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Autobiography 7:11The Autobiography of St. IgnatiusToward the first of October, the feast of St. Remigius, he began his course under the preceptor Master John Pegna, with the intention of fostering the vocations of those who wished to serve God. He intended to add others in order the more freely to give his mind to his studies. He followed the lectures in philosophy, and experienced the same temptations with which he had been assailed when studying grammar at Barcelona. During the lectures he was troubled by so many spiritual thoughts that he could not listen attentively. Accordingly, as he saw he was making but little progress in his studies, he spoke to his preceptor and promised to attend the lectures, as long as he could find bread and water enough to keep him alive. After making this promise, all these untimely devotions ceased to disturb him, and he quietly pursued his studies. He was at this period a friend of Peter Faber and Francis Xavier, whom he afterward led to the service of God by giving them the Exercises. During the last years he was not persecuted as at first. Speaking of this to him one day, Doctor Fragus remarked that he was surprised that no one molested him. Ignatius replied: "This is owing to the fact that I do not speak on religious topics. But when the course is completed, we shall act as formerly."Autobiography 8:27The Autobiography of St. IgnatiusAt the University of Paris, in 1534, on the 14th of March, St. Ignatius received the degree of Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy, having received the degree of Bachelor of Arts two years before. The University of Paris had the honor of having as pupils St. Ignatius, St. Francis Xavier, Peter Faber, Claude le Jay, Simon Rodriguez, John Codura, Paschasius, Brouet, Martin Olave, all honored with the academic degree.Autobiography 8:81The Autobiography of St. IgnatiusAmong the colleges founded in the chief cities of the world are Loyola College, at Loyola in Spain; St. Omer's College, in Belgium, the link between Europe and America; Stonyhurst College, in England; Clongoes Wood, Ireland; Mangalore, in India, the only first-grade college in the district; Melbourne, Australia; St. Ignatius College, California, the pioneer of Pacific coast missions and of the Rocky Mountains; at Kansas City the only boarding college in the far West; St. Ignatius, at Cleveland, Ohio, one of the latest Western colleges; Spring Hill College, at Mobile, Alabama; Georgetown College, at Washington, D.C.; Holy Cross College, at Worcester, Massachusetts; St. John's College, at Fordham, New York; St. Francis Xavier's College, in New York City.The Essay 9:3An Essay on the Development of Christian DoctrineIt seems, then, that we have to deal with a case something like the following: Certain doctrines come to us, professing to be Apostolic, and possessed of such high antiquity that, though we are only able to assign the date of their formal establishment to the fourth, or the fifth, or the eighth, or the thirteenth century, as it may happen, yet their substance may, for what appears, be coeval with the Apostles, and be expressed or implied in texts of Scripture. Further, these existing doctrines are universally considered, without any question, in each age to be the echo of the doctrines of the times immediately preceding them, and thus are continually thrown back to a date indefinitely early, even though their ultimate junction with the Apostolic Creed be out of sight and unascertainable. Moreover, they are confessed to form one body one with another, so that to reject one is to disparage the rest; and they include within the range of their system even those primary articles of faith, as the Incarnation, which many an impugner of the said doctrinal system, as a system, professes to accept, and which, do what he will, he cannot intelligibly separate, whether in point of evidence or of internal character, from others which he disavows. Further, these doctrines occupy the whole field of theology, and leave nothing to be supplied, except in detail, by any other system; while, in matter of fact, no rival system is forthcoming, so that we have to choose between this theology and none at all. Moreover, this theology alone makes provision for that guidance of opinion and conduct, which seems externally to be the special aim of Revelation; and fulfils the promises of Scripture, by adapting itself to the various problems of thought and practice which meet us in life. And, further, it is the nearest approach, to say the least, to the religious sentiment, and what is called ethos, of the early Church, nay, to that of the Apostles and Prophets; for all will agree so far as this, that Elijah, Jeremiah, the Baptist, and St. Paul are in their history and mode of life (I do not speak of measures of grace, no, nor of doctrine and conduct, for these are the points in dispute, but) in what is external and meets the eye (and this is no slight resemblance when things are viewed as a whole and from a distance),--these saintly and heroic men, I say, are more like a Dominican preacher, or a Jesuit missionary, or a Carmelite friar, more like St. Toribio, or St. Vincent Ferrer, or St. Francis Xavier, or St. Alphonso Liguori, than to any individuals, or to any classes of men, that can be found in other communions. And then, in addition, there is the high antecedent probability that Providence would watch over His own work, and would direct and ratify those developments of doctrine which were inevitable.The Everlasting Man 2:5The Everlasting ManNow the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-headed cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering headdresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer-book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.The Everlasting Man 2:16The Everlasting ManSo also in the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know; we believe every common Indian conjurer who chooses to come to us and talk in the same style. If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, it would never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith. I do not propose in this book to follow the alleged example of St. Francis Xavier with the opposite imaginative intention, and turn the Twelve Apostles into Mandarins; not so much to make them look like natives as to make them look like foreigners. I do not propose to work what I believe would be a completely successful practical joke; that of telling the whole story of the Gospel and the whole history of the Church in a setting of pagodas and pigtails; and noting with malignant humour how much it was admired as a heathen story in the very quarters where it is condemned as a Christian story. But I do propose to strike wherever possible this note of what is new and strange, and for that reason the style even on so serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and fanciful. I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things. And I say that in both cases, when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural things. They do not fade into the rest with the colours of impressionism; they stand out from the rest with the colours of heraldry; as vivid as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on a ground of gold. So stands the Red Clay against the green field of nature, or the White Christ against the red clay of his race.May 10:13The Roman MartyrologyAt Madrid, [in the year 1175,] the holy Isidore the husbandman, famous for wonders, whom Pope Gregory XV enrolled in the list of the Saints along with holy Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Teresa, and Philip Neri.December 3:2The Roman MartyrologyIn the island of San-Chan, in the Canton River, in China, holy Francis Xavier of the Society of Jesus, Apostle of the Indies, illustrious for the conversion of the Gentiles, for gifts and miracles, who died, (in the year 1552,) full of good works and labours, upon this present 2nd day of December, but his feast is kept upon the morrow by order of Alexander VII.