it was but too certain pestilence, and the Moorish arrows, that the last of the crusaders was drawing near his end. From his resting-place, the castle of Carthage, Louis could look out upon the burning sands of the shore, the molten sea, the sky of burnished brass; he could watch the southern winds sweep the sharp dust of the desert into the camp of his followers; could behold the African horsemen hovering around his devoted troops, destroying every straggler. Leaning with his thin, feeble hands upon the battlements, he looked toward the bay where floated the ship in which his favorite son lay sick, stricken by the plague which was consuming so many; which even then had fastened upon the king's own blood. With tearful, anxious, yet patient and confiding eyes, he watched the vessel just moving in the roll of the bay under that August sun, and prayed to God and Jesus that his son might live, and his brother quickly come. His prayer was not granted; on the third of August, the Count of Nevers died; on the eleventh, his death was told to his father; on the morning of the twentyfifth, the fleet of Charles of Anjou had not yet appeared. Meanwhile the poison in the veins of the monarch had through twenty-one days been working, and none yet knew whether he would live or die. From his sick-bed he had sent messages of comfort and resignation to the sick around him ; on his bed of weakness and pain he had finished those advices to his successor which should be engraved in adamant, and given to every king and king's son to grow better by. "Hold to justice," such are some of his words, "be inflexible and true, turning neither to the right hand nor the left, and sustain the cause of the poor until justice be done him. If any one has to do with thee, be for him and against thyself. Beware of beginning war, . . . . and if it be begun, spare the church and the innocent. Appease all quarrels that thou canst. see that they do their duty. bounds." Procure good officers, and So passed the closing hours of the French king. During the night of the twenty-fourth of August, he asked to be taken from his bed, and laid, unworthy sinner that he was, on a bed of ashes. His request was complied with; and so he lay, his hands crossed, his eyes fixed upon the suffering form of his Saviour, until some three hours after the next midday. Those who sat by, and saw how breath failed him, drew the curtains of the window to admit the slight breeze that curled the waters of the bay, and looked out, carelessly, into the August afternoon. Afar off, a fleet was just coming in sight, the long-expected fleet of Anjou. With beating hearts they knelt and told the royal invalid on his couch of ashes; but his ear was deaf, his eye lifeless, his jaw fallen. Make ready your spices to embalm his body, poor threadbare garment that it is! And issue your bulls to embalm his memory as a saint, for as such already his name is aromatic in the mouths of men! Truly a saint; not faultless, -neither was Peter; not intellectually omnipotent,- neither was John; not an overturner, he would render Cæsar's dues to Cæsar, God's to God. We have said he was no radical; perhaps we erred; there is no truly radical, root-reaching reform that does not flow from the infinite in man's heart and conscience; the finite, in his mind, is much, but always superficial, not radical. Glory to Louis the Ninth! glory to all who have reformed as their Master did, from the centre outward! Let him be Saint Louis, the Holy Louis, the divinely enlightened Louis! And let us of Protestantism weep that it is so hard for us to raise our true and noble men, our heroes and earthly saviours, our Eliots, Hampdens, and Cromwells, Washingtons and Jays, into saints also, for ever to be revered. IV. THE FOUNDER OF THE JESUITS.* THE Jesuits! It is a word of terror which M. Michelet and his friend utter in the ears of their country men, of terror even to many of their Catholic brethren. Nor is the dread of this long slumbering, but now reawakening, body confined to France. Jesuitism is spreading, and silently acquiring strength, in the United States; for good or for evil, it is gaining ground among us; and many, whose eyes are open to the fact, see in our future history auto-da-fes and inquisitions, and Protestantism destroyed by a new St. Bar. tholomew. Under these circumstances, we have thought that a sketch of the founder of Jesuitism, of his purposes and constitutions, might be interesting and even useful. It was in the year 1491, that the word spread from the ancestral castle up into the valleys of Guipuzcoa, that another son was born to the noble house of Ogner and Loyola. Already had Don Bertram seven sons and three daughters, before the birth of Ignatius, the last born of the family. And what a world was that upon which his eyes first opened! In Germany, a little, fair-haired Martin Luther, eight years old, was gathering fagots with his mother in the woods of Mansfield. In Florence, a polished, treacherous Lorenzo de * Des Jésuites. Par MM. MICHELET et QUINET. Paris: 1843. From the North American Review, for October, 1844. Medici, worn out with gout and intrigue, was preparing to take to his death-bed, and sue, without success, to the haughty, unhappy monk Savonarola, for absolution. In Rome, a Roderic Borgia, the incarnation of evil, was looking forward to the day when, as Alexander the Sixth, he should preside over the Christian Church. In Spain itself, the Moor was fighting his last battles, and breathing his last sigh, and Columbus was standing ready to prove with his life the truth of his bold speculations. Ignatius had not yet walked alone, or mastered his first word, before Granada yielded, Lorenzo died, Columbus sailed, and the Holy College, guarded by armed men, chose the vilest churchman of Christendom as its supreme head. Six years of his life passed by, and the youngest son of Loyola, handsome, intelligent, proud, ambitious, was already destined to the life of a courtier, and given as a page to Ferdinand the Catholic, when that same overbearing monk, Savonarola, who had refused absolution to the chief of Florence unless he would restore freedom to his country, and all that he had usurped from them to his neighbours, stood forth against the abominable Borgia, and on the birthday of his Saviour proclaimed it as a revelation made to him from God, that he was not to obey the corrupt see of Rome. Men looked on admiring, and fancied the day of retribution had Not yet; this was but the first blush of its morning, and their admiration and fancy died with the unhappy Dominican, whose weak recantations, a year later, were mingled with the hissing of his blood on the coals which were consuming him. The day was not yet; the great champions were not ready; the little Martin was now a stout scholar of fifteen, singing for bread at Magdeburg and Eisenach; Ignatius, a boy of seven, was waiting on his most Catholic Majesty. come. Years pass away; vast events, to our eyes vague and ghost-like, flit across the stage of European history. Spain and France-mighty burglars — agree to enter, and divide the booty of Naples; they enter it, quarrel, and Spain remains mistress. Charles is born, heir to Austria, and Aragon, and Burgundy, and Castile. Cæsar Borgia rages like a wolf through the whole centre of Italy. Venice, that mighty monster of the sea, contends with Turkey, France, the Emperor, the Pope, the Duke of Ferrara, the Marquis of Mantua, and Ferdinand of Aragon; and yet, though the ocean is red with her blood, lives and fights on. The Pope Borgia dies,dies of his own poison-cup, prepared for another, but seized on thoughtlessly by himself after riding on a warm day; he and Cæsar both drink; the latter outlives it, being plunged by his physicians into the warm and reeking entrails of a mule; but the father is too gross, and dies, and the armed head of Julius fills his place. Amid all this confused hubbub, Luther sits quietly at Erfurt, studying his Thomas Aquinas, his Cicero and Virgil, but above all, when once found, David, and Isaiah, and John, and Paul, and Jesus. Quietly he sits there, his half-muttered exclamations of delight hardly audible in that world of contest and dispute; and yet within him is preparing matter with noise enough in it to make all Europe rock. Little Charles of Spain, heir to so many thrones, a lad of some three years old, never once suspects, as he plays with his golden tassels, that so much trouble for his future life is preparing in the centre of Germany. But so it was ordained; by study, by sickness, by the murder of his friend, by the lightning of heaven, Luther is led on, forced on, till we see him, in the night-time, knocking for admission at the hermithouse of St. Augustine. The Saint admits him, bestows his own name upon him, and, to uproot the pride of his heart, sends him forth to beg bread of his old friends. He is not merely in Augustine's house, and bearing the name of Augustine; but the writings of the old African become, by intense study through ten years, first at Erfurt, then at Witten |
