It was then that Ignatius Loyola appeared upon the stage, when Luther was in the midst of his victories, and when new ideas were shaking the pontifical throne.  The desponding successor of the Gregorys and the Clements knew not where to look for aid in that crisis of peril and revolution.  The monastic orders composed his regular army, but they had become so corrupted that they had lost the reverence of the people.  The venerable Benedictines had ceased to be men of prayer and contemplation as in the times of Bernard and Anselm, and were revelling in their enormous wealth.  The cloisters of Cluniacs and Cistercians—­branches of the Benedictines—­were filled with idle and dissolute monks.  The famous Dominicans and Franciscans, who had rallied to the defence of the Papacy three centuries before,—­those missionary orders that had filled the best pulpits and the highest chairs of philosophy in the scholastic age,—­had become inexhaustible subjects of sarcasm and mockery, for they were peddling relics and indulgences, and quarrelling among themselves.  They were hated as inquisitors, despised as scholastics, and deserted as preachers; the roads and taverns were filled with them.  Erasmus laughed at them, Luther abused them, and the Pope reproached them.  No hope from such men as these, although they had once been renowned for their missions, their zeal, their learning, and their preaching.

At this crisis Loyola and his companions volunteered their services, and offered to go wherever the Pope should send them, as preachers, or missionaries, or teachers, instantly, without discussion, conditions, or rewards.  So the Pope accepted them, made them a new order of monks; and they did what the Mendicant Friars had done three hundred years before,—­they fanned a new spirit, and rapidly spread over Europe, over all the countries to which Catholic adventurers had penetrated, and became the most efficient allies that the popes ever had.

This was in 1540, six years after the foundation of the Society of Jesus had been laid on the Mount of Martyrs, in the vicinity of Paris, during the pontificate of Paul III.  Don Inigo Lopez de Recalde Loyola, a Spaniard of noble blood and breeding, at first a page at the court of King Ferdinand, then a brave and chivalrous soldier, was wounded at the siege of Pampeluna.  During a slow convalescence, having read all the romances he could find, he took up the “Lives of the Saints,” and became fired with religious zeal.  He immediately forsook the pursuit of arms, and betook himself barefooted to a pilgrimage.  He served the sick in hospitals; he dwelt alone in a cavern, practising austerities; he went as a beggar on foot to Rome and to the Holy Land, and returned at the age of thirty-three to begin a course of study.  It was while completing his studies at Paris that he conceived and formed the “Society of Jesus.”