If Oxford spends annually a revenue of $2,500,000 to supply facilities for higher education to two thousand of the nobility and gentry, how much would be required to educate a quarter of a million students,—not two thousand, but two hundred and fifty thousand?
The fundamental principles in the educational institute of St. Ignatius were these:—
First, solidity and thoroughness.
The first condition of all higher studies as well as of lower studies was such that, as St. Ignatius said, "It was useless to begin at the top, as the edifice without a good foundation would never stand."
Let literature and philosophy be gone through with satisfactorily, and then theology may be approached.
Literature must come first of all. St. Ignatius provides for law and medicine, but by professors of law and medicine outside of the Order; but no professors of the Order were sent for work outside of Jesuit institutions. If the younger men were sent abroad, the younger generation would be deprived of that type; and if eminent men were sent forth without a permanent Jesuit College, the work would not be that of the Order, but of scattered individuals, and would soon perish.
In the cause of education St. Ignatius had placed in his charter the watchwords "Defence and Advance." As a leader of a military type he had gathered about him the flower of youth and of mature age, from college and university, from doctor's chair and prince's throne, and in fifteen years from the foundation of the Order left one hundred colleges and houses in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Germany, France, Brazil, and the East Indies. Xavier traveled from India and Ceylon, in the west, to Malucca, Japan, and the coast of China on the east. Wherever the energy and activity of Apostolic zeal penetrated it was with the purpose, and usually the result, of permanent Apostolic work in the foundation of educational institutions. Father de Backer says,—
"Wherever a Jesuit set his foot, wherever there was founded a house, a college, a mission, there too came apostles of another class, who labored, who taught, who wrote."
This is true even to our day where in the Rocky Mountains, beside the mission house of Spokane Falls, rises the Jesuit College of Spokane.