Canisius began by preaching sermons at court, and to the people, by catechising children, and by seizing every possible opportunity of doing good.  Then the plague broke out, and he devoted himself to the stricken.  The Pope proclaimed a jubilee, and Canisius profited by the occasion to vindicate the honour of indulgences.  His method everywhere seems to have been to do the next, the obvious thing, whatever it might be, and to throw himself heart and soul into it.  Not content with his work in the city, he evangelised the country places.  The poorest hamlets attracted him most, and as he went on his way, he instructed, consoled, heard the confessions of a life-time, gave the sacraments to the living and the dying, and brought back many hundreds of lost sheep to the fold.  He continued to work thus without a break during the winter months, among people who were Christian but in name, intemperance, ignorance, and long neglect, having brutalised them almost beyond human reach.  But where he passed, every village changed its aspect; conversions little short of miraculous marked his progress everywhere.  Words that from the mouth of another might have returned unto him void, uttered by Canisius carried compunction into the hardest hearts.  It was his sanctity, his entire abnegation of self and whole-hearted dependence on the Divine Will, far more than his learning, vigour, or energy that gave his words wings, and worked wonders among this forsaken and degraded country folk; and his charity was such that he would have been well content to have laboured among them for the rest of his life.

But meanwhile Vienna was suffering from his absence, and all sorts and conditions of men clamoured for his return.  The episcopal see having become vacant, the king besought the Pope and St. Ignatius that it might be conferred on Father Canisius.  But the utmost he could obtain after long importunity was that Canisius should administer the affairs of the diocese for one year, pending the election of a bishop, with the proviso that he should not touch a single farthing of the rich revenues belonging to the see, which he was to govern as a simple religious.

The arrangement was one admirably adapted to the restoration of order in the existing state of chaos, while no sacrifice of its discipline was forced on the Society by the promotion of one of its members to rank and dignity.

Canisius was afterwards made Dean of the University, in the hope that he would do for it what he had already done for Ingolstadt, and he set about the work in the same masterly fashion that distinguished all his schemes of reform.  His first act was to obtain a royal decree, limiting the admission of professors to those who had submitted themselves to a rigorous examination in religious doctrine, and had given irrefragable proofs of orthodoxy.  The same conditions were in future to be exacted of all who presented themselves for degrees.  The university teemed with Lutheran literature; it was swept away by the same inexorable root-and-branch measures that had been so successfully employed at Ingolstadt.