The relation between women and early Jesuitism bears out the old assertion that kicks and beatings increase both canine and feminine affection. Ignatius Loyola himself compared woman to the devil. He writes: "Our enemy imitates the nature and manner of a woman as to her weakness and frowardness. For, as a woman, quarrelling with her husband, if she sees him with erect, firm aspect, ready to resist her, instantly loses courage and turns on her heel, but if she perceive he is timid and inclined to slink off, her audacity knows no bounds, and she pounces upon him, ferociously. Thus the devil," etc. Ignatius Loyola was magnificently in earnest. He remembered the Medician Papal courts and their scandal. He would have his order endangered by no looseness of priestly morals. His rules were of iron strictness. Moreover, and this greatly to his official advantage, he knew women. Especially well he knew, too, the sentimental, introspective, hero-worshipping woman. The spiritual direction of three such women for a short time gave him more trouble, he afterward declared, than the government of his whole world-spread order. Accordingly, he decreed: "No woman shall come twice to confession in one day." "If the female penitents pretend to scruples of conscience, the confessors are to tell them 'not to relate tales and repeat trifles.' Sometimes they must be silenced at once, for if they are truly disturbed by conscience there will be no need of prolixity." "Consolation and advice to women are to be given in an open part of the church." Visits to women were also severely restricted. They must be confined to women of rank and consequence. The women visited must be those who have rendered signally important service to the order. Visits must be agreeable to the husband or other ruling male relative of the woman visited. Confession by a woman was always to be witnessed by another priest, stationed near the confessor. A Jesuit of advanced age and ancient probity once infringed this last order and listened to a woman penitent without witnesses. Loyola called eight priests together and made the old Jesuit scourge himself on his naked back till each of the priests had repeated one of the penitential psalms. To do all things vehemently has always been a German trait. According to Hasenmuller, a German Jesuit turned Lutheran, many of Loyola's disciples in Germany exceeded their chief in their expressed contempt for women. Some Jesuit priests, he says, expectorated whenever a woman's name was mentioned. Others would eat no dish prepared by a woman. One cried: "When I think of a woman my stomach rises and my blood is up." Another exclaimed: "It grieves me and I am ashamed that a woman brought me into the world."