At its head was a General, with power as absolute as that of a commander-in-chief in war. The Church was at war. Monastery and convent were Christ’s infantry. They did not suffice. They were even losing ground. The new Compañía would be the cavalry: an arm best fitted for skirmish and attack. “Let us think all in the same manner; let us speak all in the same manner,” said Loyola. His Spiritual Exercises were the drill of his cohorts. So the militant ideal of Spain, serving in her armies the will of Isabel, found this new and compact body. The sword had become a mystic instrument. Now a body of spiritual fathers turned themselves into a sword: took on the traits and ethic of the sword. Like Spain’s, the forces of Loyola spread at once to Africa, America and Asia. And at the end, the Society of Jesus, like Spain once more, locked in too perfect oneness: its strength hardened and grew brittle: its heroic faith became a stifling armor. * * * * * About a hundred years after the founding of the Society of Jesus, a young Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, wrote a series of Letters which have focused all the distrust and misconception aroused by the aggressive Body, and from whose subtle blows it never has recovered. _Les Lettres d’un Provincial_ is a great literary work. A man of genius, spokesman of his race, exposes the presence in his land of an organism monstrously alien to the spirit and rhythm of France. His intuitions are metaphysically deeper than his logic. Pascal does not know that the Society of Jesus is a formulation of the will of Spain: his points often are departures from false premises as in his invidious handling of the Jesuit doctrine of _probabilism_ or of the famous Jesuit sentence: “The end justifies the means.” Small matter: Pascal wrote a brilliant laughing prose whose beauty has not faded; and more, almost unwittingly he defended France against the invasion of an alien will. Although his arguments were often false, although his irony was unscrupulous, Pascal from his vantage-point was right.