But the natural enemies of Jansen were, without doubt, the Jesuits. To the history of this Society we can only now advert in a very cursory manner. It may appear surprising that an order so powerful and politic should have owed its origin to such a person as Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish soldier: and that a wound in the leg, which this hidalgo received at the battle of Pampeluna, should have issued in his becoming the founder of a Society which has embroiled the world and the Church. But in fact, Loyola, though the originator of the sect, is not entitled to the honor, or rather the disgrace, of organizing its constitution. This must be assigned to Laynez and Aquaviva, the two generals who succeeded him—men as superior to the founder of the Society in talents as he excelled them in enthusiasm. Ignatius owed his success to circumstances. While he was watching his arms as the knight-errant of the Virgin, in her chapel at Montserrat, or squatting within his cell in a state of body too noisome for human contact, and of mind verging on insanity, Luther was making Germany ring with the first trumpet-notes of the Reformation. The monasteries, in which ignorance had so long slumbered in the lap of superstition, were awakened; but their inmates were totally unfit for doing battle on the new field of strife that had opened around them. Unwittingly, in the heat of his fanaticism, the illiterate Loyola suggested a line of policy which, matured by wiser heads, proved more adapted to the times. Bred in the court and the camp, he contrived to combine the finesse of the one, and the discipline of the other, with the sanctity of a religious community; and proposed that, instead of the lazy routine of monastic life, his followers should actively devote themselves to the education of youth, the conversion of the heathen, and the suppression of heresy. Such a proposal, backed by a vow of devotion to the Holy See, commended itself to the pope so highly that, in 1540, he confirmed the institution by a bull, granted it ample privileges, and appointed Loyola to be its first general. In less than a century, this sect, which assumed to itself, with singular arrogance, the name of “The Society of Jesus,” rose to be the most enterprising and formidable order in the Romish communion.