In 1542, Ignatius had a select body of fifteen or sixteen young men studying in Paris; others he had placed in Padua or elsewhere. He availed himself of the actual universities until such time as he should have his own. War breaking out between the Emperor Charles V and the French King Francis, all Spaniards and Belgians were ordered out of France. Such as were Italians remaining in Paris, the other young Jesuits crossed the frontier to Louvain, under the charge of Father Jerome Domenech. There the Latin oratory of the youth, Francis Strada, whom Lefèvre, on his way through Belgium, supplied with matter for his orations,[116] helped to build up the Order rapidly with two kinds of men, talented youths, who were captivated by the things they saw and heard, and men already eminent, who were equally attracted by the scope of the new Institute. In the young Strada preaching and the eminent Lefèvre going out of his way to subsidize him with matter, we catch a family glimpse of that intensified force which can be developed in a closely bound organization.
Conspicuously wanting in gifts of presence and of learning, Francis Villanova, sent by Ignatius to the university seat of Alcalà, won such an ascendency there by his other qualities as a Priest, that a commodious and flourishing college was soon founded. Father Jerome Domenech endowed one in his native city of Valentia, 1543. Lefèvre and Araoz, following awhile by royal request in the suite of the Princess Mary, daughter of the Portuguese King, and queen of the Spanish King, founded a college at Valladolid. In Gandia, his own duchy, Francis Borgia erected and richly equipped a university, which was the first placed in the hands of the Society.
Colleges at Barcelona, Bologna, Saragossa, arose within the next two or three years; also at Messina, Palermo, Venice, and Tivoli. It is evident that Ignatius had a world of administration already on his hands. As early as March 16, 1540, he had excused himself from granting an application, because of "much pains he was taking in sending some to the Indies, others to Ireland and to parts of Italy." Now, though his forces were increasing, yet he was husbanding them; and even so, while refusing many applications, he seemed to be everywhere. But this need not be so much a matter of wonder, if we consider that it is the right place, and the right move at the proper time, that commands other places, movements, and times.
At the death of Lefèvre, in 1546, the onward movement of these select men, coming in contact, either friendly or adverse, with every actual power in Europe, was so impressive for its strategic completeness, and so far-reaching in its results, that, as an historian remarks, "These ten men, so ably chosen, had accomplished to their entire satisfaction, in less than six years, what the most absolute monarch would not have ventured to exact of the most blind devotedness."[117]
Hardly had Lefèvre departed this life, when his place was taken by the last man whom he had dealt with, Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, the friend and cousin of the Emperor Charles V. Still wearing his ducal robes, until his temporal affairs could be settled, he came to Rome in 1550. He founds the Roman College, which is the centre and type of all Jesuit colleges.
It was begun on February 18th, 1551, at the foot of the Capitol, with fourteen members of the Order, and Father John Peltier, a Frenchman, at their head. Doubling this number in the following September, the College moved to a larger building. The Professors taught Rhetoric, and three languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. In 1553, the entire course of Philosophy and Theology was added. The number of Jesuit students among the auditory amounted, in this year, to sixty, and, in the following year, to one hundred. A few years later, Vittoria Toffia, niece of Paul IV, and wife of Camillo Orsini, provided the institution with a splendid property. Thenceforth, the number of Jesuit students alone was as high as 220, brought together from sixteen or more different nations, most of them familiar with many languages, all speaking by rule the tongue of the country in which they were residing, and all competent to speak and teach in the one universal and learned language of the time, the Latin tongue.
Of students not belonging to the Order, nearly twenty colleges are enumerated, at some periods, as following the courses of this central Roman College. They included the colleges of the English, the Greeks, the Scotch, the Maronites, the Irish, and the Neophytes; the Colleges named Capranica, Fuccioli, Mattei, Pamfili, Salviati, Ghislieri; the German College and the College Gymnasio; also the Roman Seminary. Of the 2107 students counted, as following the courses at a given time, 300 were in theology. The most eminent professors filled the chairs, in successive generations; theologians like Suarez and Vasquez, commentators like Cornelius a Lapide and Maldonado, founders or leaders in the schools of national history like Mariana and Pallavicini; Clavius, reformer of the Gregorian calendar; Kircher, universal in all exact sciences; and so of the rest; while the cycle of colleges over the world remained provided with their requisite forces, and maintained their own prestige.[118]
The emblem of this institution was Theology, enthroned, as it were, in a temple of imposing proportions. At her right and left two Maids of Honor stand; they are the Natural Sciences. One of them, representing Mathematics, is placing the celestial sphere under the feet of the august goddess seated; the other, representing Physics, is subjecting, in like manner, the orb of the earth. The legend attached reads: Leges impone subactis.
In forty or fifty years such an investment of talent, character, and virtue, had been made, by management within the Order, and by that power to which Ignatius always appealed, Divine Providence, that Rome had seen pass through this house the most distinguished men of the age, in every line of intellectual life, of moral eminence, and of all that could elevate the thoughts of noble and generous minds. For the young, in particular, three characters came, figures that were to fill the niches and terminate the aisles of contemplation, as the ideal choice of the bloom of youth—Stanislaus Kostka, a young Polish noble of seventeen, Aloysius Gonzaga, an Italian prince of twenty-three, and John Berchmans, a Flemish burgher of twenty-two. Being what they were, and leaving this life at such an age, they have appropriated in the Catholic Church the honors of the young.
With regard to Germany, it is with a classic touch, as of Cæsar's style, that an historian introduces the subject thus: Germania, quo gravius laboravit, hoc studiosius adjuta est; Ignatio nulla regio commendatior.[119] Nor will the association be considered far-fetched, if, substituting for Cæsar's pen and Cæsar's sword, Loyola's legislation for letters and his strategic tactics, one catches a suggestive idea, on the present topic, from that statue of the same Roman General, which represents him as holding in one hand a sword, and in the other a pen, with the words inscribed underneath, Ex utroque Cæsar.