All this was done in the midst of a self-sacrificing life among the Indians that a modern reads with ever-increasing astonishment. It seems almost incredible when it is recalled that the men who bore these sufferings so heroically were always highly educated, scholarly graduates of European colleges and often the descendants of gently nurtured families. Not infrequently the missionaries could see but very little fruit {214} from their labors for long periods and they had to be satisfied if they could make even a few converts among the old and the women and children as the result of years of labor. The contribution to civilization of these men, formed after the mighty saintly mind of Columbus' great contemporary Ignatius Loyola, is one of the greatest things that we owe to Columbus' Century. The most important function of the Jesuits, however, as planned by Ignatius himself, was not missionary work, but education. Ignatius contemplated that his little Company of Jesus should be, first of all, teachers. His constitutions arranged the training and outlined the methods. Before a generation had passed after his death they had some of the best schools in Europe. Everywhere the Jesuit schools were attended by the better classes, and the first century of the history of the Jesuits had not closed before there were more than one hundred thousand students in attendance in their classrooms. The reason for this was that their system of teaching and of intellectual discipline turned out scholars better than any other. What they taught as the basis of education was the classics. The humanities had come in as a great feature of education with the Renaissance. When the order was founded the Renaissance spirit was at its height and the schools of the New Learning had multiplied all over Europe. The Jesuits adopted it as the best means of training the mind, and how well they used it history shows.