caste, bodily penances and costly expiations, and the constant intervention of man, and of the works of man, between the worshipper and the supreme object of his worship. So long as human nature shall continue what it is, the religion of human nature will be unchanged. The Church of Rome will be eternal, if man, such as he now is, is himself eternal.

have misled and deceived me"-such was his | compromise, the indications have been the last address to his confessors-"you are deeply same-a worshipper of pomp and ceremonial guilty, for in truth I acted in good faith. I a spiritual despotism exercised by a sacerdotal sincerely sought the peace of the church." The humiliation of his spiritual advisers quickly followed. It was preceded by the retirement and death of Madame de Maintenon, who had both provoked and derided the sufferings of the Port-Royalists. The very type of mediocrity out of place, she is to our mind the least winning of all the ladies of equivocal or desperate reputation who in modern times have stood on the steps of European thrones. Her power was sustained by the feebleness of the mind she had subdued, and by the craftiness of those who had subjugated her own. Her prudery and her religiousness, such as it was, served but to deepen the aversion which her intriguing, selfish, narrow-minded, and bigoted spirit excite and justify; although, in her own view of the matter, she probably hoped to propitiate the favour of Heaven and the applause of the world, by directing against the unoffending women of Port-Royal the deadly wrath of the worn-out debauchee, whose jaded spirits and unquiet conscience it was her daily task to sustain and flatter. De Noailles, the instrument of her cruelty, lived to bewail his guilt with such strange agonies of remorse as to rescue his memory from all feelings of hatred, although it is difficult to contemplate without some failure of respect, the exhibition of emotions, which, however just in themselves, deprived their victim of all powers of self-control, and of every semblance of decorous composure. His howlings are described by the witness of them, to have been more like those of a wild beast or a maniac, than of a reasonable man.

But for every labour under the sun, says the Wise Man, there is a time. There is a time for bearing testimony against the errors of Rome, why not also a time for testifying to the sublime virtues with which those errors have been so often associated? Are we for ever to admit and never to practise the duties of kindness and mutual forbearance? Does Christi anity consist in a vivid perception of the faults, and an obtuse blindness to the merits of those who differ from us? Is charity a virtue only when we ourselves are the objects of it? Is there not a church as pure and more catholic than those of Oxford or Rome-a church com prehending within its limits every human being who, according to the measure of the knowledge placed within his reach, strives habitually to be conformed to the will of the common Father of us all? To indulge hope beyond the pale of some narrow communion, has, by each Christian society in its turn, been denounced as a daring presumption. Yet the hope has come to all, and with her faith and charity, her inseparable companions. Amidst the shock of contending creeds, and the uproar of anathemas, they who have ears to hear, and hearts to understand, have listened to gentler and If these slight notices of the heroes and more kindly sounds. Good men may debate heroines of Port-Royal, (slight indeed, when as polemics, but they will feel as Christians. compared with the original materials from On the universal mind of Christendom is indewhich they have been drawn,) should be as-libly engraven one image, towards which the cribed by any one to a pen plighted to do suit and service to the cause of Rome, no surmise could be wider of the mark. No Protestant can read the writings of the Port-Royalists themselves, without gratitude for his deliver ance from the superstitions of a church which calls herself Catholic, and boasts that she is eternal. That the Church of Rome may flourish as long as the race of man shall endure, is indeed a conclusion which may reasonably be adopted by him who divines the future only from the past. For where is the land, or what the historical period, in which a conspicuous place has not been held by phenomena essentially the same, however circumstantially different? In what age has man not been a worshipper of the visible? In what country has imagination-the sensuous property of the nind-failed to triumph over those mental powers which are purely contemplative? Who can discover a period in which religion has not more or less assumed the form of a compromise between the self-dependence and the self-distrust of her votaries-between their abasement to human authority and their conviction of its worthlessness-between their awe of the divine power and their habitual reFoit against the divine will? Of every such

eyes of all are more or less earnestly directed. Whoever has himself caught any resemblance. however faint and imperfect, to that divine and benignant Original, has in his measure learned to recognise a brother wherever he can discern the same resemblance.*

There is an essential unity in that kingdom. which is not of this world. But within the provinces of that mighty state there is room. for endless varieties of administration, and for local laws and customs widely differing from each other. The unity consists in the one object of worship-the one object of affiancethe one source of virtue-the one cementing principle of mutual love, which pervade and animate the whole. The diversities are, and must be, as numerous and intractable as are the essential distinctions which nature, habit, and circumstances have created amongst men. Uniformity of creeds, of discipline, of ritual, and of ceremonies, in such a world as ours!

*See on this subject a book entitled "Catholic Chris tianity," the anonymous work of the Rev. E. M'Vicar, now a minister of the Church of Scotland in Ceylon. Why such a book should not have attained an exten sive celebrity, or why such a writer should have been permitted to quit his native land, are questions to which we fear no satisfactory answer could be given by the dispensers of fame or of church preferment.

tude. In common hands, analysis stops at the species or the genus, and cannot rise to the order or the class. To distinguish birds from fishes, beasts from insects, limits the efforts of the vulgar observer of the face of nature. But Cuvier could trace the sublime unity, the universal type, the fontal Idea existing in the creative intelligence, which connects as one the mammoth and the snail. So, common observers can distinguish from each other the different varieties of religious society, and can rise no higher. Where one assembly worships with harmonies of music, fumes of incense, ancient liturgies, and a gorgeous ceremonial, and another listens to the unaided voice of a

a world where no two men are not as distin- | Our minds are steeped in imagery; and where guishable in their mental as in their physical the visible form is not, the impalpable spirit aspect; where every petty community has its escapes the notice of the unreflecting multiseparate system of civil government; where all that meets the eye, and all that arrests the ear, has the stamp of boundless and infinite variety! What are the harmonies of tone, of colour, and of form, but the result of contrasts -of contrasts, held in subordination to one pervading principle, which reconciles without confounding the component elements of the music, the painting, or the structure? In the physical works of God, beauty could have no existence without endless diversities. Why assume that in religious society-a work not less surely to be ascribed to the supreme author of all things-this law is absolutely reversed? Were it possible to subdue that innate tendency of the human mind, which single pastor, they can perceive and record compels men to differ in religious opinions the differences; but the hidden ties which and observances, at least as widely as on all unite them both escape such observation. All other subjects, what would be the results of appears as contrast, and all ministers to antisuch a triumph? Where would then be the pathy and discord. It is our belief that these free comparison, and the continual enlarge- things may be rightly viewed in a different ment of thought; where the self-distrusts which aspect, and yet with the most severe conforare the springs of humility, or the mutual de- mity to the divine will, whether as intimated pendencies which are the bonds of love? He by natural religion, or as revealed in holy who made us with this infinite variety in our scripture. We believe that, in the judgment intellectual and physical constitution, must of an enlightened charity, many Christian sohave foreseen, and foreseeing, must have in- cieties, who are accustomed to denounce each tended, a corresponding dissimilarity in the other's errors, will at length come to be reopinions of his creatures on all questions sub-garded as members in common of the one mitted to their judgment, and proposed for their acceptance. For truth is his law; and if all will profess to think alike, all must live in the habitual violation of it.

great and comprehensive church, in which diversities of forms are harmonized by an allpervading unity of spirit. For ourselves, at least, we should deeply regret to conclude that Zeal for uniformity attests the latent dis- we were aliens from that great Christian comtrusts, not the firm convictions of the zealot. monwealth of which the nuns and recluses In proportion to the strength of our self-reli- of the valley of Port-Royal were members, ance, is our indifference to the multiplication and members assuredly of no common excel. of suffrages in favour of our own judgment. lence.

IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND HIS ASSOCIATES.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1842.]

On the dawn of the day which, in the year | martyrdom. With a stately though halting 1534, the Church of Rome celebrated the feast gait, as one accustomed to military command, of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, a little company of men, whose vestments bespoke their religious character, emerged in solemn procession from the deep shadows cast by the towers of Notre Dame over the silent city below them. In a silence not less profound, except when broken by the chant of the matins appropriate to chat sacred season, they climbed the hill of martyrs, and descended into the crypt, which then ascertained the spot where the apostle of France had won the crown of

* Exercitia Spiritualla S. P. Ignatii Loyola, cum Verstone literali ex Autographo Hispanico præmittuntur R. P. JOANNIS ROOTHMEN, præpositi Generalis Societatis, Jesu, Litera Encyclia ad Patres et Fratres ejusdem Soietatis, de Spiritualium Exercitiorum S. P. N, Studio et Usu. Londini, typis C. Richards. 1837.

marched at their head a man of swarthy complexion, bald-headed and of middle stature, who had passed the meridian of life: his deepset eyes glowing as with a perennial fire, from beneath brows, which, had phrenology then been born, she might have portrayed in her loftiest style, but which, without her aid, announced a commission from on high to subjugate and to rule mankind. So majestic, indeed, was the aspect of Ignatius Loyola, that, during the sixteenth century few, if any of the books of his order appeared without the impress of that imperial countenance. Beside him in the chapel of St. Denys knelt another worshipper, whose manly bearing, buoyant step, clear blue eye, and finely-chiseled features, contrasted strangely with the solemnities in which he was

engaged. Then in early manhood, Francis Xavier united in his person the dignity befitting his birth as a grandee of Spain, and the grace which should adorn a page of the queen of Castile and Arragon. Not less incongruous with the scene in which they bore their parts, were the slight forms of the boy Alphonso Salmeron and of his bosom friend Jaygo Laynez, the destined successor of Ignatius in his spiritual dynasty. With them Nicholas Alphonso Bobadilla, and Simon Rodriguez-the first a teacher, the second a student of philosophyprostrated themselves before the altar, where ministered Peter Faber, once a shepherd in the mountains of Savoy, but now a priest in holy orders. By his hands was distributed to his associates the seeming bread, over which he had uttered words of more than miraculous efficacy; and then were lifted up their united voices, uttering, in low but distinct articulation, an oath, at the deep significance of which the nations might have trembled or rejoiced. Never did human lips pronounce a vow more religiously observed, or pregnant with results

more momentous.

at her shrine his secular weapons, performed there his nocturnal vigils, 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 gaberdine with prickly thorns, fasted to the verge of starvation, assumed the demeanour 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. Friendly hands dragged him from his hiding-place; and hands, in intention at least, not less friendly, recorded his feverish ravings. At one time he conversed with voices audible to no ear but his; at another, he sought to propitiate him before whom he trembled, by expiations which would have been more fitly offered to Moloch. Spiritual doctors ministered to his relief, but they prescribed in vain. Too simple for their subtilized perception was the simple truth, that in revealing himself to mankind in the character of a father, that awful Being has claimed as peculiarly his own the gentlest, the kindest, and the most confiding affections of our nature.

At the verge of madness Ignatius paused. That noble intellect was not to be whelmed beneath the tempests 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 eye of the worshipper. That ineffable mystery, which the author of the Athanasian creed has laboured to enunciate in words, was disclosed to him as an object not of faith but of actual sight. The past ages of the world were rolled back in his presence, and he beheld the material fabric of things rising into being, and perceived the motives which had prompted the exercise of the creative energy. 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 men to receive but as exercises of their belief, now 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. In a volume of fourscore leaves he attempted indeed to impart them; but, dark with excess of light, his words held the learned and the ignorant alike in speechless wonder.

Descended from an illustrious family, Ignatius had in his youth been a courtier and a cavalier, and if not a poet at least a cultivator of poetry. At the siege of Pampeluna his leg was broken, and, after the failure of mere vulgar leeches, was set by a touch from the hand of the prince of apostles. Yet St. Peter's therapeutic skill was less perfect than might have been expected from so exalted a chirurgeon; for a splinter still protruded through the skin, and the limb was shrunk and shortened. To regain his fair proportions, Ignatius had himself literally stretched on the rack; and expiated, by a long confinement to his couch, this singular experiment to reduce his refractory bones and sinews. Books of knighterrantry relieved the lassitude of sickness, and, when these were exhausted, he betook himself to a series of still more marvellous romances. In the legends of the Saints the disabled soldier discovered a new field of emulation and of glory. Compared with their self-conquests and their high rewards, the achievements and the renown of Roland and of Amadis waxed dim. Compared with the peerless damsels for whose smiles Paladins had fought and died, how transcendently glorious the image of feminine loveliness and angelic purity which had irradiated the hermit's cell and the path of the wayworn 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 mere 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 Ignatius returned to this sublunary scene worldly ambition. Nor were these vows un- with a mission not unmeet for an envoy from heeded by her to whom they were addressed. the empyrean world, of which he had thus be Environed in light, and clasping her infant to come a temporary denizen. He returned to her bosom, she revealed herself to the adoring establish on earth a theocracy, of which he gaze of her champion. At that heavenly should himself be the first administrator, and vision, all fantasies of worldly and sensual to which every tribe and kindred of men should delight, like exorcised demons, fled from his be subject. He returned no longer a sordid soul into an eternal exile. He rose, suspended | half-distracted anchorite, but, strange to tell, a

|

man distinguished not more by the gigantic | but enhance the wonder. To transmute promagnitude of his designs, than by the clear fligates into converts, by a process of which, good sense, the profound sagacity, the calm during any one of her revolutions round our perseverance, and the flexible address with planet, the moon is to witness the commencewhich he was to pursue them. History affords ment and the close, might perhaps seem like a no more perfect illustration how readily deliri- plagiarism from the academies of Laputa. ous enthusiasm and the shrewdness of the ex- But in his great, and indeed his only extant change may combine and harmonize in minds work, Ignatius Loyola is no dreamer. By of the heroic order. A Swedenborg-Franklin, force of an instinct with which such minds as reconciling in himself these antagonist pro- his alone are gifted, he could assume the chapensities, is no monster of the fancy. Iracter to which the shrewd, the practical, and On his restoration to human society, Ignatius the worldly-wise aspire, even when abandoning reappeared in the garb, and addressed himself himself to ecstasies which they are alike unto the occupations of other religious men. able to comprehend or to endure. His mind The first fruits of his labours was the book of resembled the body of his great disciple, which we have transcribed the title-page. It Francis Xavier, which, as he preached or was originally written in Spanish, and appeared | baptized, rose majestically towards the skies, in an inaccurate Latin version. By the order while his feet (the pious curiosity of his hearof the present pope, Loyola's manuscript, stillers ascertained the fact,) retained their firm remaining in the Vatican, has been again hold on the earth below. If the spiritual exertranslated. In this new form the book is com- cises were designed to excite, they were not mended to the devout study of the faithful by a less intended to control and to regulate, relibull of Pope Paul III., and by an encyclical gious sensibilities. To exalt the spirit above epistle from the present general of the order of terrestrial objects was scarcely more his aim, Jesus. To so august a sanction, slight indeed than to disenchant mankind of the self-deceits is the aid which can be given by the suffrage by which that exaltation is usually attempted. of northern heretics. Yet on this subject the The book, it is true, indicates a tone of feeling chair of Knox, if now filled by himself, would utterly removed from that which animates the not be very widely at variance with the throne gay and the busy scenes of life; but it could of St. Peter. The "Spiritual Exercises" form not have been written except by one accusa manual of what may be called "the act of tomed to observe those scenes with the keenconversion." It proposes a scheme of self- est scrutiny, and to study the actors in them discipline by which, in the course of four with the most profound discernment. To this weeks, that mighty work is to be accomplished. commendation must be added the praise (to In the first, the penitent is conducted through borrow terms but too familiar) of evangelical a series of dark retrospects to abase, and of orthodoxy. A Protestant synod might indeed gloomy prospects to alarm him. These ends have extracted from the pages of Ignatius obtained, he is during the next seven days to many propositions to anathematize; but they enrol himself-such is the military style of the could also have drawn from them much to book-in the army of the faithful, studying confirm the doctrines to which their confesthe sacred biography of the Divine Leader of sions had given such emphatic prominency. that elect host, and choosing with extreme If he yielded to the demigods of Rome what caution the plan of life, religious or secular, in we must regard as an idolatrous homage, it which he may be best able to tread in his would be mere prejudice to deny that his su steps, and to bear the standard emblematic at preme adoration was reserved for that awful once of suffering and of conquest. To sustain Being to whom alone it was due. If he asthe soldier of the cross in this protracted war-cribed to merely ritual expiations a value of fare, his spiritual eye is, during the third of his solitary weeks, to be fixed in a reverential scrutiny into that unfathomable abyss of wo, into which a descent was once made to rescue the race of Adam from the grasp of their mortal enemies; and then seven suns are to rise and set while the still secluded but now disenthralled spirit is to chant triumphant hallelujahs, elevating her desires heavenward, contemplating glories hitherto unimaginable, and mysteries never before revealed; till the sacred (xercises close with an absolute surrender of all the joys and interests of this sublunary state, as a holocaust, to be consumed by the undying flame of divine love on the altar of the regenerate heart.

which we believe them to be altogether destitute, yet were all his mighty powers held in the most earnest and submissive affiance in the divine nature, as revealed under the veil of human infirmity and of more than human suffering. After the lapse of two centuries, Philip Doddridge, than whom no man ever breathed more freely on earth the atmosphere of heaven, produced a work of which the Spiritual Exer cises might have afforded the model-so many are still the points of contact between those who, ranging themselves round the great object of Christianity as their common centre, occupy the most opposite positions in that expanded circle.

From the publication of the "Spiritual Exer He must have been deeply read in the na- cises" to the Vow of Montmartre, nine years ture of man, who should have predicted such elapsed. They wore away in pilgrimages, in first fruits as these from the restored health of feats of asceticism, in the working of miracles, the distracted visionary, who had alternately and in escapes all but miraculous, from dansounded the base strings of humility on earth, gers which the martial spirit of the saint, no and the living chords which vibrate with less than his piety, impelled him to incur. In spontaneous harmonies along the seventh the caverns of Monreza he had vowed to scale heavens. A closer survey of the book will | the heights of 'perfection' and it therefore be

hooved him thus to climb that obstinate emi- | traversing the Netherlands and England as a nence, in the path already trodden by all the beggar. Unheeded and despised as he sat at canonized and beatified heroes of the church. the feet of the learned, or solicited alms of the But he had also vowed to conduct his fellow-rich, he was still maturing in the recesses of pilgrims from the city of destruction to the his bosom designs more lofty than the highest land of Beulah. In prison and in shipwreck, to which the monarchs of the houses of Valois fainting with hunger or wasted with disease, or of Tudor had ever dared to aspire. In the his inflexible spirit still brooded over that University of Paris he at length found the bright, though as yet shapeless vision; until at means of carrying into effect the cherished length it assumed a coherent form as he knelt purposes of so many years. It was the heroic on the mount of Olives, and traced the last in- age of Spain, and the countrymen of Gonsalvo delible foot-print of the ascending Redeemer and Cortes lent a willing ear to counsels of of mankind. At that hallowed spot had ended daring on any field of adventure, whether sethe weary way of Him who had bowed the cular or spiritual. His companions in study heavens, and came down to execute on earth thus became his disciples in religion. Nor a mission of unutterable love and matchless were his the common-place methods of making self-denial; and there was revealed to the pro- converts. To the contemplative and the timid, phetic gaze of the future founder of the order he enjoined hardy exercises of active virtue. of Jesus, (no seer-like genius kindled by high To the gay and ardent, he appeared in a resolves,) the long line of missionaries who, spirit still more buoyant than their own. To animated by his example, and guided by his a debauchee, whom nothing else couid move, instructions, should proclaim that holy name he presented himself neck-deep in a pool of from the rising to the setting sun. It was in- frozen water, to teach the more impressively deed a futurity perceptible only to the tele- the duty of subduing the carnal appetites. To scopic eye of faith. At the mature age of an obdurate priest, he made a general confesthirty, possessing no language but his own, no sion of his own sins, with such agonies of rescience but that of the camp, and no literature morse and shame, as to break up, by force of beyond the biographies of Paladins, and of sympathy, the fountains of penitence in the saints, he became the self-destined teacher of bosom of the confessor. Nay, he even engaged the future teachers of the world. Hoping at billiards with a joyous lover of the game, against hope, he returned to Barcelona, and on condition that the defeated player should there, as the class-fellow of little children, com- serve his antagonist for a month; and the vicmenced the study of the first rudiments of the torious saint enforced the penalty by consignLatin tongue. ing his adversary a month of secluded devotion. Others yielded at once and without a struggle to the united influence of his sanctity and genius; and it is remarkable that, from these more docile converts, he selected, with but two exceptions, the original members of his infant order. Having performed the initiatory rite of the Spiritual Exercises, they all swore on the consecrated host in the crypt of St. Denys, to accompany their spiritual father on a mission to Palestine; or, if that should be impracticable, to submit themselves to the vicar of Christ, to be disposed of as missionaries at his pleasure.

Among the established facetiæ of the stage, are the distractions of dramatic Eloisas under the tutorship of their Abelards, in the attempt to conjugate Amo. Few play-wrights, probably, have been aware that the jest had its type, if not its origin, in the scholastic experiences of Ignatius Loyola. At the same critical point, and in the same manner, a malignant spirit arrested his advance in the grammar. On each successive inflection of the verb, corresponding elevations heavenwards were excited in his soul by the demon, who, assuming the garb of an angel of light, thus succeeded in disturbing his memory. To baffle his insidious enemy, the harassed scholar employed the pedagogue to make liberal use of that discipline of which who can ever forget the efficacy or the pain? The exorcism was complete. Amo, in all her affectionate moods, and changeful tenses, became familiar as household words. Thus Thomas à Kempis was made to speak intelligibly. Erasmus also revealed his hidden treasures of learning and wit, though ultimately exiled from the future schools of the Jesuits, for the same offence of having disturbed the thoughts of his devout reader. Energy won her accustomed triumphs, and, in the year 1528, he became a student of the Humanities, and of what was then called philosophy, at the University of Paris.

Of the seven decades of human life, the brightest and the best, in which other men achieve or contend for distinction, was devoted by Ignatius to the studies preparatory to his great undertaking. Grave professors examined him on their prælections, and, when these were over, he sought the means of subsistence by

Impetuous as had been the temper of Ignatius in early life, he had learned to be patient of the slow growth of great designs. Leaving his disciples to complete their studies at Paris under the care of Peter Faber, he returned to Spain to recruit their number, to mature his plans, and, perhaps, to escape from a too familiar intercourse with his future subjects In the winter of 1536, they commenced their pilgrimage to the eternal city. Xavier was their leader. Accomplished in all courtly exercises, he prepared for his journey by binding tight cords round his arms and legs, in holy revenge for the pleasure which their graceful agility had once afforded him; and pursued his way with Spartan constancy, till the corroded flesh closed obstinately over the ligatures. Miracle, the prompt handmaid of energies like his, burst the bands which no surgeon could extricate; and her presence was attested by the toils which his loosened limbs immediately endured in the menial service of his fellow travellers. At Venice they rejoined their leader, and there employed themselves in mi