I would advise you, by all means, to attend to two or three of their
public disputations, in order to be informed both of the manner and the
substance of those scholastic exercises. Pray remember to go to all those
kind of things. Do not put it off, as one is too apt to do those things
which one knows can be done every day, or any day; for one afterward
repents extremely, when too late, the not having done them.

But there is another (so-called) religious society, of which the minutest
circumstance deserves attention, and furnishes great matter for useful
reflections. You easily guess that I mean the society of 'les R. R. P. P.
Jesuites', established but in the year 1540, by a Bull of Pope Paul III.
Its progress, and I may say its victories, were more rapid than those of
the Romans; for within the same century it governed all Europe; and, in
the next, it extended its influence over the whole world. Its founder was
an abandoned profligate Spanish officer, Ignatius Loyola; who, in the
year 1521, being wounded in the leg at the 'siege of Pampeluna, went mad
from the smart of his wound, the reproaches of his conscience, and his
confinement, during which he read the lives of the Saints. Consciousness
of guilt, a fiery temper, and a wild imagination, the common ingredients
of enthusiasm, made this madman devote himself to the particular service
of the Virgin Mary; whose knight-errant he declared himself, in the very
same form in which the old knight-errants in romances used to declare
themselves the knights and champions of certain beautiful and
incomparable princesses, whom sometimes they had, but oftener had not,
seen. For Dulcinea del Toboso was by no means the first princess whom her
faithful and valorous knight had never seen in his life. The enthusiast
went to the Holy Land, from whence he returned to Spain, where he began
to learn Latin and philosophy at three-and-thirty years old, so that no
doubt but he made great progress in both. The better to carry on his mad