The Jesuits are literally one of the greatest creations of this great period. Not to know them as such is to miss the significance of their order and not a little of the true spirit of the epoch from which they sprang. The arts and literature of the Renaissance produced no work destined to live so vividly, nor to influence men in all succeeding generations so deeply, as "the little company of Jesus," as Ignatius of Loyola conceived and organized it. {223} [Illustration: HOLBEIN, SIR THOMAS MORE] CHAPTER IV SIR THOMAS MORE AND SOME CONTEMPORARIES While in this great period of the Renaissance, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and so many others, were demonstrating the power of the human mind to express itself in aesthetic modes of all kinds, and Copernicus and Regiomontanus and Vesalius and Paracelsus were showing how man's intellect might penetrate the mysteries of the universe without him and that smaller universe the microcosm that he is himself, and Erasmus and Pico della Mirandola and Linacre were exhibiting human scholarship at its highest, a great contemporary in England expressed human life at its best in strong terms of the human will. This was Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, put to death by Henry VIII, but not until he had succeeded in making out of his life a wonderful work of living art of the profoundest significance, to which men of all classes have been attracted ever since. He was a great scholar, a great lawyer, a great judge--the only man who ever cleared the docket of the English Court of Chancery,--a writer of distinguished ability not only in his own language but in Latin, a philosopher who so far as the consideration of social problems was concerned deserves a place beside Plato: yet not for any of these attainments is he famous, but for his unflinching following of what he saw to be his duty even though it cost him everything that men usually hold dear--life, reputation, property and even the possibility of poverty and suffering for those he held dear after his death.