voices, uttering, in low but distinct articulation, a vow, at the deep significance of which the nations might have well rejoiced. Never did human lips pronounce a vow more religiously observed, or pregnant with results more momentous.

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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. Books of knight-errantry relieved the lassitude of sickness, and when these were exhausted, he betook himself to pious books. In the lives of the Saints the disabled soldier discovered a new field of emulation and of glory. Compared with their self-conquest and their high rewards, the achievements and the renown of Roland and of Amadis waxed dim. pared 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. 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. He rose, suspended 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.

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 so beautifully enunciated 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.

On his restoration to human society, Ignatius reappeared in the garb, and addressed himself to the

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occupations of other religious men. The first fruit of his labors was the book of "Spiritual Exercises." It was originally written in Spanish, and appeared in a Latin version. By the order of the present Pope, Loyola's manuscript, still remaining in the Vatican, has been again translated. In this new form the book is commended to the devout study of the faithful by a bull of Pope Paul III., and by an Encyclical Epistle from the present General of the Order of Jesus.

From the publication of the "Spiritual Exercises" to the vow of Montmartre, nine years elapsed. They wore away in pilgrimages, in the working of miracles, and in escapes all but miraculous, from dangers which the martial spirit of the saint, no less than his piety, impelled him to incur. In the caverns of Manresa he had vowed to scale the heights of "perfection," and it therefore behooved him thus to climb that obstinate eminence, in the path already trodden by all the canonized and beatified heroes of the Church. But he had also vowed to conduct his fellow-pilgrims from the city of destruction to the land of Beulah. In prison and in shipwreck, fainting with hunger or wasted with disease. his inflexible spirit still meditated over that bright, though as yet shapeless vision; until at length it assumed a coherent form as he

knelt on the Mount of Olives, and traced the last indelible foot-print of the ascending Redeemer of mankind. At that hallowed spot had ended the weary way of Him who had bowed the heavens, and came down to execute on earth a mission of unutterable and matchless self-denial; and there was revealed to the prophetic gaze of the future founder of the Order of Jesus, the long line of missionaries who, animated by his example and guided by his instructions, should proclaim that holy Name from the rising to the setting sun. At the mature age of thirty, possessing no language but his own, no science but that of the camp, and no literature beyond the biographies of Saints, he became the self-destined teacher of the future teachers of the world. Hoping against hope, he returned to Barcelona, and there, as the class-fellow of little children, commenced the study of the first rudiments of the Latin tongue.

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 traversing the Netherlands and Italy as a beggar. Unheeded and despised as

he sat at the feet of the learned, or solicited alms of the rich, he was still maturing in the recesses of his bosom designs more. lofty than the highest to which the monarchs of the houses of Valois or of Tudor had ever dared to aspire. In the University of Paris he at length found the means of carrying into effect the cherished purposes of so many years. It was the heroic age of Spain, and the countrymen of Gonsalvo and Cortez lent a willing ear to counsels of daring on any field of adventure, whether secular or spiritual. His companions in study thus became his disciples in religion. Nor were his the commonplace methods of making converts. To the contemplative and the timid, he enjoined hardy exercises of active virtue. To the gay and ardent, he appeared in a spirit still more buoyant than their own. To a debauchee, whom nothing else could move, he presented himself neck-deep in a pool of frozen water, to teach the more impressively the duty of subduing the carnal appetites. Nay, he even engaged at billiards with a joyous lover of the game, on condition that the defeated player should serve his antagonist for a month; and the victorious saint enforced the penalty by consigning his adversary to a month of secluded devotion. Others yielded at once and without a struggle to the united influence of his sanctity and