This spirit of generosity, so characteristic of St. Ignatius, is clearly manifested in the Constitutions which he drew up for the guidance and the government of his Society. The whole spirit of his institute is a spirit of generous devotion to the service of God and the good of men. For instance, he wants his followers to be so little attached to their country, or to any place whatever, that they shall be willing to go and live in any part of the world where there is hope of God’s greater service and the help of souls. They must leave father and mother, sisters and brothers and whatsoever they had in the world. They must so far resign their right to a good name as to allow all their errors and defects to be manifested to their superiors. They are even urged to wish to suffer reproaches, slanders and injuries, and to be treated and accounted as fools, so as to resemble Jesus Christ, and in all things to seek their greater abnegation and continual mortification. In the exercise of low and mean offices they must be willing to be employed in such as are more abhorrent to nature. Certainly all these rules and practices suppose an uncommon degree of generosity. And yet the Saint insists on them, and urges his followers to labor constantly that no point of perfection which by God’s grace they can attain in the perfect observance of his Constitutions, be omitted by them. In all things they are to seek God, casting off, as much as is possible, the love of creatures, that they may set all their affections on the Creator. As to the general spirit of his Society, it is hard to conceive how this could be more generous than it actually is; and no less generosity is seen when the rules descend to practical details. Consider, for instance, the strict interpretation they put on the understanding of the religious vows. They make poverty a total privation of the right to dispose of anything at one’s will or discretion, neither allowing one to give nor to receive, to lend nor to borrow any object whatever without permission of the superior. For the measure and the pattern of the vow of chastity nothing less is proposed than the purity of the blessed Angels in Heaven. To protect this virtue a Jesuit has to submit himself all the days of his life to such careful surveillance as solicitous parents exercise over their daughters, who are not allowed to go outside the house without permission, nor, as far as circumstances allow, without the attendance of a discreet companion.