orders.  The General, instead of holding office for a term of years, was to be elected for life, with unlimited command over the whole Order in its several degrees.  He was to be regarded as Christ present and personified.  This autocracy of the General might have seemed to menace the overlordship of the Holy See, but for a fourth vow which the Company determined to adopt.  It ran as follows:  ’That the members will consecrate their lives to the continual service of Christ and of the Popes, will fight under the banner of the Cross, and will serve the Lord and the Roman Pontiff as God’s vicar upon earth, in such wise that they shall be bound to execute immediately and without hesitation or excuse all that the reigning Pope or his successors may enjoin upon them for the profit of souls or for the propagation of the faith, and shall do so in all provinces whithersoever he may send them, among Turks or any other infidels, to furthest Ind, as well as in the region of heretics, schismatics, or believers of any kind.’

Loyola himself drew up these constitutions in five chapters, and had them introduced to Paul III., with the petition that they might be confirmed.  This was in September 1539, and it is singular that the man selected to bring them under the Pope’s notice should have been Cardinal Contarini.  Paul had no difficulty in recognizing the support which this new Order would bring to the Papacy in its conflict with Reformers, and its diplomatic embarrassments with Charles V. He is even reported to have said, ‘The finger of God is there!’ Yet he could not confirm the constitutions without the previous approval of three Cardinals appointed to report on them.  This committee condemned Loyola’s scheme; and nearly a year passed in negotiations with foreign princes and powerful prelates, before a reluctant consent was yielded to the Pope’s avowed inclination.  At length the Bull of Sept. 27, 1540, Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, launched the Society of Jesus on the world.  Ignatius became the first General of the Order; and the rest of his life, a period of sixteen years, was spent in perfecting the machinery and extending the growth of this institution, which in all essentials was the emanation of his own mind.

It may be well at this point to sketch the organization of the Jesuits, and to describe the progress of the Society during its founder’s lifetime, in order that a correct conception may be gained of Loyola’s share in its creation.  Many historians of eminence, and among them so acute an observer as Paolo Sarpi, have been of the opinion that Jesuitry in its later developments was a deflection from the spirit and intention of Ignatius.  It is affirmed that Lainez and Salmeron, rather than Loyola, gave that complexion to the Order which has rendered it a mark for the hatred and disgust of Europe.  Aquaviva, the fifth General, has been credited with its policy of interference in affairs of states and nations.  Yet I think it can be shown that the Society, as it appeared in the seventeenth century, was a logical and necessary development of the Society as Ignatius framed it in the sixteenth.[160]