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companions; ‘for they were free from ambition.’
But
the aspiring honor of the
Gallican church was interested; a prouder sympathy was awakened among the devotees at court; and, the Franciscans having, as a
mendicant order, been excluded from the rocks and deserts of the New World, the office of converting the
Le Jeune, Brieve Relation 1632. |
heathen of
Canada, and thus enlarging the borders of French dominion, was intrusted solely to the Jesuits.
The establishment of ‘the Society of Jesus’ by Loyola had been contemporary with the reformation, of which it was designed to arrest the progress; and
its complete organization belongs to the period when the first full edition of
Calvin's Institutes saw the light.
Its members were, by its rules, never to become prelates, and could gain power and distinction only by influence over mind.
Their vows were, poverty, chastity, absolute obedience, and a constant readiness to go on missions against heresy or heathenism.
Their cloisters became the best schools in the world.
Emancipated, in a great degree, from the forms of piety, separated from domestic ties, constituting a community essentially intellectual as well as essentially plebeian, bound together by the most perfect organization, and having for their end a control over opinion among the scholars and courts of
Europe and throughout the habitable globe, the order of the Jesuits held, as its ruling maxims, the widest diffusion of its influence, and the closest internal unity.
Immediately on its institution, their missionaries, kindling with a heroism that defied every danger and endured every toil, made their way to the ends of the earth; they raised the emblem of man's salvation on the Moluccas, in
Japan, in
India, in Thibet, in
Cochin China, and in
China; they penetrated
