Of all the occupations to which man can devote the earlier years of his life, none probably leaves on the character an impress so deep and indelible as the profession of arms. In no other calling is the whole range of our sympathetic affections, whether kindly or the reverse, called into such habitual and active exercise, nor does any other stimulate the mere intellectual powers with a force so irresistible when once they are effectually aroused from their accustomed torpor. Loyola was a soldier to the last breath he drew, a general whose authority none might question, a comrade on whose cordiality all might rely, sustaining all the dangers and hardships he exacted from his followers, and in his religious campaigns a strategist of consummate skill and most comprehensive survey. It was his maxim that war ought to be aggressive, and that even an inadequate force might be wisely weakened by detachments on a distant service, if the prospect of success was such that the vague and perhaps exaggerated rumor of it would strike terror into nearer foes and animate the hopes of irresolute allies. To conquer Lutheranism by converting to the faith of Rome the barbarous or half-civilized nations of the earth was, therefore, among the earliest of his projects. Though not in books, yet in the far nobler school of active and especially of military life, Loyola had learned the great secret of government--at least, of his government. It was that the social affections, if concentrated within a well-defined circle, possess an intensity and endurance unrivaled by those passions of which self is the immediate object. He had the sagacity to perceive that emotions like those with which a Spartan or a Jew had yearned over the land and the institutions of their fathers--emotions stronger than appetite, vanity, ambition, avarice, or death itself--might be kindled in the members of his order; if he could detect and grasp those mainsprings of human action of which the Greek and the Hebrew legislators had obtained the mastery. Nor did he seek them in vain. Some unconscious love of power, a mind bewildered by many gross superstitions and theoretical errors, and perhaps some tinge of insanity, may be ascribed to Ignatius Loyola; but no dispassionate reader of his writings or of his life will question his integrity, or deny to him the praise of a devotion at once sincere, habitual, and profound. It is not to the glory of the reformers to depreciate the name of their greatest antagonist, or to think meanly of him to whom more than any other man it is owing that the Reformation was stayed and the Church of Rome rescued from her impending doom.