centre, or respectively some here, some there. Orleans, Bourges, Bologna, Modena professed Law, either as their specialty, or as their distinguishing faculty; Montpellier, Salerno, Medicine; Padua, the Liberal Arts; Toledo, Mathematics; Salamanca, and, above all, Paris, general culture, Philosophy, and Theology.

These universities became such well-springs of learning, that for Theology the Bishops' seminaries practically ceased to exist; and, to acquire the general culture of the times, the children of the faithful no longer turned to the monastic schools. Nay, in quite a contrary sense, the clergy and the monks themselves, in pursuit of the best learning that the age could give, left their cloisters for a while, and betook themselves to the universities. They followed up that step by settling down there. Paris beheld the great old orders of Augustinians, Benedictines, Carthusians, the Carmelites, the Bernardines, all establishing monasteries or colleges; no otherwise than the newest order of Trinitarians, which was chiefly made up of university men. Two institutes arose, those of the Dominicans and Franciscans; who with men at their head, like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, placed themselves right in the heart of these intellectual centres; and they became bulwarks of sound learning, as opposed to the inanities of a false scholasticism. They kept the leaven of religion and virtue in the midst of what was not quite a perverse generation, but was most certainly, from whatever side we view it, a very dubious multitude, belonging, it is true, to a Christian generation. Consider the 10,000 at Bologna, which was the centre for Law studies; the 30,000 at Oxford; or the 40,000, all at one time studying, or reckoned to be studying, in Paris, the acknowledged centre for Theology.

An indiscriminate mass of humanity like this, pressed, thronged, and crowded together, stimulated with all the ardor, and alive with all the passions of youth, could not fail to be little better than a nursery for indiscriminate license. Whatever might be the vigilance of the Church, or however strenuous the exercise of legitimate authority, nothing in the usual course of human society could prevent its becoming a prolific soil for the propagation of every species of error. And, as during three hundred years the intellectual and educational powers of Europe followed this course, the law of evolution asserted itself in many directions.

On the one side, those tens of thousands of Christian youths, who were aiming at all the posts of influence in Church and State, and who, entering their native university, or journeying to foreign ones, began life there at as early an age as twelve or fourteen years, to remain in this environment some nine or twelve years more, became, as was natural, the living, swarming members of a state of society so dissolute, that successive occupants of the Papal See depicted the condition of things as one of moral contagion. In the manner of thought and mind which prevailed, no form of theoretic error was wanting. In philosophy, there was scepticism; in theology, heresy; while, in politics, Cæsarism and absolutism became rife. Then, at the end of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance came; and one of the first things, which it expressly and formally did, was to renew in life, art, and politics, the same old paganism, upon the ruins of which, so many centuries before, Christianity had begun its upward and laborious ascent. Newly fashioning then much of what was old, Christianity had augmented all this with so much which was new, that in a thousand years it had made a Renaissance possible. And now the form of this Renaissance threatened its own ascendancy in morals and in life.

On the other hand, the old spirit of conservatism in religion, and of preservation in the matter of morals, maintained itself for a time, through those bodies of religious men and clergymen, who had left the cloister or the seminary, to take up their abode in the secular seats of learning. It was this spirit which originated the latest and best development of the universities, that of the "college" system, established in their midst. Salamanca had twenty colleges; Louvain, forty; Paris, fifty. Still, in the final issue, there was now scarcely any reserve force of cloistral or episcopal learning behind the universities, and outside of them. And the religious and the clergy themselves, who at best were not a little out of their element from the moment they migrated into the secular environment, conformed insensibly to the conditions in which they found themselves, and so far ceased to be the power they had been.

Witness, in the time of Ignatius, the Paris University, as described by contemporary records. "It was fallen from its ancient splendor. The bonds of discipline had been gradually relaxed; studies were abandoned; and with masters, as with scholars, all love of letters, and respect for the rule, had given place to sombre passions, to political hate, to religious fanaticism and dissolute habits."7

Here then we have two elements in the educational condition of Europe, which explain the rise of the Jesuit system. One was the positive, concrete fact, embodied in that great developed system of university learning. The other was a negative element, the decline therein of the essential moral life. These two factors are not mere antecedents in the order of time, as being only prior to the method of Loyola. One of them, the university system, supplied the very material out of which his method and matter were taken; yes, and the men themselves, the Jesuits who applied the principles of reform to education. The other factor, which I have called negative, that decline of the essential moral life, was the adequate occasion, which prompted Ignatius to approach the question of education at all. For we may say with confidence that, if the universities of the sixteenth century were still doing the work which originally they had been chartered to do, the founder of the Society of Jesus would not only have omitted to draw out his system as a substitute for them, and as an improvement upon them, but he would have done, what he always did with anything good in existence; he would have used what he found, and have turned his attention to other things more urgent. He did use these university centres for his own young men, until he had better educational institutions, and a better method of his own in progress.

Hence the educational problem, when it falls under the notice of Ignatius, presents itself as the identical one of old, that of moral regeneration. But it is a different state of the same question. In circumstances rendered acutely critical by the agitations of the epoch, social, moral, and religious, it was a favorite contemplation of his to look with compassion on men living like the blind, dying, and sinking into eternal depths; on men talking, blaspheming, reviling one another; on their assaulting, wounding, slaying one another; and all together going to eternal perdition.8 It was from this moral point of view that he descended into the arena of education.

But before he can teach men, or mould teachers of men, or even conceive the first idea of legislating for the intellectual world, he must himself first learn. There are two fundamental lessons which he does learn, and they go to form him. One is that, among all pursuits, the study of virtue