A learned and elegant work, which narrates the rise and progress of Christian Schools, from the sixtieth year of the Christian era onwards, ends its long journey at the date of the Reformation, and takes leave of its varied subject, and of its lines of Christian Scholars, in these words: "We leave them at the moment when the episcopacy was recovering its ancient jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical seminaries, and when a vast majority of the secular schools of Catholic Christendom were passing into the hands of a great Religious Order, raised up, as it would seem, with the special design of consolidating anew a system of Christian education."[1] Two centuries and a half later, when the Society of Jesus had run a long course, from the date of the Reformation which had seen it rise, up to the eve of the Revolution which beheld it extinct, a General of the Order, Ignatius Visconti, addressing the Provincial Superiors over the world, takes note of a new stage in the process of educational development: "The taste for letters now," he says, "is more keen and exquisite, and the number of literary schools has increased so much, that ours may no longer appear so necessary. For I may mention the fact that, besides our schools of polite letters, there were, for a long while, either none or very few. So that parents were forced to send their children to us, even if otherwise they did not want it."[2] This refers in a quiet way to what Leopold von Ranke states with more emphasis. Speaking of Grammar classes, the German historian says: "Here also the Jesuits succeeded to admiration. It was found that young people gained more with them in six months, than with other teachers in two years. Even Protestants removed their children from distant gymnasia to confide them to the care of the Jesuits."[3] Ranke narrates in the same place how it was "toward the universities above all that the efforts of the Jesuits were directed." And he describes what the results were in Germany. D'Alembert writes of their progress in France: "Hardly had the Company of Jesus begun to show itself in France, than it met with difficulties without number, in the endeavor to establish itself. The universities especially made the greatest efforts to keep the new-comers out. It is difficult to decide whether this opposition is a praise or a condemnation of the Jesuits who stood it. They announced gratuitous teaching; they counted among their number celebrated and learned men, superior perhaps to those whom the universities could boast of," etc.[4]