emulation and glory. Compared with their self-conquests and high rewards, the achievements and the renown of Roland and of Amadis waxed dim. Compared with the peerless damsel for whose smiles Palladius had fought and died, how transcendently glorious the image of female loveliness and angelic purity which had irradiated the hermit’s cell and the path of the way-worn pilgrims!
Far as the heavens are above the earth would be the plighted fealty of the knight of the Virgin Mother beyond the noblest devotion of merely human chivalry. In her service he would cast his shield over the Church which ascribed to her more than celestial dignities, and bathe in the blood of her enemies the sword once desecrated to the mean ends of worldly ambition. Nor were these vows unheeded by her to whom they were addressed. Environed in light, and clasping her infant to her bosom, she revealed herself to the adoring gaze of her champion. At that heavenly vision all fantasies of worldly and sensual delight, like exorcised demons, fled from his soul into eternal exile. He rose, suspended at her shrine his secular weapons, performed there his nocturnal devotions, and with returning day retired to consecrate his future life to the glory of the Virgo Deipara.
To these erotic dreams succeeded stern realities; convulsive agonies of prayer, wailings of remorse, and self-inflicted bodily torments. Exchanging dresses with a beggar, he lined his gabardine with prickly thorns, fasted to the verge of starvation, assumed the demeanor of an idiot, became too loathsome for human contact, and then, plunging into a gloomy cavern, surrendered himself up to such wrestlings with the evil spirit, and to such vicissitudes of rapture and despair, that in the storm of turbid passions his reason had nearly given way.
At the verge of madness, Ignatius paused. That noble intellect was not to be whelmed beneath the tempest in which so many have sunk, nor was his deliverance to be accomplished by any vulgar methods. Standing on the steps of a Dominican church, he recited the office of Our Lady, when suddenly heaven itself was laid open to the eyes of the worshiper. That ineffable mystery which the author of the Athanasian creed has labored in vain to enunciate in words, was disclosed to him as an object, not of faith, but of actual sight. To his spiritualized sense was disclosed the actual process by which the host is transubstantiated, and the other Christian verities which it is permitted to common man to receive but as exercises of their belief, became to him the objects of immediate inspection and of direct consciousness. For eight successive days his body reposed in an unbroken trance, while his spirit thus imbibed disclosures for which the tongues of men have no appropriate language.
Ignatius returned to this sublunary sphere with a mission not unmeet for an envoy from the empyrean world, of which he had thus become a temporary denizen. He returned to earth to establish a theocracy, of which he should himself be the first administrator, and to which every tribe and kindred of men should be subject. He returned no longer a sordid, half-distracted anchorite, but, strange to tell, a man distinguished not more by the gigantic magnitude of his designs than by the clear good sense, the profound sagacity, the calm perseverance, and the flexible address with which he was to pursue them. History affords no more perfect illustration how readily delirious enthusiasm and the shrewdness of the exchange may combine and harmonize in minds of the heroic order. A Swedenborg-Franklin reconciling in himself these antagonist propensities is no monster of the fancy.
Of all the occupations to which man can devote the earlier years of his life, none probably leaves on the character an impress so deep and indelible as the profession of arms. In no other calling is the whole range of our sympathetic affections, whether kindly or the reverse, called into such habitual and active exercise, nor does any other stimulate the mere intellectual powers with a force so irresistible when once they are effectually aroused from their accustomed torpor. Loyola was a soldier to the last breath he drew, a general whose authority none might question, a comrade on whose cordiality all might rely, sustaining all the dangers and hardships he exacted from his followers, and in his religious campaigns a strategist of consummate skill and most comprehensive survey. It was his maxim that war ought to be aggressive, and that even an inadequate force might be wisely weakened by detachments on a distant service, if the prospect of success was such that the vague and perhaps exaggerated rumor of it would strike terror into nearer foes and animate the hopes of irresolute allies. To conquer Lutheranism by converting to the faith of Rome the barbarous or half-civilized nations of the earth was, therefore, among the earliest of his projects.
Though not in books, yet in the far nobler school of active and especially of military life, Loyola had learned the great secret of government—at least, of his government. It was that the social affections, if concentrated within a well-defined circle, possess an intensity and endurance unrivaled by those passions of which self is the immediate object. He had the sagacity to perceive that emotions like those with which a Spartan or a Jew had yearned over the land and the institutions of their fathers—emotions stronger than appetite, vanity, ambition, avarice, or death itself—might be kindled in the members of his order; if he could detect and grasp those mainsprings of human action of which the Greek and the Hebrew legislators had obtained the mastery. Nor did he seek them in vain.
Some unconscious love of power, a mind bewildered by many gross superstitions and theoretical errors, and perhaps some tinge of insanity, may be ascribed to Ignatius Loyola; but no dispassionate reader of his writings or of his life will question his integrity, or deny to him the praise of a devotion at once sincere, habitual, and profound. It is not to the glory of the reformers to depreciate the name of their greatest antagonist, or to think meanly of him to whom more than any other man it is owing that the Reformation was stayed and the Church of Rome rescued from her impending doom.
From amid the controversies which then agitated the world had emerged two great truths, of which, after three hundred years’ debate, we are yet to find the reconcilement. It was true that the Christian commonwealth should be one consentient body, united under one supreme head, and bound together a community of law, of doctrine, and of worship. It was also true that each member of that body must for himself, on his own responsibility and at his own peril, render that worship, study that law, and seek the guidance of the Supreme Ruler. Here was a problem for the learned and wise, for schools, and presses, and pulpits. But it is not by sages nor in the spirit of philosophy that such problems receive their practical solution. Wisdom may be the ultimate arbiter, but it is seldom the immediate agent in human affairs. It is by antagonist passions, prejudices, and follies that the equipoise of this most belligerent planet of ours is chiefly preserved, and so it was in the sixteenth century. The German pointed the way to that sacred solitude where beside the worshiper himself none may enter; the Spaniard to that innumerable company which with one accord still chant the liturgies of remotest generations. Chieftains in the most momentous warfare of which this earth had been the theatre since the subversion of paganism, each was a rival worthy of the other in capacity, courage, disinterestedness, and love of the truth, and yet how marvelous the contrast!