Alas for such gratitude! How many families have had cause to deplore it! How many children have been reduced to beggary by it! How many ancient and noble houses has it precipitated from the height of affluence and splendour into the depth of poverty and wretchedness! Who can number the crimes committed in the madness of despair occasioned by the loss of the family inheritance? That the parent may suffer a few years less of purgatory, the child has been too often condemned to misery in this life, and perhaps to eternal punishment in the next. But all this is of no consequence. The man who has been led thus to disregard one of his most sacred parental duties, in order to found a Jesuits’ college or endow a professorship, will be saved, because they promise him—“In every college of our Society, let masses be celebrated once a week _for ever_, for its founder and benefactor, whether dead or alive. At the beginning of every month, all the priests who are in the college ought to offer the same sacrifice for them; and a solemn mass, with a commemorative feast, shall be celebrated on the anniversary of the donation, and a wax candle offered to the donor or his descendants.” Besides this, “the donor shall have three masses while alive, and three masses after his death, by all the priests of the Society, with the prayers of all its members; so that he is made partaker of all the good works which are done, by the grace of God, not only in the college which he has endowed, but in the whole Society.”[37] By such allurements do these crafty priests, with diabolical cunning, snatch princely fortunes from the credulous and superstitious believers. And so assiduous and successful were they even at the very beginning, that, only thirteen years after the establishment of the order, during Loyola’s lifetime, they already possessed upwards of a hundred colleges very largely and richly endowed.