“He” (Ignatius) “had already done much for God’s sake, and God now rendered it back to him with usury. A courtier, a man of pleasure, and a soldier, he had neither the time nor the will to gather knowledge from books. But the knowledge of man, the most difficult of all, was divinely revealed to him. The master who was to form so many masters, was himself formed by Divine illumination. He composed the _Spiritual Exercises_, a work which had a most important place in his life, and is powerfully reflected in the history of his disciples.” This quotation is from Crétineau Joly (vol i. p. 18), an author who _professes_ not to belong to the Society, but whose book was published under the patronage of the Jesuits, who, he says, opened to him all the depositories of unpublished letters and manuscripts in their principal convent, the Gesù, at Rome; he wrote also a virulent pamphlet against the great Pontiff Clement XIV., the suppressor of the Jesuits. Hence we consider ourselves fairly entitled to rank the few quotations we shall make from him as among those emanating from the writers that belong to the order; and we are confident that no Jesuit would ever think of repudiating Crétineau Joly. This author proceeds to state, that in the manuscript in which Father Jouvency narrates in elegant Latin those strange events, it is said—‘This light shed by the Divine will upon Ignatius shewed him openly and without veil the mystery of the adorable Trinity and other arcana of religion. He remained for eight days as if deprived of life. What he witnessed during this ecstatic trance, as well as in many other visions which he had during life, no one knows. He had indeed committed these celestial visions to paper, but shortly before his death he burned the book containing them, lest it should fall into unworthy hands. A few pages, however, escaped his precautions, and from them one can easily conjecture that he must have been from day to day loaded with still greater favours. Chiefly was he sweetly ravished in contemplating the dignity of Christ the Lord, and his inconceivable charity towards the human race. As the mind of Ignatius was filled with military ideas, he figured to himself Christ as a general fighting for the Divine glory, and calling on all men to gather under his standard. Hence sprang his desire to form an army of which Jesus should be the chief and commander, the standard inscribed—‘_Ad majorem Dei gloriam_.’