LOYOLA. 



575 



voural to dissuade him from his purpose, entreating 

 him to remember his illustrious birth, and the repu- 

 tation which he had already obtained ; but Ignatius 

 was firm. Leaving his brother at a sister's house, 

 in Onate, he proceeded to Navarretta, where he col- 

 lected some debts, and, having paid his servants and 

 all his creditors, gave the rest for the restoration of 

 the picture of the Virgin, and proceeded alone, upon 

 his mule, to Montserrat. A Moor overtook him, 

 who, in their conversation, uttered an opinion respect- 

 ing the Virgin, which appeared to Ignatius blasphem- 

 ous, and, while the Moor, luckily for himself, pricked 

 forward, Loyola deliberated whether it was not his 

 duty to follow and stab him. The Moor had gone to 

 a village oft' the road, and Ignatius let his mule choose 

 his own way, with the intention of killing the infidel, 

 it the mule should carry him to the village ; but it 

 was not so ordered, and he arrived at Montserrat. 

 Here he consecrated his arms to the Virgin, declared 

 himself her knight, and proceeded to the hospital at 

 Manresa, a small place not far from Montserrat, 

 where he fasted rigorously, scourged himself, neither 

 cut his nails nor combed his hair, and prayed seven 

 hours a-day. He begged his bread, bread and water 

 being his only food, and, eating very sparingly, he 

 gave what remained to others. In the condition 

 to which he was thus reduced, visions haunted him, 

 and tempted him. Recollections arose of his birth 

 nnd breeding, his former station, his former habits of 

 life, these compared with his present sitviation, in an 

 hospital, in filth and in rags, the companion of beg- 

 gars ! This temptation he at once quelled and pun- 

 ished, by drawing closer to the beggar at his side, 

 and courting more familiarity with him. He then 

 shrank from the prospect of living in this painful, 

 and, as he could not but feel it to be, beastly life, till 

 the threescore and ten years of mortal existence 

 should be numbered : Could he bear this ? The 

 question, he thought, came from Satan , to Satan he 

 replied triumphantly, by asking him if it was in his 

 power to insure life to him for a single hour ; and he 

 comforted and strengthened himself by comparing the 

 longest span of human life to eternity. It is affirmed 

 that, at this time, he was entranced from one Sunday 

 to another, lying, all that while, so apparently lifeless, 

 that certain pious persons would have had him buried, 

 if others had not thought it necessary first to ascer- 

 tain whether he were dead, and, in so doing, felt a 

 taint pulsation at the heart. He awoke from this 

 ecstasy, as from a sweet sleep, sighing forth the 

 name of Jesus. Orlandini says it is a pious and 

 probable conjecture, that, as great mysteries were 

 revealed to Paul, when he was wrapt into the third 

 heaven, so, during these seven days, the form and 

 constitution of the society, which he was to found, 

 were manifested to Ignatius. It is pretended that he 

 retired from Manresa to a cave in a rock, not far 

 from that city. The cave was dark, and not unlike a 

 sepulchre, but, for this incommodiousness, as well as 

 for its solitude, and the beauty of the narrow vale, 

 where thorns and brushwood concealed it, the more 

 agreeable to him. Having remained some ten 

 months at Manresa, a city which, his biographers 

 sny, he undoubtedly regards with peculiar favour in 

 heaven, as the cradle of his Christian infancy, and 

 the school of his first evangelical discipline, he deter- 

 mined upon going to Jerusalem, less for the desire of 

 seeing those places which had been hallowed by the 

 presence of our Lord than in the hope of converting 

 some of the infidels, who were masters of the holy 

 land, or of gaining the palm of martyrdom in the 

 attempt, for of this he was most ambitious. A dan- 

 gerous passage of five days brought him to Gaeta, 

 from whence he proceeded to Rome on foot. This 

 was a painful and perilous journey. It was seldom 



that he was admitted into a town, or under a roof, for 

 fear of the plague, his appearance being that of a 

 man who, if not stricken with the disease, had recently 

 recovered from it ; and, for the most part, he was 

 fain to lie down, at night, in a porch, or in the open 

 air. He reached Rome, however, where there was 

 either not the same alarm, or not the same vigilance. 

 At Venice, he begged his bread, and slept on the 

 ground, till a wealthy Spaniard, recognising him for 

 a countryman, took him to his house, and afterwards 

 introduced him to the doge, from whom he obtained 

 a free passage to Cyprus. From Jaffa, he proceeded, 

 with other pilgrims, to Jerusalem, in the usual man- 

 ner ; and, when they alighted from their asses, on 

 the spot where the friars were waiting with the cross 

 to receive them, and when they had the first sight of 

 the holy city, all were sensible of what they deemed 

 an emotion of supernatural delight. He now began 

 his return to Spain, more unprovided even than he 

 had left it. Ko difficulty occurred in re-crossing to 

 Cyprus. He had obtained a good character from his 

 fellow-pilgrims, and they, having taken their passage 

 from that island in a large Venetian ship, besought 

 the captain to give him a passage, as one for whose 

 holy conversation they could vouch. The Venetian 

 captain was no believer in such holiness, and he re- 

 plied that a saint could not possibly want a ship to 

 convey him across the sea, when he might walk upon 

 the water, as so many others had done. The master 

 of a smaller vessel was more compassionate ; and 

 this, though so much less sea-worthy than the other 

 that none of the other pilgrims embarked in her, 

 reached Italy safely, after a perilous voyage, while 

 the other was wrecked. He had been warned of the 

 danger to which he would be exposed, in travelling 

 from Ferrara to Genoa, where the French and Spanish 

 armies were in the field, by botli which he must pass, 

 with the likelihood of being apprehended as a spy by 

 both. Some Spanish soldiers, into whose company he 

 fell, pointed out another route. But Ignatius liked 

 to put himself in the way of tribulation ; the more 

 suffering, the greater merit, and, consequently, the 

 more contentment ; and he was contented according- 

 ly, when, upon attempting to enter a walled town, 

 which was in possession of the Spaniards, he was 

 seized and searched as a spy. The journey to Jeru- 

 salem, notwithstanding all the hardships which he 

 endured in it, had so greatly improved his health, that 

 he thought the relaxation of austerity in his course 

 of life, which had been enjoined him as a duty, had 

 ceased to be allowable, having now ceased to be ne- 

 cessary. He did not, indeed, resume his former mode 

 of apparel, in its full wretchedness; but he clad him- 

 self as meanly as he could, and cut the soles of his 

 shoes in such a manner as to let the gravel in, and 

 also to prepare for himself a further refinement of 

 discomfort, for the fragments of sole which he had 

 left, were soon worn away, while the upper-leather 

 remained, and thus he contrived to walk, in winter, 

 with his bare feet on the earth, and yet no one sus- 

 pected that he was thus meritoriously afflicting him- 

 self. 



In 1524, he returned to Barcelona, and began to 

 study grammar. After a residence of two years he 

 went to the university of Alcala, where he found 

 some adherents ; but the inquisition imprisoned him 

 for his conduct, which appeared strange, and rendered 

 him suspected of witchcraft. He was not delivered 

 from the prison of the holy office until 1528, when he 

 went to Paris to continue his studies, the subjects of 

 which, indeed, were only works of an ascetic charac- 

 tei. Here he became acquainted with several Span- 

 iards and Frenchmen, who were afterwards noted 

 as his followers ; as Lainez, Salmeron, Bovadilla, 

 Rodriguez, Pierre Favre, and others. (See Lainez, 



