{187} Their perseverance in this field of zeal was universally admired; it secured success during more than two centuries; and the latest missionary expeditions of their society proved, that the original spirit was not decayed. Whoever had caught it from the institute of Ignatius was a scholar without pride; a man disengaged from his own conveniences; indifferent to his employment, to country, to climate; submissive to guidance; capable of living alone, and of edifying in public; happy in solitude, content in tumult; never misplaced. In a word, great purity of manners, cultivated minds, knowledge without pretensions, close study without recompence, obedience without reasoning though not without reason, love of labour, willingness to suffer, and, finally, fervor of zeal; such were the qualifications, which Ignatius's discernment directed his successors in government to seek, to select, or to form; and it is an acknowledged truth, that, at every period of the society, they always found men of this description to lead out their sacred expeditions to the four quarters of {188} the world. These men planted Christian faith in the extremities of the East, in Japan, in the Molucca islands; they announced it in China, in the hither and further India, in Ethiopia and Caffraria, &c. Others, in the opposite hemisphere, appeared on the snowy wastes of North America; and, presently, Hurons were civilized, Canada ceased to be peopled only by barbarians. Others, almost in our own days, nothing degenerate, succeeded to humanize new hard-featured tribes, even to assemble them in Christian churches, in the ungrateful soil of California, to which angry Nature seems to have denied almost every necessary for the subsistence of the human species. They were but a detachment from the body of their brethren, who, at the same time, were advancing, with rapid progress, through Cinaloa, among the unknown hordes of savages, who rove through the immense tracts to the north of Mexico, which have not yet been trodden by the steps of any evangelical herald. Others, again, in greater numbers, from the school of Ignatius, with the most inflexible {189} perseverance, amidst every species of opposition, continued to gather new nations into the church, to form new colonies of civilized cannibals, for the kings of Spain and Portugal, in the horrid wilds of Brazil, Maragnon, and Paraguay. Here truly flowed the milk and honey of religion and human happiness. Here was realized more than philosophy had dared to hope, more than Plato, in his republic, or the author of Utopia, had ever ventured to imagine. Here was given the demonstration, from experience, that pure religion, steadily practised, is the only source of human happiness. The new settlements, called _Reductions_, of Brazil and Paraguay, were real fruits of the zeal of the Jesuits. Solipsian empires, and gold mines to enrich the society, existed only in libels[65]. {190}