While painters and sculptors and architects and poets during the Renaissance period were creating masterpieces that were to influence all succeeding generations, a Spanish soldier, using men as his material, created a human masterpiece for the accomplishment of great purposes that was destined to be as vital and enduring as any of the supreme achievements of the time. As Raphael used color and Michelangelo marble, and Leonardo da Vinci the original ideas of an inventive genius of first rank, Ignatius Loyola formed men's wills to a great creative end that was destined to influence not only Europe but every continent on the globe perhaps more than any other creation of the time. The Company of Jesus, as he called it--and he liked to add the epithet little--the band of trained soldiers whose motto was to be "For the Greater Glory of God" (_Ad Major em Dei Gloriam_) and whose purposes were to be as various as all the activities that can be included under such a standard, came to be within half a century after his death the most powerful body of intellectual men in their influence over mankind that the world has ever seen. It was not so much a deliberate creation as a Providential formation, gradually finding its place in the world under the guiding genius of a great soul living on after the death of the body it had informed. Born in Spain in the Castle of Loyola the year before Columbus discovered America, the youngest of eleven children, Ignatius until his thirtieth year was a venturous chivalric soldier. Wounded at the siege of Pamplona by the French in 1521, when his leg healed in bad position, he had it rebroken, bearing the awful pain in those pre-anaesthetic days rather than have his pride annoyed by deformity. During the enforced idleness he read, after exhausting all the other reading {207} of the place, especially the romances of chivalry, a life of Christ and lives of various saints, particularly that of St. Francis of Assisi, and came to the conclusion that life was only worth living when lived in imitation of the God Man. Amidst many almost incredible difficulties, for more than a dozen of years, he formed his character by spiritual exercises, took up the study of grammar in a class with little boys, supported himself by begging as one of the beggar students of the time, and gathered around him at the University of Paris a group of seven men, who in 1534 took their vows with him as members of the Company of Jesus. With true Spanish chivalry, their first object was to win over the Holy Land from the infidels by going to Jerusalem and converting it. Prevented by war from doing this, they became teachers and missionaries in Italy. Their zeal was so great and yet so directed by reason, they were so absolutely unselfish and had a charm that attracted so much attention, that they accomplished wonders. The Pope received them with kindness and gave them provisional confirmation of their rule. Pope Paul III had insisted on