He next tools away from the students all heretical books, and obtained from Duke William a mandate, forbidding the booksellers to sell such.  He abolished gambling, to which the students had been much addicted.  He settled disputes between them and their professors, and the ancient rules and regulations concerning studies ceased to be a dead letter.  His words animated his hearers with a love of work, creating a stimulus and a desire to excel.  He re-established the unjustly discredited syllogistic form of argument, and reverted to the learning of the Schools in its primitive purity, deprived of the excrescences with which would-be scholars had disfigured it.  Lastly, he succeeded in freeing the University from every reproach of immorality and license, and this was, perhaps, his most signal victory at Ingolstadt.  The annals of the University abundantly testify to the greatness of the work accomplished.

At the end of his six months’ rectorship, Canisius gave an account of his administration, and declined the chancellorship then offered to him.  Ingolstadt, in that short space of time, had been transformed, and in order to perpetuate the benefits conferred on it, the Duke resolved to found a college to be handed over to the sons of St. Ignatius.

Next to Bavaria, Austria was to share in the blessings which the very presence of Canisius seemed to draw down from Heaven, but the whole German-speaking world clamoured for his possession.  The Bishop of Saxony entreated him to come and change the deplorable state of his diocese.  Duke Albert, son and successor of William iv., stoutly maintained that he was needed at Ingolstadt, and that he could not suffer him to leave it; while St. Ignatius was besieged with demands for the services of his most learned disciple.  The Prince-Bishop of Freising and the Bishop of Eichstadt each claimed him as his theologian at the Council of Trent.  Ferdinand, King of the Romans, urged that “the Light of Germany” should be instantly sent to the capital of the Austrian dominions, then plunged in the darkness of heresy.  Pope Julius iii. solved the difficulty by desiring that he should proceed at once to Vienna, and St. Ignatius softened the blow to Duke Albert in these words:  “The formal demand of his Holiness obliges me to send Father Canisius to Vienna, but without taking him absolutely from your Highness; I am merely lending him to the King of the Romans for a time, after which he shall return to Ingolstadt.”

The capital of Austria had fallen a complete prey to heresy.  For twenty years not a single priest had been ordained there; religious vocations were no longer heard of.  Scarcely the twentieth part of the population had remained Catholic.  Three hundred country parishes near the city were entirely without priests.  The University, instead of providing a remedy, aggravated the existing evils by a teaching that was more or less heterodox.  Society, moreover, was rotten to the core, and needed to be entirely reconstructed.  Such was the condition of things when, at the call of the feeble but devout Ferdinand I., Blessed Peter Canisius arrived at Vienna in March 1552.  Thirteen of his religious brethren had preceded him by nearly a year, and had opened a college which already promised well.