Upon this basis of the amount of work done, as well as its intrinsic character, shown by the results, I was going to draw some inferences with regard to the amount of the temporal endowments, which must have been required to support such a vast organization, and must have been vested in the Order by the Christian world. One might compare the work done with what Oxford accomplishes; and, seeing that the latter university supplies the facilities for higher education, and that far from gratuitously, to only a couple of thousands among the nobility and gentry, then, since it spends upon this an annual revenue of $2,500,000, how much would be required to conduct the education of a quarter of a million of students? Our arithmetic would feel oppressed by the calculation.
But the calculation is not necessary. It is quite evident that religious poverty gave the key to the situation,--poverty, self-abnegation, the resignation of all temporal considerations in life, by men who had no families to provide for, no station to acquire; who had themselves given up every station, from that of the clerical benefice, or the liberal and martial careers, to ducal coronets, princedoms, and even royalty; men therefore, who were bestowing with themselves, and in themselves, the essential endowment of education upon the world, and who needed only to have that supplemented with the few temporal necessities still remaining. And the conclusion to be drawn seems to be this. The Christian world, whether ruler or people, republic or municipality, was making a safe and lucrative investment, whether at home or abroad, in the midst of civilization or of barbarism, when it consigned the absolute use of sufficient temporalities to a world-wide faculty, inspired by the sentiment of religious devotion.
For what is the object of any religious society whatsoever? It is to complete in each of its members the duties of the man, the citizen and the Christian, with other duties called "religious," which, correlative with the former, are nevertheless distinct from them. They are duties which presuppose the moral virtues, the civil and Christian virtues, and tend to complete them with the highest qualities to which perfect Christianity aspires, those of self-devotion and religious self-consecration.