limiting the number of religious orders because of abuses that had arisen in them, but after reading Ignatius' rule he declared "the finger of God is here," gave them the fullest confirmation and in 1543 they were acknowledged as one of the religious orders of the Church. Francis Thompson has summed up very strikingly, with a poet's eye for effect, the situation in Europe when Loyola was born. That will give the best idea what a confusion there was all around him at the moment when this son of an obscure nobleman began the work that was finally destined to bring order out of much of the religious and educational chaos of the time at least: "It was a great, a brilliant, a corrupt epoch, fraught with possibilities of glory and peril to a youth of Spain. The old order was yielding. Throughout Europe the nations were loud with the falling ruins of feudalism, and the consolidation of absolute monarchies was ushering in the new political creation. In a mighty dust of war and revolt Christendom itself was vanishing, leaving in its stead an adjustment of States {208} on a secular basis, to be known as 'the balance of European Power.' "In the year after little Loyola's birth Columbus sailed to begin the New World. When the boy passed to the Court the day of Ferdinand and Isabella was done; Charles V was waiting to ascend the Spanish throne. Before he began the campaign which ended in the breach of Pamplona, Charles had inherited the sceptre of Spain and been elected to the Empire of Germany. The great captain, Gonsalvo de Cordova, was dead; Francis I was King of France, singing _'Souvent femme varie,_ and preparing to tilt with Charles for the supremacy of Europe. English Harry was still bluff Hal, no gospel light yet dawned from Boleyn's eyes and many an English Queen, little dreaming of that perilous dignity to come, still bore her head on her shoulders. But a thick-necked young German friar, with the Reformation in his cowl, was about to cut the tow-rope between the Teuton nations and the boat of Peter. There was a constable Bourbon who should presently halloo those revolting Teutons to the sack of Rome, there was Cellini, a goldsmith, who should brag to have killed him there: a young Gaston de Foix was to flame athwart Italy, and leave like a modern Epaminondas--the victors weeping at Ravenna: a Bayard, last of chivalry in an unchivalric age, was to leave a name _sans peur et sans reproche._ And there was a young Loyola: what of him? Why, before Cervantes came to laugh Spain's chivalry away, should he not be a Spanish Bayard, a Spanish Gaston de Foix, or indeed both in one?"