John the material alliances he had promised him, if he would break with England and Holland. But he had little to offer, and the Protestants were now alarmed; and Possevin, Good, Warsevicz, and Professor Nicolai were politely ushered from the country. Of the foreign missions which will enrage us more fully when the Jesuits are firmly established, a few words must suffice. In India the use of the civil power to support their preaching continued to augment the number, and restrain the quality, of the converts. The Japanese mission made slow progress, and was extinguished in some of the large towns. The gates of China were politely opened to admit a Portuguese legation (containing disguised Jesuits), but, after an interview at Canton, politely closed again by the wary mandarins. The settlement in Brazil was deeply injured by the diseases which European Christians brought to South America, terrifying the natives; and a serious loss was sustained in 1570, when a ship conveying forty Jesuits to Brazil was captured by "Huguenot pirates." They were all slain. Florida, Mexico, and Peru were visited for the first time in this decade, and a few fathers laid the foundations of new missions. On the whole, the missionary record under Borgia and Mercurian does not fulfil the earlier promise. Mercurian died in the summer of 1580, just forty years after the establishment of the Society. Assuredly a remarkable advance had been made in those four decades. The ten Jesuits had become a formidable army of 5000 _socii_ (including novices and lay-brothers), fighting heresy in the boudoirs of queens and the market-places of Germany, educating hundreds of thousands of youths, all over Europe, in a fanatical zeal for the papacy, extending its influence through the laity by means of sodalities and confraternities, pouring out a vast literature, from the blistering pamphlet to the ponderous folio volume, relating to the great religious controversy, wearing the garb of the beggar or the silk of the noble as occasion needed, speaking a hundred tongues, and sending scores of men yearly to lands whence they would never return and where fever or the axe awaited them. They were the backbone of the counter-Reformation, formidable alike by the simple and austere devotion of some, the brilliance and learning of others, and the unscrupulousness of yet others in the service of the Church. And every man, and every movement of every man, was registered in that central bureau at Rome, where four sagacious heads directed the strategy and tactics of this planet-scattered regiment.