As St. Ignatius, in his pursuit of absolute perfection, thought no virtue foreign to his institute, so he judged no service, which churchmen could yield to the public, foreign to his society. Without pretending to enumerate the various duties and occupations, which he recommends to its members, I select only a few, upon which he enters into more detailed instructions, and to which he specially calls the attention of all superiors, the zeal of all their subjects. They are, good example; prayer; works of {185} charity to the poor, the imprisoned, the diseased; the writing of books of piety and religious instruction; the use of the sacrament of penance; preaching; pious congregations; spiritual retreats; national and foreign missions; and education of youth in public and gratuitous schools. In the catholic scheme of religion, each of these things is deemed important; and the united voice of all, who knew Jesuits, gives them the full credit of having, during their existence in a body, cultivated, with success, each of these several branches. Their preachers were heard and admired in every country; their tribunals of penance were crouded; the sick and dying were always secure of their attendance, when demanded; their books of devotion were everywhere read with confidence; the good example, resulting from the purity of their morals, secured them, even in the last fatal persecution, from inculpation, it disabled the malice of calumny. In the impossibility of criminating living Jesuits, their worst enemies could only revile the dead. Hospitals, workhouses, and lazarets, were the constant scenes {186} of their zeal; their attendance on them was reckoned an appropriate duty of their society. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the plague successively ravaged every country in Europe, many hundreds of Jesuits are recorded to have lost their lives in the service of the infected. Several perished, in the same exercise of charity, in the last century, at Marseilles and Messina; and, during the late retreat of the French army from Moscow, not less than ten Jesuits died of fatigue and sickness, contracted in the hospitals crouded with those French prisoners, who, a little before, had ejected them from their principal college, at Polosk, after having plundered it of every valuable. It would be tedious to insist upon every point; but something I must say on the articles of missions and public schools, the two principal scenes of their zeal. With respect to missions, the Jesuits might truly apply to themselves the verse, Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? ÆN. lib. i.