Catholicism owes much to the Jesuits; and, casuistically speaking, the Jesuits owe their existence to a broken leg.  Ignatius of Loyola was their founder.  He was at first a page, then a soldier, then got one of his legs broken in battle, was captured and confined as an invalid, had his immortal leg set and re-set, whiled away his time whilst it was mending in reading romances, got through all within his reach, could at last find nothing but the Lives of the Saints, had his latent religious feelings stirred during their perusal, travelled to different places afterwards, and at last established the order of Jesuits—­an order which has more learning within its circle than perhaps any other section of men, which has sent out its missionaries to every clime, has been subjected to every kind of vicissitude, has been suppressed by kings and emperors, ostracised by at least one Pope, and shouted down often by excited peoples in the heated moments of revolution; but which has somehow managed to live through it all and progress.  The men fighting under the standard of Ignatius have a tenacity, a mysterious irrepressibleness about them which dumfounds the orthodox and staggers the processes of ordinary calculators.  In Preston we have three churches, besides an auxiliary chapel, wherein priests of the Jesuit order labour.  By far the largest number of Preston Catholics are in charge of those priests, and the generality of them don’t seem to suffer anything from the “tyranny”—­that is the phrase some of us Protestants delight to honour—­of their supervision.  They can breathe, and walk about, laugh, and grow fat without any difficulty, and they are sanguine of being landed in ultimate ecstacy if they conduct themselves fairly.

In a former article we referred to one of the Catholic churches in this town—­St Wilfrid’s—­which is looked after by Jesuit priests—­on this occasion we purposely alluding to another—­St. Ignatius’s.  The Catholics in the district of this church are very strong; they number about 6,000; are mainly of a working-class complexion; and are conveniently and compactly located for educational and religious purposes.  Catholics are so numerous in the neighbourhood—­are so woven and interwoven amongst the denizens of it—­that it is a good and a safe plan never to begin running down the Pope in any part of it.  Murphyites and patent Christians fond of immolating Rome, &c., would have a very poor chance of success in this district.  The church of St. Ignatius stands in the square which bears its name.  The first stone of the edifice was laid on the 27th of May, 1833:  to 1858 the church was enlarged, and in the course of the re-opening services the famous Dr. Manning (now Archbishop of Westminster) preached a sermon.  The building is erected in the “perpendicular English” style of architecture—­literally, a very general thing, the horizontal style being yet unworkable; is railed round; and has a dim, quiet elegance about its exterior.  At the southern end there is a