Some of his companions, meanwhile, journeyed to Rome. There they obtained from Paul III. permission to visit Palestine upon a missionary enterprise, together with special privileges for their entrance into sacerdotal orders. Those of the ten friends who were not yet priests, were ordained at Venice in June 1537. They then began to preach in public, roaming the streets with faces emaciated by abstinence, clad in ragged clothes, and using a language strangely compounded of Italian and Spanish. Their obvious enthusiasm, and the holy lives they were known to lead, brought them rapidly into high reputation of sanctity. Both the secular and the religious clergy of Italy could show but few men at that epoch equal to these brethren. It was settled in the autumn that they should all revisit Rome, traveling by different routes, and meditating on the form which the Order should assume. Palestine had now been definitely, if tacitly, abandoned. As might have been expected, it was Loyola who baptized his Order, and impressed a character upon the infant institution. He determined to call it the Company of Jesus, with direct reference to those Companies of Adventure which had given irregular organization to restless military spirits in the past. The new Company was to be a ’cohort, or century, combined for combat against spiritual foes; men-at-arms, devoted, body and soul, to our Lord Jesus Christ and to his true and lawful Vicar upon earth.’[159] An Englishman of the present day may pause to meditate upon the grotesque parallel between the nascent Order of the Jesuits and the Salvation Army, and can draw such conclusions from it as may seem profitable.
[Footnote 159: These phrases occur in the Deliberatio primorum patrum.]