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It was the prayer of Ignatius Loyola that his order should be persecuted, and his desire has been most literally fulfilled, for the Jesuits have suffered almost uninterrupted persecution, not at the hands of Protestants only, but of the Roman Catholic Church itself in successive ages.
Duplessis-Bochart presented two pictures, one representing the Blessed Virgin, and the other the Holy Family. De Castillon, seignior of the Island of Orleans, offered four small pictures, one of St. Ignace de Loyola, of St. François Xavier, of St. Stanislas de Kostka, and of St. Louis de Gonzagne, and also a large engraving of Notre Dame.
You were then but a child, you are scarcely yet a woman; yet have I not given to your intellect the strong food on which the statesmen of Florence fed their pupil-princes, or the noble Jesuits the noble men who were destined to extend the secret empire of the imperishable Loyola?"
It was written by a very holy member of that celebrated congregation, the author concealing his own name under that of his Orders which makes use of the book almost in the same way as the Jesuits make use of the Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola." I reminded him that in his Philothea he recommends people to have a living Director.
It was a true instinct which led S. Ignatius Loyola to pray on behalf of the Order which he founded that it might be hated by the world. "Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you.... If ye were of the world, the world would love his own." If the world does not hate the Church it is not because the world has become Christian, but because worldliness has taken possession of the Church.
Let us not suppose too quickly that we are more nearly allied to Luther or Loyola because their figures appeal to us more. If at present our admiration goes out again to the ardently pious, and to spiritual extremes, it is partly because our unstable time requires strong stimuli.
Between the Spain of Quixote and the France of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, lies something deeper than time. Descartes and Gassendi had lived in France, while, on the other hand, the seed of Saint Ignatius Loyola lay germinating in the Spain of Cervantes. A French journalist who visited my house during the summer, remarked: "The ideas were great in the French Revolution; it was not the men."
His habit and his white band show him to be an ecclesiastic; and his begging, which he does very earnestly, proves him to be of a mendicant order; which, added to his flattery and insinuation, make him supposed to be a Jesuit, and have acquired him the name of Loyola. I must not omit too, that when he breaks wind he smells exactly like the Sultan.
This conviction, however, took a peculiar form in his mind. His Essays show how widely he had sympathised with many forms of the religious sentiment. He wrote with enthusiasm of the great leaders of the Roman Catholic Church; of Hildebrand and St. Francis, and even of Ignatius Loyola; and yet his enthusiasm does not blind him to the merits of Martin Luther, or Baxter, or Wesley, or Wilberforce.
Dominic are the very soul and spirit of the middle ages, its masters and teachers, the former a living expression of all the ardent, charitable faith of the humble, and the other defending dogma and fixing doctrines for the intelligent and the powerful, on the other hand Ignatius de Loyola appeared on the threshold of modern times to save the tottering heritage by accommodating religion to the new developments of society, thereby ensuring it the empire of the world which was about to appear.
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