=The Order.=--The remarkable spread of Protestantism, however, was not to go on unchallenged. Already before the rupture of the Church, the need of a better-educated clergy had been acknowledged. We have seen that Luther and the Reformers laid great stress upon the education of the young as a means of propagating the new faith, and they had employed this means with great success. It is not to be gathered from this that the Roman Church had been unmindful of her duty in the training of the young. It has already been shown that the Church maintained education from the beginning of the Christian era down through the Middle Ages, that she never slackened in her zeal for this work, and that she held it to be her right and duty, as she does to this day, to train the young. At this very time she was maintaining many schools. But the "Order of Jesus" was destined to systematize education in such a degree as the Church had never witnessed. It has been claimed that the founding of the "Society of Jesus" was a "Counter-Reformation," the purpose of which was to check the growth of Protestantism. Whatever may have been the effect of its work in this direction, it seems clear that such was not the purpose for which it was organized. Schwickerath shows that it is doubtful if the founder of the Jesuit order had ever heard the name of the German Reformer. He says,[63] "The Papal Letters and the Constitutions assign as the special object of the Society: 'The progress of souls in a good life and knowledge of religion; the propagation of faith by public preaching, the Spiritual Exercises and works of charity, and particularly the instruction of youth and ignorant persons in the Christian religion.'" It cannot be denied, whatever the original purpose of the Society, that it not only checked the onward march of Protestantism, but it even restored many provinces and communities to their fealty to the Mother Church. How well the last clause of the admonition above quoted was carried out will be seen when we remember that the Jesuits originated the most successful educational system of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, a system having a definite end in view, and whose adherents by indomitable energy, by self-sacrifice, by oneness of purpose, secured remarkable success. Let us turn our attention to the founding of the "Order."