This man had nine children, some in infancy, and all under age, whom he left in the wide world unprotected, to enter the Society. And the angels and saints ought to praise God for this! Alas for the moral blindness of perverted human nature! Loyola again wrote to him, saying that he accepted him as his brother, but that, before he could be admitted into the noviciate, he must settle all his temporal affairs, and have nothing more to do with the world; meanwhile, until he was ready to enter the Society, to _keep his intention a secret_. Borgia was admitted into the house of probation in 1548, and from that moment he became a bigoted fanatic, whose greatest happiness consisted in lacerating his body. Macaulay says, in an article in the _Edinburgh Review_, “that it is making penitence with him to listen to the recital of his flagellations and his self-inflicted punishments of all kinds.” He had so destroyed his constitution by this absurd way of trying to please God, that he never had a single day of good health, and was even once threatened with a gangrene over his whole body. Such was the man appointed Vicar-General, and afterwards chief of the order. He had no wish for the honour, considered the office a _burden_, and we believe he was sincere in his humility. The first battle he had to fight was against the Holy See itself. Almost contemporaneously with his nomination, a Dominican friar ascended the Papal throne, under the name of Pius V. A more bigoted, fanatical, cruel, and sanguinary man never existed. Brought up under the wing of the Inquisition, he contracted a sort of blind passion for that bloody tribunal, and never felt so happy as when he heard of some barbarous cruelties inflicted upon the heretics, or when some hecatombs of these accursed enemies of Popery were sacrificed at the altar of his revenge, or when some new instrument of torture was invented against them. Suffice it to say, that when he sent his general, Santafiore, to fight against the French Protestants, he commanded him in the most peremptory manner to take no Huguenot prisoner, but to put them one and all to the sword; and because Santafiore had not rigorously executed his commands, he reproached him in the most bitter manner. And when that monster of cruelty, the Duke of Alva, had spread death and desolation over the entire of the Netherlands, 18,000 of the inhabitants of which he boasted of having delivered up into the hands of the executioners, so pleased was Pius with his deeds, that he sent him the consecrated hat and sword, as marks of his approval.[126] Can this, then, be the religion of Christ? Is it for a moment possible that this should be the true religion, this which erects upon its altars the statues of such monsters of iniquity, and impiously calls them saints, to be worshipped in place of God the Lord? And among the greatest of these modern saintships stands forth the name of Pius V.! This Pope, a most rigorous observer