of restricting the numbers of the professed to a small percentage of the whole Society.  The same rigid prohibition with regard to property was not imposed upon the houses of novices, colleges, and other educational establishments of the Jesuits; while the secular coadjutors were specially appointed for the administration of wealth which the professed might use but could not own.[168] In like manner, as they lived on alms, there was no objection to a priest of the order receiving valuable gifts in cash or kind from grateful recipients of his spiritual bounty.  A separate article of the constitutions furthermore reserved for the General the right of accepting any donation whatsoever, made in favor of the whole Company, and of assigning capital or revenue as he judged wisest.

[Footnote 168:  Quinet calculates that at the close of the sixteenth century there were twenty-one houses of the professed (incapable of owning property) to 293 colleges (free from this inability).]

Scholastics, even after they had taken the vow of poverty, were not obliged to relinquish their private possessions.  Sooner or later, it was hoped that these would become the property of the order.  In a word, the principle of this solemn obligation was so manipulated as to facilitate the acquisition and accumulation of wealth by the Jesuit like any other corporation.  Only no individual Jesuit owned anything.  He was rich or poor, he wore the clothes of princes or the rags of a mendicant, he lived sumptuously or begged in the street, he traveled with a following of servants or he walked on foot, according as it seemed good to his superiors.  The vow of poverty, thus interpreted in practice, meant a total disengagement from temporalities on the part of every member, an absolute dependence of each subordinate upon his superior in the hierarchy.

Having thus far treated the organization of the Jesuits as implicit in Loyola’s own conception and administration, I ought to add that it received definite form from his successor, Lainez.  The founder pronounced the Constitutions in 1553.  But they were thoroughly revised after his death in 1558, at which date they first issued from the press.  Lainez, again, supplemented these laws with a perpetual commentary, which is styled the Declarations.  These contain the bulk of those easements and indulgent interpretations, whereby the strictness of the original rules was explained away, and an almost unbounded elasticity was communicated to the system.

It would be rash to pronounce a decided opinion upon the much disputed question, whether, in addition to their Constitutions and Declarations, the Jesuits were provided with an esoteric code of rules known as Monita Secreta.[169] The existence of such a manual, which was supposed to contain the very pith of Jesuitical policy, has been confidently asserted and no less confidently denied.  In the absence of direct evidence, it may be worth quoting two passages