Loyola was too sagacious not to have anticipated this difficulty; but he manifestly hoped to escape it in some way, either by evading or bridging it over, or he would not have asked the pope to approve the original constitution which contained it. He certainly did not desire or contemplate any change in his original constitution or plan; and therefore, when Paul III hesitated and appointed a committee of cardinals to scrutinize them, he must have felt a degree of perplexity to which his proud and ambitious military spirit had not been hitherto accustomed to submit unresistingly. He could not avoid seeing, however, that if the pope's final decision should be adverse to him, it would necessarily be the death of his society, upon which he had, with inordinate ambition, fixed his hopes. The occasion constituted the most serious crisis in his personal fortunes he had ever encountered. Success promised him a long list of triumphs; defeat, nothing but obscurity. He had no such intellectual resources as fitted him for rencounter with those who had, not having attended school until after he had reached the years of manhood, and not having then shown any special aptness for learning. Whatsoever capacity he possessed, tended in the direction of governing men, his faculty for which was developed during his service in the army; and he must therefore have experienced the consciousness that if he failed to obtain the sanction of the pope, his career would be seriously, if not entirely, checked. The future of the papacy depended upon the successful training of men to obedience; and Loyola, understanding this, could have had no difficulty in persuading the pope that a society like his, contrived especially to suspend the power of human reasoning and reduce its members to mere unthinking machines, would more assuredly produce that result than had been done by the very worst forms of absolute despotism which had, for so many centuries, held the Oriental world in subjugation.