We cannot examine with equal freedom all the chronicles of early Jesuit activity, and must be content to cull from the pages of the _Historia Societatis Jesu_, the first section of which is written by Father Orlandini, such facts as may enable us to form a balanced judgment of the Society under Ignatius. Italy was, naturally, the first and chief theatre of their labours, and in the course of a few years they spread from the turbulent cities of Sicily to the foot of the Alps. I have already described the work of Ignatius at Rome, and need add only that, as Orlandini tells us, he was one of the most urgent in pressing the reluctant Pope to "reform" the Roman Inquisition, or to equip it with the dread powers of the Spanish tribunal. At the very time when he was devising pleas for toleration in Protestant and pagan lands, he was urging that in Italy and Portugal there should be set up the most inhuman instrument of intolerance that civilisation has ever known. The psychology of his attitude is simple; he was convinced that he was asking tolerance for truth and intolerance for untruth. The liberal-minded Romans were not persuaded of the justice of his distinction, and the opposition to the Society increased. The hostility, which at times went the length of breaking Jesuit windows, is ascribed by his biographers chiefly to his zeal for the conversion of prostitutes. He founded a large home for these women, and would often follow them to their haunts in the _piazze_ and lead them himself to St. Martha's House. On the whole, his great philanthropic services and personal austerity secured respect for his Society at Rome, and it prospered there until his later years. In the south of Italy the Society met little opposition in the early years. Bobadilla had done some good work in troubled Calabria before the Society was founded, and within the next ten years colleges were opened at Messina (1548), Palermo (1549), and Naples (1551). The poet Tasso was one of the first students of the Naples college. It was in the north that the more arduous work had to be done. The seeds of the Reformation were wafted over the Alps and found a fertile soil in the cities of the Renaissance. Hardly anywhere else were monks and clergy so corrupt and ignorant, and nowhere was there so much familiarity with the immorality of the Vatican system. Rome itself lived on this corruption and regarded it with indulgence, but in the university towns of the north educated men, and even women, who almost remembered the lives of Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., Julius II., and Leo X., were but provoked to smile when they were exhorted to cling to the "Vicar of Christ."