"They were to take, besides, a vow of special obedience to the head of the Church for the time being, devoting themselves, without condition or remuneration, to do his pleasure, and to go to any part of the world to which he should see fit to send them.... The essential duties of the new order were to be three: preaching in the first place; secondly, the guidance of souls through confession; and thirdly, the education of the young." Surely this is a wise scheme, to prepare the kingdoms of the earth and subdue them, not to their Divine master, but to their temporal, and, through their temporal, to themselves. Their founder, Ignatius Loyola, was one of the most remarkable men of the world. His life is too well known to admit of our dwelling upon any of its incidents. He died first General of his order, 1556, and was canonised by Gregory XV. in 1622. Although the Jesuits were not conspicuous as patrons of art--nor has sacred art done much for them--yet the gorgeous pencil of Rubens, of a more material than spiritual splendour, has to a considerable degree brought them within pictorial notice and celebrity. Mrs Jameson thinks that no portrait was taken of their founder during his life. We are surprised she does not notice that wondrously fine portrait at Hampton Court, by Titian. In the histories of religious orders, it is a striking fact that the founders never failed to unite themselves with one or more congenial spirit, ready to co-operate with them, and doubtless, as they thought, by a Divine appointment. As St Francis and St Dominick, different as they were in individual character, had the one great sympathy under which they met, embraced, and then parted--as for one end to divide the world between them--so did Ignatius Loyola find in Francis Xavier a friend and associate, and subsequently in Francis Borgia, a no less willing disciple. One is perfectly astonished at reading accounts of the entire devotion of the whole man to the law of obedience, and the more than satisfaction, the joy, at being selected to suffering and death. It had been the dream of Francis Xavier to die a martyr in the Indies for the conversion of mankind; and when chosen to that end by Ignatius,-- "When the clearer sense and approaching accomplishment of those dark intimations were disclosed to him, passionate sobs attested the rapture which his tongue was unable to speak. He fell on his knees before Ignatius, kissed the feet of the holy father, repaired his tattered cassock, and, with no other provision than his breviary, left Rome on the 15th March 1540, for Lisbon, his destined port of embarkation for the East."