And then, again, around those two centres which mingle themselves in one--the Papacy and the general council--and which represent so forcibly, in the face of the precocious divisions of Protestantism, the grand and living unity of the church of Jesus Christ, what astonishing fecundity for good, what varied resources, what fruitful germination of men and deeds! What souls, those great saints of the sixteenth century, recruited from among all ranks of society, and to whom Providence seems to have confided the mission of replying by some beneficent institution to all the attacks and all the negations of Protestantism! Would that, then, be a picture wanting in grandeur, where a competent artist--wishing to glorify in the sixteenth century not the warlike Reformation which rent asunder without remorse the ancient and majestic unity of Christendom, but the peaceful and fruitful reform which multiplied, according to the needs of a much troubled and suffering age, grand inspirations and magnanimous self-sacrifices--should group around the living centre of the church Ignatius Loyola and his brave companions, the pastor Pascal Baylon and the grand nobleman Francis Borgia, St. Philip Neri and St. Camillus of Lelli, St. Charles Borromeo in the midst of the plague at Milan and St. Francis of Sales evangelizing the populations of Chablais? And yet this enumeration must be limited to the names of the more illustrious only, and to works the most considerable. Now, in these names are found truly personified the inspirations which constitute, in its plenitude, the veritable spirit of Christianity. First, the spirit of zeal and apostleship. Those who have seen the frescoes of the church of St. Ignatius at Rome remember with what just pride a Jesuit painter has represented the triumphs of the first fathers of his company over heresy and infidelity. {66} And unless blinded by incurable prejudices, what a striking comparison can one make between Melanchthon, the disciple of Luther, and that student of the Paris University, the friend of St. Ignatius--that St. Francis Xavier who, setting out for the Indies in 1541 and dying in 1552, had converted, by himself alone, more heathen in a dozen years than all the Protestant missionaries united have been able to convert in a century; that man whose life would seem but a legend of olden times, were it not authenticated by most unexceptionable documents, and had it not appeared in the sixteenth century, which is far less the age of enthusiasm than that of criticism--that man, in fine, to whom a Protestant, Baldeus, has had the impartiality to render a splendid eulogy, closing with that apostrophe so _naïve_ and nearly as honorable to the writer as to the hero, "Would to God that, having been what you were, you might be of us!"