Pampeluna. A proud noble, an aspiring soldier, a graceful courtier,
an ardent and daring gallant was metamorphosed by that stroke into the
zealot whose brain engendered and brought forth the mighty Society of
Jesus. His story is a familiar one: how, in the solitude of his
sick-room, a change came over him, upheaving, like an earthquake, all the
forces of his nature; how, in the cave of Manresa, the mysteries of
Heaven were revealed to him; how he passed from agonies to transports,
from transports to the calm of a determined purpose. The soldier gave
himself to a new warfare. In the forge of his great intellect, heated,
but not disturbed by the intense fires of his zeal, was wrought the
prodigious enginery whose power has been felt to the uttermost confines
of the world.

Loyola's training had been in courts and camps: of books he knew little
or nothing. He had lived in the unquestioning faith of one born and bred
in the very focus of Romanism; and thus, at the age of about thirty,
his conversion found him. It was a change of life and purpose, not of
belief. He presumed not to inquire into the doctrines of the Church.
It was for him to enforce those doctrines; and to this end he turned all
the faculties of his potent intellect, and all his deep knowledge of
mankind. He did not aim to build up barren communities of secluded monks,
aspiring to heaven through prayer, penance, and meditation, but to subdue
the world to the dominion of the dogmas which had subdued him; to
organize and discipline a mighty host, controlled by one purpose and one
mind, fired by a quenchless zeal or nerved by a fixed resolve, yet
impelled, restrained, and directed by a single master hand. The Jesuit
is no dreamer: he is emphatically a man of action; action is the end of
his existence.

It was an arduous problem which Loyola undertook to solve,--to rob a man