purity and majesty, and they shrunk with an instinctive dread from meeting Him. Nearer and yet nearer came that awful visitant, whose form they could not see, but whose terror they felt. Conscience spoke and said, "It is the footsteps of the great Judge which you hear: it is the living God who is approaching; He bears the sword of justice, and on whomsoever that sword falls it strikes him with eternal death.” “Oh, my sin, my sin!" we hear Luther exclaim, as he looked round and round, and could see no way to flee, and yet could not abide that awful coming. What shall he do? Where shall he hide himself?

It was not on Luther only that these terrors fell. Though parted from him by wide continents, Loyola was joined with him in this sore agony. The same cry with which the cell at Erfurt resounded, broke from the lips of Ignatius Loyola amid the mountains of Spain. In his cave at Manresa,—how solemnising to think that it was so did the founder of the Order of the Jesuits experience convictions of sin, and feel the stings and terrors of an awakened conscience. Guilt, like a mountain, lay upon his soul. He descended into that "Valley of the Shadow of Death" where there is no water-spring, no dawning of the day, no living thing, save "the worm that dies not.” He entered into that prison in which even souls on earth may at times be shut up; that abode of dolour and black despair, which none can describe save those who have felt it, and than which there is no more dreadful state under heaven, or in the universe, unless hell itself, and it is more dreadful because it is eternal.

The courage which had never quailed before the embattled hosts of the Moor, melted as wax melts before the fire, at the dreadful things which he now apprehended; and that strong bodily frame which had served him so well on the battlefield, and enabled him to perform such feats of prowess, was disolv

ing under the pressure of his inward anguish. Pale and emaciated he wandered amid the mountains, till at last his failing strength would not permit him to leave his cave, and he was one day found fallen on the earth in a swoon, and taken up half dead, and conveyed to a monastery.

Yet one stage further did Luther and Loyola keep company together. Stricken with the consciousness of sin, and feeling the need of expiation, both set about the work of making themselves holy; neither of them seeing as yet, that the righteousness that justifies, is not within but without, and is the work of another. The scourgings, the fasts, and the penances that Luther underwent in his cell at Erfurt we all know. A similar expiatory course did Loyola prescribe himself. Fleeing from the cheerful light of day, he buried himself in the gloom of the mountains of Manresa. Rags, dirt, and an iron girdle set with prickles, were the staple of his expiations and penitences. To these he added seven hours each day on his knees, and prayers at midnight. On one occasion he passed three days in confessing the sins of his whole past life; and deeming the enumeration not sufficiently full he made a second confession in which he gave a place to all omitted transgressions. He was rewarded with short-lived intervals of peace. Anon his heavens would o'ercast, the thunders and lightnings would return, and the suffering in his soul recommence. Again he betook him to the scourge and the fast, assured that in due time these would open to him the gates of a stable and blessed peace. And as he anticipated so did it happen to him. So at least, did he persuade himself. Awakening one day as from a long and troubled dream, he said to himself, Why should I permit myself to be overcome by vain fears? I will dismiss these terrors. And at the utterance of this strong resolve the black past rolled away, and a future full of sunshine rose upon him.

This marks the point of divergence in the path of these two men. Luther turned to the Bible. In that Book he saw the righteousness that justifies; not that which the sinner works in himself by the scourge, or earns by floods of bitter tears, but that which Christ has wrought for him on the Cross. Seeing this, he went to his Saviour, and laid his sins on Him, and obtained forgiveness, and with forgiveness a new life. The same evangelical road which had been opened to himself, Luther opened to others. Hence the Reformation.

This road Loyola never found. He missed the way to the Cross. He laid his sins on no one. He bore them himself. Other satisfaction he offered not to the law of God than fastings and confessions. When he judged that he had fasted enough, and confessed enough, he then by a fiat of his will banished the remembrance of his sins. But to be rid of the remembrance of sin is not to be delivered from its guilt. To forget is one thing, to be forgiven is another. Forgivenessthat forgiveness which proceeds on the ground of a perfect righteousness and an infinite satisfaction that forgiveness which remits the penalty to the transgressor because it has been borne by his surety, Loyola knew not, nor cared to know. He was his own sin-bearer. He never looked at the actual realities of his case. He chose to dwell in a world of delusions and fictions. His peace had no solid basis. He never submitted his mind to the teaching of the Bible. And as he slighted its instructions in the all important matter of his reconcilation with God, turning haughtily away in the pride of his own righteousness, from the great sacrifice of expiation, and by the strength of his own will, not the cleansing virtue of the "blood," compelling peace-delusive peace-so throughout the whole of his future career, he surrounded himself with fancies and self-deceptions, and was guided, not by the Scriptures of truth, the alone source of a true illumination of

mind, and of right aims, but followed solely dreams, visions, and voices. Hence the monstrous opinions he propagated, the unrighteous ends he pursued, and the revolting and fearfully inhuman means he took to accomplish them.

Luther submitting to the Word of God, which is truth, and filled with the Spirit of God, which is love, led the nations out of their prison-house. Loyola, full of pride and rebellion, and hating the truth, strove by every Satanic device, and by every unholy and cruel weapon to compel the nations to return to their prison, and lie down in their old chains.

CHAPTER V.

The Enrolling of the Jesuit Army.

WALKING by the rules of knight-errantry, and not by the precepts of Scripture, which says, "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve," Loyola, his night of terror past, and the day of peace now risen fully upon him, hung up his sword and shield at the shrine of Mary, and took a vow to be her servant and soldier. the world doing battle in her cause, and

He would go round offering to all blas

phemers and impugners of her deity the alternative of " conversion or the sword." The Church of Rome was the Church of Mary. Mary sat enthroned on its altars; and when Loyola thought of this his zeal flamed fiercely up against the infidels of the East and the heretics of the West, who held but in light esteem, in fact, treated with contempt, the claims of her whose crossed and sworn champion he had become. By the help of his good sword, he would bring these opposers to the feet of Mary, or sweep them from the earth.

At this stage of his career, he had a vision shown him, in which he plainly beheld two cities or camps, and two armies

engaged in mortal combat. "These gloomy towers and dungeon-keeps on the left," said a voice to him, "which murky clouds overhang, are the strongholds of Babylon. You see her dark warriors mustering phalanx on phalanx at her gates. These shining battlements on the right are Jerusalem, and these soldiers in bright armour, posted on her walls, are her defenders. You are the chosen captain who is to lead in this great war. Go forth and conquer, thou mighty man!" So spake the voice in the ear of his imagination.

Loyola thought right to begin in the east. To cleanse from Saracenic pollution

"Those holy fields,

Over whose acres walked those blessed feet

Which, eighteen hundred years ago, were nailed,
For our advantage, to the bitter tree,"

and rescue from the keeping of the infidel the "holy sepulchre," was an enterprise which fascinated him by the romance which attended it. But when he arrived in Jerusalem, after a long journey on foot, for he was penniless, he looked not quite the great captain he gave himself out to be. The Superior of the Convent, before whom he presented himself, took leave, despite his protestations of a Divine commission, to doubt whether God would send a deliverer in rags, and whether the man who stood before him with a strange fire burning in his eye was he. Disgusted with his reception, Loyola shook the dust from his feet as a testimony against the men who were willing thus tamely to bear the yoke of the infidel when they might, if they chose, have deliverance from it, and forthwith returned to his native Spain.

This untoward commencement of his mission by no means cooled his ardour or shook his resolve. It only convinced him that the predestined field of his future triumphs lay in the West, and that what he had been chosen to crush was the hydra of