Now, in these names are found truly personified the inspirations which constitute, in its plenitude, the veritable spirit of Christianity.
First, the spirit of zeal and apostleship. Those who have seen the frescoes of the church of St. Ignatius at Rome remember with what just pride a Jesuit painter has represented the triumphs of the first fathers of his company over heresy and infidelity. { 66} And unless blinded by incurable prejudices, what a striking comparison can one make between Melanchthon, the disciple of Luther, and that student of the Paris University, the friend of St. Ignatius--that St. Francis Xavier who, setting out for the Indies in 1541 and dying in 1552, had converted, by himself alone, more heathen in a dozen years than all the Protestant missionaries united have been able to convert in a century; that man whose life would seem but a legend of olden times, were it not authenticated by most unexceptionable documents, and had it not appeared in the sixteenth century, which is far less the age of enthusiasm than that of criticism--that man, in fine, to whom a Protestant, Baldeus, has had the impartiality to render a splendid eulogy, closing with that apostrophe so _naïve_ and nearly as honorable to the writer as to the hero, "Would to God that, having been what you were, you might be of us!"
If the Company of Jesus represents in so high a degree the spirit of zeal, behold St. Theresa and St. Peter of Alcantara, who represent none the less worthily the spirit of penitence--that essential part of the Christian life, so entirely foreign to the heroes and the works which spring forth from Protestantism.
In contrast with the rehabilitation of the flesh, openly preached and practised by Luther, by Henry VIII., by the Landgrave of Hesse and the principal corypheuses of the Reformation, see how, in the train of these two Spaniards--that reformer of Carmel and that son of St. Francis--whole generations follow. They embrace with enthusiasm that hidden life of the cloister, where the superficial glance of the man of the world sees only an arbitrary captivity and aimless mortifications; but where the eyes of faith discover the secret of those acts and movements of reparation which preserve from ignominy and ruin the ages dragged along the dangerous declivity of scepticism and immorality, by teaching men that, if unbelief and luxury destroy individuals and societies, it is the force of prayer, united to that of sacrifice, which alone can raise them up again.
