It would be hard to crowd into a whole chapter as many false statements as this much and perhaps over-praised historian contrives to condense in a single sentence. For apart from the inherent impossibility of anyone who was "rude, repulsive and discourteous" arriving at the dignity of General of the Society, it is absolutely false that Father Nickel "was deposed from his office and was explicitly told that he had forfeited his authority." Far from this being the case, it was he who had summoned the congregation in order to lay before it the urgent necessity of his being relieved from the heavy burden of his office. On its assembling, the first thing he did was to ask for a Vicar because his infirmities and his age--he was then seventy-nine years old--made it impossible for him to fulfill the duties of his office, or even to take part in the proceedings of the congregation. Moreover, it is absolutely calumnious to say that the congregation explicitly declared that he had forfeited all his authority. Even Ranke, who makes the charge, declares that he was guilty of no transgression; nor was the action of the congregation in defining the Vicar's position as "not being in conjunction with that of the retiring General," anything else than a desire to avoid having the Society governed by two heads. Nor did this denote "a change in the Society's methods;" for there had been a provision in the constitution from the very beginning for even the deposition of a general. Again, far from being repulsive in his manners, the congregation proclaimed him to have been the very opposite. Indeed, all his brethren sympathized with him, especially at that moment, because, besides the usual burden of his office and his age, he was afflicted by the sad news which had just reached him that three of the Fathers who were delegates to the congregation--the Vice-Provincial of Sardinia and his two associates--had been shipwrecked at the mouth of the Tiber. The words of the congregation's acceptance of his withdrawal denote nothing but the deepest reverence and affection. They are: _Congregatio obsequendum duxit voluntati charissimi optimeque meriti Parentis_, that is, "The congregation deemed it proper to comply with the desire of the most beloved and most deserving Father."