No matter, however, what pretenses were made by Loyola, or what his secretly cherished designs were, there is not the least ground for doubt that his method of establishing and organizing a new society had no relations whatsoever to the principles of Christian faith--in other words, that the existing methods were competent for all practicable and necessary purposes without it. It was, consequently, temporal merely; that is, it had reference exclusively to the management of men, so as to reduce them to uninquiring obedience to such authority as was set over them. There was nothing besides this which the Church and the ancient monastic orders did not already possess the power to accomplish. The "exercises" he prescribed were, it is true, spiritual in character--such as penance and mortification of the flesh--but the Church had already provided these, and they were rigidly observed by the monastic orders. The pledge to employ them, made by the members of the Jesuit society so as to promote their own spiritual welfare, was merely incidental to the duty they already owed to the Church. Consequently, while these "exercises" conformed to the existing obligations imposed by the Church, the new society projected by Loyola was intended to furnish the machinery necessary for exacting obedience--for training and disciplining all who could be influenced by it for that single purpose. And in order to accomplish effectually this obedience to himself and his new society, leaving out entirely both the Church and the pope, he originally designed that the members of the society should be responsible alone to their general, from whom all the laws and regulations for their government should emanate. The pope, as the head of the Church, had not the least authority over these members conferred upon him by the original constitution; nor was it intended that they should obey any other authority than that of their general, because he, and he alone, was recognized as the sole representative of God upon earth. There was nothing spiritual in all this, in the sense in which the Church had defined spiritual things and the Christian world understood them; but it made the society, as Loyola planned it, temporal merely--a mere police corps, drilled and disciplined to obedience alone, without the right either to inquire or decide whether the commands of their superior were right or wrong. It should surprise no intelligent man, therefore, at learning the fact that the pope hesitated about giving the society his approval, when Loyola first requested his pontifical ratification of its constitution.