Such were the labours of the first Jesuits during the generalship of Ignatius, and it remains only to close the career of their able leader. The varied story of success and failure, the showers of glowing testimonials and bitter diatribes, the heroism of some and the frailty of others, kept him alternately elated or depressed to the end. He must have seen that the first fervour could not be maintained, and that opposition became more serious as the Society grew. It had now nearly a thousand members scattered over the world, and a hundred houses and colleges. The figures are misleading, however, as there were only thirty-five professed fathers and only two professed houses; many of the so-called colleges had no pupils and were little more than names. Ignatius had twice attempted to resign his office in the last few years; and there was much to distress him. He had hardly composed the trouble in Portugal, in 1552, when Lainez gave him anxiety. Lainez, who was made Provincial of Italy when Brouet was sent to Paris, complained that the general was robbing his colleges of their best teachers for the sake of Rome. Ignatius dictated to his secretary an angry letter. "He bids me tell you," says the scribe, "to attend to your own charge ... and you need not give him advice about this until he asks it." In the next year (1553) he had a grave quarrel with Cardinal Caraffa. The Jesuits of Sicily had admitted a youth against his parents' wishes, and Caraffa, to whom the mother appealed, ordered Ignatius to give up the youth. He appealed to the Pope, and got Caraffa's verdict cancelled. When, two years afterwards, Caraffa became Pope Paul IV., Ignatius remembered his momentary triumph with concern, and there were grave faces in the Jesuit house. Paul III. had died in 1549. His successor Julius III. had been, as the previous record shows, very generous to the Jesuits, though funds had fallen very low in Rome, owing to the Reformation, and Ignatius had great work to keep alive the German college he had founded. Julius died in 1555, and it is said by the Jesuit writers that five cardinals voted for Ignatius himself at the next conclave. Marcellus, the next Pope, lived less than a month, and then Caraffa occupied the see. To Caraffa the Spaniards were "barbarians," and the Jesuits were Spaniards. But he postponed the struggle which he was to have with the Society, and received Ignatius courteously. Work, austerity, and anxiety had at length seriously impaired the strong frame of Ignatius, and he began to prepare for the end. It is marvellous how he lived to see his sixty-fifth year, and continued to control the mighty struggle of his Society against its various enemies. With the opening of 1556, however, he retired to a great extent from the labours of his office, and spent his days chiefly in prayer. He died in the early morning of 31st July 1556, and the struggle for the succession began. FOOTNOTES: