The first few years of the generalship of Acquaviva were peaceful. A friendly Pope, Gregory XIII., occupied the Roman see, and the Society increased in numbers and prestige. The Gesù, the famous metropolitan church of the Jesuits, was opened by the Pope in 1583; the Gregorian calendar was very largely framed by one of their members, the learned Clavius of Bavaria. But Gregory died in 1585, and Acquaviva prepared for a struggle with the papacy. The stern, despotic Sixtus V. had now received the tiara, and all Rome expected him to clip the wings of the soaring Society. Acquaviva thought it would be prudent to disarm the Pope and disavow the thirst for power. He offered to resign control of the Roman seminary. Sixtus refused the offer, and awaited his opportunity; and in the following year, 1586, the flash and roar of the gathering clouds in Spain led him to intervene. The Spanish fathers had, as I said, looked upon the generalship almost as an hereditary right, and had resented the election of Mercurian and Acquaviva. But this feeling is so wholly opposed to the religious ideal of the Society that we at once suspect a serious decay of the character of the Spanish Jesuits, and we find some remarkable evidence of it. The official history of the Society in Spain does not attempt to conceal that under Borgia and Mercurian there had been widespread decadence,[9] and I have shown how this was due to material prosperity and the lack of serious work and heretical neighbours. We have, however, a more singular and ample account of this decadence. One of the most brilliant of the Spanish Jesuits, Mariana, the famous advocate of regicide, was moved to discredit the Roman authorities by showing the corruption into which they had allowed his own province to fall, and his _Tratado del Govierno de la Compañia de Jesus_ gives us a very candid picture of the Spanish houses. The work was, naturally, not published by Mariana. Like so many documents in the Society, it was intended for private circulation in manuscript, but it was found amongst his papers by a bishop whom the king appointed to examine them, and the only ground for the claim of certain Jesuits that it is partly spurious is that they dislike its revelations. The decrees of the Society itself confirm the substance of its charges, and the temper and spirit of the book are quite in keeping with its Jesuit authorship.