The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Part 6

"St. Ignatius praised him not only on account of other great merits, but particularly for devising and arranging the system of colleges."

As to the number of students found under a unified method of thorough teaching, it will be interesting to take them in review.

In Rome in 1584, the twenty colleges attending cla.s.ses in the Roman College numbered 2108 students, in Poland there were 10,000 young men chiefly of the n.o.bility, at Rome 2000, at La Fleche 1700. In the seventeenth century at the College of Louis le Grand, in Paris, the number varied between 2000 and 3000. In 1627 the Province of Paris had in fourteen colleges 13,195 students.

The papal seminaries under Gregory XIII, at Vienna, Dillengen, Fulda, Prague, Gratz, Olmutz, Wilna, as well as in j.a.pan, were directed by the Fathers, as also that of Pius V and of St. Charles Borromeo at Milan.

Taking an average, there were more than two hundred thousand students being educated in these educational inst.i.tutions.

A comparison could be made on this basis of the work done by the Order and that which is accomplished by Oxford.

If Oxford spends annually a revenue of $2,500,000 to supply facilities for higher education to two thousand of the n.o.bility and gentry, how much would be required to educate a quarter of a million students,--not two thousand, but two hundred and fifty thousand?

The fundamental principles in the educational inst.i.tute of St.

Ignatius were these:--

First, solidity and thoroughness.

The first condition of all higher studies as well as of lower studies was such that, as St. Ignatius said, "It was useless to begin at the top, as the edifice without a good foundation would never stand."

Let literature and philosophy be gone through with satisfactorily, and then theology may be approached.

Literature must come first of all. St. Ignatius provides for law and medicine, but by professors of law and medicine outside of the Order; but no professors of the Order were sent for work outside of Jesuit inst.i.tutions. If the younger men were sent abroad, the younger generation would be deprived of that type; and if eminent men were sent forth without a permanent Jesuit College, the work would not be that of the Order, but of scattered individuals, and would soon perish.

In the cause of education St. Ignatius had placed in his charter the watchwords "Defence and Advance." As a leader of a military type he had gathered about him the flower of youth and of mature age, from college and university, from doctor's chair and prince's throne, and in fifteen years from the foundation of the Order left one hundred colleges and houses in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Germany, France, Brazil, and the East Indies. Xavier traveled from India and Ceylon, in the west, to Malucca, j.a.pan, and the coast of China on the east. Wherever the energy and activity of Apostolic zeal penetrated it was with the purpose, and usually the result, of permanent Apostolic work in the foundation of educational inst.i.tutions. Father de Backer says,--

"Wherever a Jesuit set his foot, wherever there was founded a house, a college, a mission, there too came apostles of another cla.s.s, who labored, who taught, who wrote."

This is true even to our day where in the Rocky Mountains, beside the mission house of Spokane Falls, rises the Jesuit College of Spokane.

Sixty years later than the time of St. Ignatius there were 272 colleges, and in 150 years the collegiate and university houses of education numbered 769.

"Looking at these seven hundred inst.i.tutions of secondary and superior education," says Father Thomas Hughes in his work on Loyola, "in their scope of legislative executive power we find they were not so much a plurality of inst.i.tutions as a single one.

"If we look at the 92 colleges in France, although the University of Paris was in one quarter of the city, and in that sense materially one,--although including 50 colleges,--yet in the formal and essential bond these 92 Jesuit colleges were vastly more of a unit as an identical educational power than any faculty existing. No faculty at Paris, Rome, Salamanca, or Oxford ever preserved the control over its 50, 20, or 8 colleges that each Provincial exercised over his 10, 20, or 30 colleges, or the general of the Order over the 700 colleges, with 22,126 members in the Order."

At the present day we find the Jesuit colleges in almost every part of the known world. In Rome and in China, in South Africa and North America, in the Philippine Islands as well as in Ceylon and Egypt, in Australia and Cuba, as well as in Syria and the city of New York.

We may glance briefly at the colleges scattered over the world, containing to-day 52,692 Jesuit pupils.

This is a larger number than those taught at Oxford and Cambridge and Glasgow and Harvard or Yale or Princeton or in Paris and Edinburgh.

In the Jesuit College at Rome there are 2082 students.