of its independence]-the development of education, both primary and higher, the progress in agriculture-was their doing. In a word, the material and moral wellbeing of South America had been wrought by the Jesuits."

And, again, there are the feats of the Jesuits in North America. Readers of Parkman know what they did for the civilization of Canada; and if any one is curious as to the place that the Society occupies in the United States to-day, he has but to visit the colleges of the Jesuits in New York, Boston, Washington, Worcester, and many another city, or, if he prefer, their schools and churches, scattered all over. The originator of this stupendous achievement offers an interest that transcends the boundaries of kingdom or church.

And one word here as to his personality. Some sentences in Lord Rosebery's estimate of Oliver Cromwell seem to me applicable to Ignatius Loyola: "He was a practical mystic, the most formidable and terrible of all combinations. A man who combines inspiration apparently derived . from close communion with the supernatural and the celestial, a man who has that inspiration and adds to it the energy of a mighty man of action, such a man as that lives in communion on a Sinai of his own, and when he pleases to come down to this world below seems armed with no less than the terrors and decrees of the Almighty Himself."

Having such a character and such an achievement to deal with, it was to be expected that the biographies of Loyola should be marked either with the stamp of approbation or with that of disapprobation, and, as far as I can find out, they are in fact so marked. There are said to have been written more than two hundred biographies, but if indeed there ever were so many, scarce a dozen are of any account, and such as there are, whether of account or not, may be divided into three categories. In the first come the biographies written by Loyola's personal disciples, Polanco, Ribadeneira, Lainez, and by their immediate successors who had original documents under their eyes, such as Orlandini and Maffei, with whom Bartoli may be included, although he wrote much later. These lives are good, but hardly sufficient to satisfy modern taste in biography.

In the second category I include all the subsequent books on Ignatius written during some three hundred years, a long period in which passion and prejudice

was

By the

prevented men from writing fairly. Every one a partisan either on one side or the other. act of canonization Catholics were committed to eulogy; since that event adverse criticism has meant disrespect to the Pope, and perhaps to higher authority. Moreover, during the proceedings of canonization reports were forthcoming of over two hundred miracles wrought by Loyola's intercession; and, also, memories of what had happened seventy or eighty years before were fished up out of many pools of local tradition. From that time until the present generation few if any Catholics have ventured to disregard these miracles and these pious traditions. On the other hand, Protestants, and Catholic partisans of the forces that ultimately caused the temporary suppression of the Jesuits, included Loyola in the belligerent dislike which they felt towards the Order as it became a hundred or two hundred years after his death. To show their state of mind, I will cite two random instances, come upon in picking up various books on the subject. In a French book of the eighteenth century occurs the following passage, "This Society has a plan, framed at its very birth, to do away entirely with the teachings of Jesus Christ, to destroy His religion, and overturn crowns and kingdoms, in order to build up on their ruins an absolute despotism"; and a Spanish book, written as late as 1880, has this title, "The Jesuits their mode of life, their habits, adulteries, assassinations, regicides, poisonings, and other peccadillos committed by that celebrated Society." In short, from 1595 to near 1900, I repeat, those who in any way concerned themselves with the founder of the Society of Jesus were not able to see clearly on account of passion and prejudice.

Besides this, during that long period, there was more or less difficulty of access to the original sources. Therefore, from the time of the first disciples down to the present, owing to bias and to ignorance, it was difficult, or rather virtually impossible, to write a fair and accurate biography of Loyola.

Since 1900 the situation has completely changed. The odium theologicum has died away; if there are Catholics

who are opposed to the Society of Jesus, they are temperate in words, or mean to be, and Protestants have attained to justice and to appreciation, or nearly so. Fiery partisanship no longer distorts this ancient history. And also there is now no excuse left for ignorance of the sources; most of these biographies, memoirs, records, letters, and so forth, in Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese-have been published in fifty large volumes; moreover, two accomplished scholars in the Society, Father Astrain in Spain, and Father Tacchi Venturi in Italy, are publishing long histories of the Society in their respective countries, and each has recounted at considerable length the life of the founder, adhering closely to the original sources already known, and supplementing them by very varied information which they have gathered together from unprinted documents stored in various archives in Spain and Italy. These two biographies, imbedded in the history of the Order, may serve to represent the third category, that of fairness and modern scholarship. A French biography also has been announced, and may be out already. And a German Protestant, Dr. Heinrich Böhmer, has published Studien zur Geshichte der Gesellschaft Jesu. European scholarship has prepared the way, and the time has come, therefore, when a faithful biography of St. Ignatius can be written in English without a controversial spirit, and at no greater cost than a certain amount of study.

None of the books that fall in this third category have been rendered into English. Not counting translations of some books that belong in the second category, and brief sketches in encyclopedias and such, there is, I believe, but one original biography in English, and that is Ignatius Loyola by Catherine Stewart Erskine, Lady Buchan (writing under the name of Stewart Rose), published in 1870. This biographer encountered both difficulties heretofore mentioned-for they existed, although in diminished force, at the time she wrote-a bias to eulogy and lack of complete access to original sources. I say hers is the only English biography, because that by Francis Thompson, the poet-Pegasus hitched to the plow-is scarcely more than