The next care of the reformer was to petition the king for a seminary wherein the ranks of the clergy, thinned almost to extinction, might be reinforced by men carefully trained to a due appreciation of their high calling.  The result was the foundation of the seminary of priests of noble family, recruited mainly from the college which the Jesuits had opened at Vienna, and to which had flocked students from all the great families of Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, etc.  In conjunction with this seminary, St. Ignatius, about the same tune, founded the celebrated German College in Rome, for the regeneration of Germany by means of a clergy that should be as learned as it was morally irreproachable.

In the midst of his multifarious occupations, Canisius continued his sermons at court, in the Cathedral, and in the principal churches of Vienna.  Lutherans frequented them largely, and some, touched by the power of his doctrine and eloquence, asked him for conferences, which he gladly accorded them.  Among these were two preachers of some celebrity, pillars of Protestantism, who defied him to answer their arguments in a public disputation.  He accepted the challenge, and the day, place, and hour were fixed.  A great concourse of people, composed largely of the new sectaries, were assembled, prepared to swell the expected triumph of their champions.  The two heretical doctors held their dissertations, one after the other, and sat down amid the applause of their sympathisers.  Then Canisius stood up with religious modesty and humility, his bearing expressive of the calmness and benevolence of one who has the whole Catholic Church, past and present, on his side.  His prodigious memory and profound knowledge enabled him to refute easily every charge brought by his adversaries, whom he completely crushed with the overwhelming consistency of his logic.  They both acknowledged themselves defeated; one returned to the Catholic Church, and a few months later entered the Society of Jesus, of which he remained an edifying member till his death; the other became a more determined advocate of heresy than before, and swore to avenge his defeat by a persistent persecution of the Jesuits.

Nor were enemies wanting on any side; the more converts the Jesuits made, the greater was the hatred they inspired.  Calumnies were sown broadcast, and the life of Father Canisius was in constant danger.  Ferdinand, warned of a plot to murder the holy man, obliged him, greatly to his discomfiture, to accept a bodyguard whenever he went out.  But the work of reform and conversion went on steadily, and from all parts of Germany, bishops, princes, and governors sought to obtain the presence of the illustrious apostle.  “I am ready,” he wrote in this regard to St. Ignatius, “to go wherever obedience calls me, and to work for the salvation of souls however abandoned they may be, whether in Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Tartary, or China, wherever I am sent.”