garb of Mandarins, superintending the observatory at Pekin. They
were to be found, spade in hand, teaching the rudiments of
agriculture to the savages of Paraguay. Yet, whatever might be
their residence, whatever might be their employment, their spirit
was the same, entire devotion to the common cause, implicit
obedience to the central authority. None of them had chosen his
dwelling place or his vocation for himself. Whether the Jesuit
should live under the arctic circle or under the equator, whether
he should pass his life in arranging gems and collating
manuscripts at the Vatican or in persuading naked barbarians in
the southern hemisphere not to eat each other, were matters which
he left with profound submission to the decision of others. If he
was wanted at Lima, he was on the Atlantic in the next fleet. If
he was wanted at Bagdad, he was toiling through the desert with
the next caravan. If his ministry was needed in some country
where his life was more insecure than that of a wolf, where it
was a crime to harbour him, where the heads and quarters of his
brethren, fixed in the public places, showed him what he had to
expect, he went without remonstrance or hesitation to his doom.
Nor is this heroic spirit yet extinct. When, in our own time, a
new and terrible pestilence passed round the globe, when, in some
great cities, fear had dissolved all the ties which hold society
together, when the secular clergy had deserted their flocks, when
medical succour was not to he purchased by gold, when the
strongest natural affections had yielded to the love of life,
even then the Jesuit was found by the pallet which bishop and
curate, physician and nurse, father and mother, had deserted,
bending over infected lips to catch the faint accents of
confession, and holding up to the last, before the expiring
penitent, the image of the expiring Redeemer.