CHAPTER II
THE Excalibur of Ignatius was now forged; the Spiritual Exercises which he had evolved from his own experience at Manresa — a graduated process of religious preparation based on subtle spiritual psychology — a turnstile through which only the|,s|g., fit and few could pass.
Taught by experience that over-austerity not only crippled the body for practical work, but was an impediment in the religious life, he mitigated the extremity of his fasts and penances. At all points he had been perfervid, and he checked his perfervour, the natural error of his strenuous impetuosity. Crucifix of Ignatius
He had neglected his appearance, and suffered his nails to grow, till the boys jeered at the unkempt, unshorn man as "Father Sack." Now, to shun singularity, he trimmed his hair a little, and changed his sackcloth for two short coats of rough grey, with a cap of like colour. He put on shoes; and with a rosary round his neck was ready for travel. Lamented by all of good repute in Manresa, he took leave of Dona Ines, and started for Barcelona, companioned by her brother. Canon Antonio Pujol, Master of Ceremonies and confessor to the Archbishop of Tarragona. From Barcelona he would embark for Gaeta, go thence to Rome, where he must obtain his pilgrim's licence from the Pope, and thence to 33 E
Venice for Cyprus and the East. It was a dangerous journey, for Rhodes had fallen, and the Turks were masters in the Mediterranean, which their vessels swept. He had no money for his passage; but this never troubled him. Uniformly he waited on Providence for such matters. At Barcelona he had to tarry for a ship; and consumed the time after the manner which he made his rule during such temporary sojourn in any town, and which may here be stated once for all. Seven hours were given to prayer: during the remainder he tended the sick, begged in the streets, and distributed what he received among the poor, after satisfying his own scanty needs.
He had left an Ines at Manresa; here, too, the charity and piety of woman awaited him. Dona Isabel Roser was living a retired religious life, and caring for her blind husband. In the church of Santa Maria del Mar — Our Lady of the Sea — listening to a sermon, she saw, sitting on the altarsteps, a grey, emaciated man, with a cluster of children about him. It seemed to her that a halo compassed his head, and an inward urgence bade her summon him. She feared an hallucination; but, after returning home and taking counsel with her husband, sought Ignatius out, and brought him back to share their meal. His talk of spiritual things exercised the spell which it never failed to exercise on those of any goodwill, and it was the beginning of a long friendship.
One service Dona Isabel did him at once. She advised him against the crazy ship by which he was about to travel. He deferred to the counsel; and the ship in fact perished at sea. In another vessel he secured a passage for the love of God — a coin that is scarce current with skippers nowadays. But he had to find his own provisions, and in begging these (he would take nothing, be it noted, from Dona Isabel) he had a sharp encounter with another dame, who passed shrewd comment on Roman pilgrims in general and on the vagrancy of Ignatius in particular. Her son had turned vagabond, and this sharpened her tongue: but the humility of the Saint's answer moved Senora Cepilla Rocaberti to penitence and alms, so that he left behind him another friend,
From Gaeta he passed on foot to Rome; not without some adventure; for he rescued two female pilgrims attacked by a man in a house where they slept; and he was delayed in traversing a town by his haggard face, which suggested the plague. From Adrian VI. (that Cardinal Adrian who had been Viceroy of Spain during the War of the Comuneros) he received blessing and the pilgrim's licence, and then he departed for Venice. It was a dismal iourney. The money he had accepted for his passage he had, repenting, given in charity: the terror of the plague was on the land, and from his ghastly face, worn with illness and asceticism, folk fled in fear. Nor would Venice admit travellers without a health-certificate. Turning with others to Pisa for this purpose, and benighted on a plain, he was comforted by a vision of Christ, Who promised him guidance and protection. In the event, he traversed Pisa unquestioned; and in the boat, as it approached Venice, the city officials, who rigorously examined the certificates of his companions, passed him without noticing that he had none. Venice he entered by night, and lay down to sleep under the kindly shelter of arcades. But to a wealthy and charitable senator came, as it were, a voice in slumber: " What! sleepest thou in thy bed, when My poor servant and dear pilgrim lies so near thee on the bare stones i " He rose, and going forth with servants and torches found Ignatius, and brought him to his house. Marc Antonio Trevisani was this good man; afterwards he was Doge of Venice.
It was morning and Ignatius left the house; for, so much as might be, he would stay under rich roofs only for a night's shelter, as in an inn. The pilgrims' ship had sailed, but he refused to call on the ambassadors of his country: he had no further interest with Courts, said he, and friends would come at need. Accordingly a Biscayan merchant of his former acquaintance met him, and procured him free passage on the Admiral's ship, taking the Lieutenant-Governor to Cyprus. At this man's house he did stay till his departure, which he took despite a sickness that the doctors threatened would be fatal if he sailed. Sea-sickness, however, left him well; and then the crew, reproved by him for their libertine manners and language, bore up to set him on a desert island. He contented himself with prayer, and a storm beat them from the island to Cyprus, where it turned out that the pilgrims' ship was detained in Famagosta harbour. Ten leagues overland tramped Ignatius, "without visible means of subsistence"; and in due time was landed safely at Jaffa in Syria.
It was on the last day of August 1523 that he set foot in the Holy Land. He had left Manresa in January, after his ten months' solitary preparation. At noonday on September 4 the Franciscan Fathers came out from Jerusalem to meet them; and, headed by the cross, they entered the Holy City in solemn procession. Ignatius knelt at the spots of the Agony and Passion with kisses and tender ardour; but though his pilgrimage, to which he had been called as a preliminary of his work, was now accomplished, he still believed that his work lay here. The Franciscans undeceived him. He offered to support himself, that he might be no burthen on the poverty of the convent; and these terms they thought possible. But when matters were laid before the Provincial, who had been absent, he decided that the uncompromising fervour of Ignatius would be liable to embroil them with the Turks, whose regulations the Saint would never observe, and would endanger Ignatius's own liberty. He replied that he feared nothing, so long as he did not displease God; nor (let the modern missionary note it!) would he ask them to ransom him if he were arrested. The Provincial rejoined that by disobeying him the Saint would offend God, and required him to depart. Ignatius submitted, declining even to look at the Papal Bull, which conferred on the Provincial powers of saying "go'* or "stay." But, before leaving, he visited the Mount of Olives, to see the traditional print of Christ's foot in the rock — bribing the Turkish guard with a penknife! Scarce gone, he returned, to note toward what quarter the Sacred Foot was turned — producing this time, as his toll, a pair ot scissors. The monks meanwhile had taken alarm, and sent after him an Armenian servant. The fellow met him as he descended the mount, and roundly rated him, threatening him with his stick: but Ignatius beheld Christ before him in the air, and let himself be haled homeward filled with interior ioy.
Still hoping in a return he was never to make, he sailed for Cyprus. There were three vessels, a Turk and two Venetians. One Venetian, a goodly ship, refused him passage for love of God, bidding him walk on the water, as the Saints had done; the other, a crazy little craft, received him. The inhospitable ship went ashore on the Cyprus coast, her people barely escaping; the Turk foundered with all hands; and alone the little craft which bore the fortunes of the Jesuits made its stormy way to Venice. A few days' rest, with a charitable host, who gave him money for expenses, and a piece of cloth to double round him because of his weak stomach (for the Manresan penances had left
Ignatius, too, one of the world^s great dyspeptics), and he was forth on foot towards Spain.
For, during the voyage, he had reached an extraordinary decision. He was now clear that Palestine was not to be the nest of his Order; and while he was reading the Gospel in which it is said, '' They understood none of these things,'* it 41 F was borne in on him that without proper education his labours would be of none avail. Nothing strikes us with more amazed admiration than the unappalled determination which went straight to the root of every need, and stayed for no cost. As he had acted when he made the surgeons break and saw again his maimed leg (that leg which by its permanent halt and shortness reminded him what he had endured for world's glory), so he acted now. He resolved to set himself to school, to learn from the beginning his Latin rudiments, and sit among the lads. He did it. Among the children Isabel Roser had seen him sitting, with a light about his head: among the children he was to sit again, surely now too with a light about his head, though none might see it.
He started across the wind-swept Apennines to Genoa, through a country filled with French and Spanish troops. At Ferrara he got rid of his pieces; giving to one beggar after another who asked him in the cnurcn, tiii he had to avow himself penniless, and the astonished mendicants hailed him " A Saint! A Saint! " Then he was taken by Spanish outposts, and brought before their officer, stripped nigh naked by their search of him. He dreaded torture as a spy, and was sore tempted to resume courtly manners, in lieu of the rustic speech which his habitual thirst for contempt made him cultivate. But he resisted the temptation, and remained so dumb before his questioner that the officer asked the soldiers if they did not know a fool from a spy, and discharged him. On Ignatius they revenged the rebuke by beating him. In evil plight, he stumbled next on a French post, and was promptly haled before a French officer. The
Frenchman was better than his own compatriot, and ordered him to have every attention, saying that he came himself from near the Saint's native Guipuzcoa. At Genoa the commander of the Spanish galleys, Don Rodrigo Portundo, a Biscayan, recognised him and gave him passage to Barcelona. With Genoese Andrea Doria (fighting for France) at its heels, Ignatius's flotilla had much ado to make Barcelona.
There his present troubles had end. Isabel Roser received him; Ines Pascual was there, and gave him a room in her house; her brother. Canon Antonio Pujol, offered him the use of his library; and finally. Dona Isabel procured a schoolmaster who was ready to teach him [gratis^ she said) the rudiments of Latin and grammar. Now for two years Ignatius patiently learned his lessons among the boys, numbers of whom were for some time better and brighter scholars than himself. Though he curtailed some of his devotions to pursue these studies, he failed at first to fix his attention. Never was idle boy more distraught, amidst the drudgery of conjugations and declensions, by visions of green fields and happy sports than Ignatius by the religious raptures and sweetnesses which overtook him in his tasks. When he came to reckon results, he found he had profited nothing. But, he observed, he was arid enough when it came to hours of prayer. The raptures were all at the wrong time; and he perceived the trap. Forthwith he took Master Geronimo Ardebalo, his teacher, into that church of Santa Maria del Mar where Isabel Roser had first seen him among the children, accused himself of blameworthy yielding to these distractions, and begged him henceforth publicly to chasten him for such inattention, as he would any boy. At the same time he vowed to study two years with him if he could get bread and water. After this, he pursued his studies successfully, untroubled by further consolations.
He was now dressed in a decent black, of somewhat clerical look. We are told that he wore shoes — with the soles cut off, as an ingenious means of combining the requirements of penance with the absence of its ostentation. He wore also a hair-shirt under his black, begged his bread, and gave it away to the workmen and children about Ines*s house (which was half cotton factory). " Allow them to eat, it makes me happy," he would say when " Mother Pascual '' scolded the boys for taking it. Her son Juan afterwards declared on oath that he had seen Ignatius raised in prayer above two feet in the air, while his room was filled with a bright light. The Saint would talk with Ines's family at night about divine things, and tell the boy Juan to frequent the Sacraments, fear God's law, and obey his mother. " If you had known that guest of ours, so holy and so gentle, you would never tire of kissing the ground which his feet have touched," Juan would tell his children in later days.
It is an interesting link between two men diversely great, that Ignatius at this time, and ever after, read with delight Thomas a Kempis's " Imitation of Christ." It was his companion and exemplar: to him, as to George Eliot long afterwards, " the voice of a brother."
Ignatius soon had numerous admirers in Barcelona, among the fastidious no less than among the people, and, as always, many enemies. He was not far, indeed, from coming to his death. Outside the city was a certain Convent of the Angels, where the nuns were very relaxed, allowing the visits even of young men in no good repute. Ignatius determined to attempt its reform, and began to visit it daily, praying for hours before the altar. The nuns observed his fervour, and called one another to look at him. At last cheir curiosity led some of them to address him. He rose from before the altar, and, with that sweetness which all found irresistible, began sadly and seriously to expostulate with them on the scandal they gave and the peril they were bringing on their souls. His magnetism prevailed, and in successive visits the whole convent was drawn into his net. It returned to the observance of its rule, whereupon the young men, their pastime cut off, vowed revenge, and, after twice waylaying him to no purpose, hired two Moorish slaves to administer a more effective rebuke. The Moors did their work with trap de zele. They caught Ignatius on the road with poor Canon Antonio Pujol, and so savagely mauled them that the Canon died, and Ignatius was carried home insensible, where for long he lay at death's door. He could be moved only by lifting the sheet on which he lay, and that jolt caused him agony. At last the doctors pronounced his case hopeless, and he received th'c last Sacrament, and thereupon he recovered. Being Ignatius, one of his first acts, in the teeth of warning, was to go to the convent again. On the way a merchant, one Ribera, threw himself at his feet, avowed himself part-author of the outrage, and promised to reform his hfe. He had never intended to kill the Saint, who was, of course, no
Saint to common eyes, but merely an interfering layman; and he was moved to repentance chiefly by Ignatius's patience and charity in refusing any information which could have identified his assailants. We read the record of such uncomplaining abnegation; we admire, but do we imitate it r The flattery of the Saints in its sincerest form we continue to refuse them.
At Barcelona a great thing happened. There, and for the first time, Ignatius encountered men whom he judged fit to become his disciples. Many were willing, and three young men he chose — Calixto Saa, of Segovia; Juan de Arteaga y Avendano, of Estepa; and Diego Caceres, of Segovia, who belonged to the Court of the Viceroy of Catalonia, More than their names we need not mention, since none of them proved faithful; though Calixto had gone so far as to imitate Ignatius's pilgrimage to Jerusalem, at the Saint's recommendation. For the present, however, they conformed to his way of life, and even accompanied him in his next move to Alcala.
He had now finished his two years' course, and, after examination (at his own request), by a learned theologian, was pronounced fit for higher studies. At the University of Alcala its founder. Cardinal Ximenes, had provided means for the training ot poor scholars, and its professors were renowned. Thither, then, Ignatius went, lamented by his poor, and the three disciples with him.
It was August 1526 when he arrived, and the schools were closed till St. Luke's Day, October 18. He lodged at first in the old hospital of the city, and there he nursed a young Frenchman, Jean, page to the Viceroy of Navarre, Don Martin de
Cordova, who had been wounded in an affray. As a result, Jean joined the small band of his disciples. In Alcala, Ignatius became acquainted also with Esteban and Diego d'Eguia, first cousins of Francis Xavier, who were students at the University. Both had hearts visited by the love of God; they helped him freely in his charities, and Diego one day opened his chest and bade Ignatius take what he pleased for his poor. To begin with, indeed, the Saint made more progress in charity than in study. In his characteristic ardour and eagerness to complete his training, he attended all subjects at once — logic, physics, theology, with the voluminous commentaries of the schools. Between the vastness of the effort, the lack of method, and his absorption in teaching and charity, here as at Barcelona he made small way. And so it remained till the end of his connection with the University. His work at Alcala is not a record of successful study, but the beginnings of successful apostolate. The mere task of begging the means for his livelihood at the University must have taken him from his studies. Superfluous alms he bestowed upon the poor, especially those not born to poverty who were ashamed to beg; and gave, besides, personal service to the sick, both privately and in the hospital. A merchant of his native Azpeitia detected him attending a poor sick woman, and left 'with her a message proffering monetary aid in her pious layman's charities. But he scared the bird; from the moment the message was delivered, Ignatius commended her to God and returned to the cottage no more. Ignatius was now catechising in the streets, and holding spiritual conferences both in the hospital and in the schools. The town began to flow towards him, and the weapon of the " Spiritual Exercises " found full employment. One conversion made particular impression. A young man of rank was a prebendary in a cathedral, though not in Orders (a not uncommon thing before the Council of Trent); and his life was a scandal. Ignatius, the stranger, called on him, undaunted by a haughty reception, requested a private interview, and laid before him in plain terms his reputation in the town, and the discredit he brought on religion. The young man threatened to throw him out of the window unless he went at once. Ignatius mildly and fervently kept to his task; and, when the servants were readmitted, it was to bid them lay a cover for the intruder. With much ado Ignatius escaped being sent home on a mule, with torches before him; and the youth became one of his most attached friends.
The leader's faculty of control and personal magnetism were making themselves felt; so that Alcala beheld the unheard-of sight of a volunteer teacher, with priests among his listeners — and this in Spain, the very land of precedent and tradition. More in sorrow than in anger, the formalists intimated that it would not do. Ignatius came in contact with the Inquisition. Courteous, devout Spain appreciated and desired Ignatius — on its own terms; but of his Order it would have nothing on any terms. And that was the issue — unrealised at the time — whether the Jesuit Order should strike root in the Peninsula, or give to another land the glory of its birth. Formalism was at once the strength and weakness of the nation. It held her to the ideals of chivalry when they had perished from among other nations; it held her to the ancient Faith when it was shaking or crashing down among other nations; it held her to the last unbending championship of forlorn prescriptions and perishing causes; but the inalienable fidelity of this Oxford among the nations was purchased at the cost of a Chinese rigour and arrest of development. Yet Ignatius might well think that the prosperous soil for his future Order lay in the kingdom of Charles V., whose empire overshadowed Europe, and threw its superfluous armies to the gateways of the setting sun. But that was a hollow supremacy, not fated to endure. The head of the rigid opposition which baffled the new enterprise was, of course, the Inquisition — that device of the Spanish kings, surely reproved by Pope after Pope, which carried into the Church the leaden formalism they had already bound about the State. The Spanish horror of new ways became ecclesiastically vocal, and was formulated, through it. Because Error was innovating, even Truth must not go abroad but in the habit of prescription.
If Spain were an unfit cradle, it was, however, rich in material for the Order. It could give its loyalty to tradition, its chivalrous nobility, and, above all, that ardent mysticism, that grasp of religion as an intimate human matter which distinguishes the country of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross. So the Providence which willed that Spain should send Ignatius forth was preparing for him a little Spain in Paris. Spain transplanted from Spain, and with a foreign cross, should give Ignatius his Society. Now, therefore, the Inquisitors — uot harshly (allowing for sixteenth-century indifference to human suffering), not bigotedly, in the evil sense of the term — displayed a kindly and paternal determination to have an Ignatius of their own; w^hich an Ignatius having to do his work, not theirs, might in no wise pretend to be. This teaching stranger, with disciples in a special garb, who held secret conference with his followers, was denounced to the Inquisition at Toledo, Down came Don Alonsc de Mexia and Don Miguel Carrasco (the latter a Canon of San Justo) to discover whether perchance this was a recrudescence of an heretical sect which had before troubled the diocese of Seville. They examined the persons with whom he lodged, and such as knew of his teachings; but, finding nothing suspicious, left Juan Rodriguez de Figueroa, Grand Vicar of the Archbishop of Toledo, to finish the matter, and hied them back. Figueroa sent for the new teacher and his companions, told them of the inquiry, and permitted them to continue their teaching: only, they must vary the colour of their dress, to avoid the appearance of a Religious Order. A later edict obliged them to wear shoes!
This was the opening skirmish only. The serious conflict began with a couple of ladies. As women had been the first to help Ignatius, so they were the first to get him into trouble. The one act came of their charity, the other of theii wilfulness and want of discretion. Maria del Vado and Louisa Velasquez, widow and young daughter, had for some time been among his followers, when they conceived the idea of passing their lives in going from hospital to hospital nursing the sick. Forbidden this, they took advantage of his absence at Segovia (where he was attending his comrade Calixto, taken ill) to set ofF with one female attendant in pilgrims' garb towards the shrine of Our Lady of Guadeloupe and of St. Veronica at Jaen. Hue and cry; and their guardian, who occupied the head chair of theology, laid the escapade at the door of Ignatius. He headed a new appeal to Figueroa; and when the Saint returned from Segovia, no charge vouchsafed, he was laid by the heels in prison. As the procession passed to prison, it had to make way for a very different procession: the dignitaries of the town doing its honours to the young Marquis de Lombay, son of the Duke of Gandia. Little did the Marquis dream that the poor prisoner was his future Father and General. For the Marquis de Lombay was Francis Borgia. Strange, even among the many strange meetings in this ironic life!
His imprisonment was only a detention, not in the criminal gaol, and he was allowed visitors, to whom he spoke of divine things. There were many distinguished callers, and noble ladies in particular offered their intercession with authority. But he would have none of it: "The Love which had brought him thither could take him thence at His holy Will." Informations were again taken concerning him, with the former result; and then Figueroa interviewed him with a notary. Asked if he kept the Sabbath, he rejoined that he kept it in honour of Our Lady; but knew naught of Jewish customs, since there were no Jews in his country. He admitted knowledge of the errant ladies, not of their intention. Figueroa then told him that this was the one cause of his imprisonment, laying his hand smilingly on the Saint's shoulder; but he would have been better pleased, said he, had Ignatius been careful to avoid novelty in his discourses. " My lord," rejoined the Saint, " I should not have thought it had been any novelty to speak of Christ to Christians/' An unanswerable answer. But here, as throughout these examinations, one seems to perceive the horror of novelty even in mere method. To be unlike others is the cardinal sin in the estimation of the multitude. How arc you to know what such a man may do? How are you ever to feel at home and comfortable with him? He may be right and even wise in his fashion, but how are you to know it? And if you arc to be continually investigating his sayings and doings, good-bye to all pleasant jog-trot tranquillity! Whereas the whole trouble could be avoided if he would only take the ways of other people. The procedure of the Spanish Inquisition seems almost to have crystallised this attitude into a dogma. Throughout it was Ignatius's one but intolerable fault that he would not be like other people. Sentence might turn on this point or that, but his distressing originality was the real offence.
In the present case, after waiting some weeks that the depositions of the wandering ladies might be compared with those of Ignatius, Figueroa released him as sound in life and teaching; but ordered him and his disciples to adopt the dress of other students, and forbade, on pain of banishment and even excommunication, public preaching or private conference till the expiry of his four years' theological course. Since he protested lack of means to make the required change in garb, a priest was procured to assist him in begging the needed money. His backwardness in study gave some colour to this edict; but it was fatal to his entire way of life, and while other universities lay open to him he was not minded to be muzzled by authorities who confessed his doctrine blameless. Therefore, after consulting and gaining approbation and assistance from the Archbishop of Toledo (who would even have had Ignatius move for the rescinding of the sentence), he started for Salamanca. At this Spanish Cambridge, where the noble rubbed elbows with the sizar (or his Spanish equivalent), the suspected layman might finish his studies without laying down his apostolate.
But not in Spain were those ill-starred studies to be completed. His disciples preceded him to Salamanca, and his fame; with such effect that he was at once the centre of spiritual ferment. At Alcala he had been something over a year; he had not been a fortnight at this fresh university when Salamanca repeated and improved upon Alcala. It came in the smooth shape of a notification from his Dominican confessor that he had better dine at the Convent next Sunday, and prepare for strict questioning. So after dinner, in one of the chapels, before Sub-Prior, confessor, and another of the brethren, Ignatius and Calixto were examined. Why did they not dress as other people (eyeing poor Calixto's garments). Calixto's student garb had been given to a poor man. " Charity begins at home,'' grumbles the Sub-Prior. Then, after a flattering exordium, came question of his studies. Their insufficiency admitted, how, then, did he preach? They only spoke with people of divine things, replied Ignatius. Ah, now we come to it 1 Of what divine things i Of virtue, so as to make folk seek after it; of vice, to make them shun it, was the answer. Then the Sub-Prior unmasked his batteries. The Saint was not learned, yet spoke of vice and virtue. "These are things of which no one can speak unless he has been taught by the schools or the Holy Ghost. You have not been taught by the schools, therefore you have been taught by the Holy Ghost. That is what we want to know.*'
Confronted with this very mediaeval syllogism, Ignatius thought it better to say no more; and was at once charged with refusing to declare his teachings, at a time when errors were abroad. " I will say no more than I have said,'' rejoined Ignatius, " unless before my superiors, who have a right to question me." That ended the inquiry; and the pair were held fast in the Convent while niatters were laid before the Grand Vicar Frias. The brethren had free access to them, and there was the usual difference of opinion; some accepting the pious layman's discourse as proof of his enlightenment, others calling for examination. It came in three days, with the committal of the two to a room over the common prison, where they were tethered round the ankles by a single chain to a pillar in the middle of the room, so that the movement of one involved the movement of the other. The charity of the many who sympathised with them provided the bedding and other necessaries of which the authorities left them destitute. They were examined separately by the Grand Vicar, who demanded and received all their papers, notably the" Spiritual Exercises," and the names of their companions. This was followed by the lodging of Caceres and Arteaga in the common prison 57 H underneath their own room; French Jean's youth pleading exemption. Ignatius, after his wont, refused intermediation, and praised God for his chains with much joy. To Francisco de Mendoza, compassionating him in a later period of this imprisonment, he said it showed him to have Httle love of Christ in his heart, if he thought it so sore a thing to wear bonds for Christ's sake. " Salamanca has not fetters, manacles, and chains so many as I long to wear for God." And to sympathising Religious he professed that he found it strange they, of all folk, should not know the hidden riches of Christ's Cross.
At last he was formally examined, before Grand Vicar Frias and three Doctors of Theology. Always wary despite his ardour, and submissive despite his pertinacity, he declared himself unlearned and submitted anything he might say to the censure of the Church. With such proviso, he answered questions theological, and even, under pressure, a trying point of Canon law, scarce fair to demand of such a man; all to the satisfaction of his judges. Then said they: Let us hear how you address the people; discourse to us, they suggested, on the First Commandment.
Here was a task after Ignatius's heart; and the result was as when (in the legend) the impugned dancer was invited to give practical proof of her dancing before the ecclesiastical judges. The Divine Love of which he spoke fired his speech; the judges listened rapt: when he ceased they rose with profound respect, and, addressing him in brief favourable speech, retired. Like all these Spanish Inquisitors, they were honest men, whose prepossessions yielded at once to the flaming sincerity of the Saint. But like all the Spanish Inquisitors, their respect for his personality could not countervail their reverence for ecclesiastical red tape, their faith in the sacred virtues of precedent and formalism. Even now^, their general satisfaction had some abatement, because Ignatius in the " Spiritual Exercises " had provided for distinguishing betw^een mortal and venial sin. A puzzling matter for theologians, how^ should a professedly unlearned man take on himself to lay down rules in regard to it? " Whether I have spoken true is for you to judge," Ignatius had answ^ered: *' if then it be not true, condemn the definition." Like most of his answ^crs, this w^as final and irrefragable. They could not condemn his rules; but they still thought it vastly improper that he should make them. It v^as much like the old story of Christ's impropriety in healing on the Sabbath day.
Shortly after this examination the criminals in the prison escaped, but the Saint and his fellows refused to avail themselves of the open doors; and this incident shamed the authorities into giving them better quarters, without unfettering them, nevertheless. After three weeks' arrest, judgment was finally given; when it proved that the temerity of distinguishing mortal and venial sins still vexed the excellent Inquisitors. Ignatius and his comrades were absolved from all charges, and given liberty for their apostolic labours, with the most flattering commendations from the judges. Only, until they had finished their four years' theology, they were not to lay down distinctions between mortal and venial sin. Again formalism had triumphed. It was the Alcala result in a subtler form. For Ignatius could not teach or guide souls without such distinction in some shape, or giving his enemies occasion to accuse him of trenching upon it; so elementary a part does it bear in the spiritual life. Again the Inquisition, with all respect and courtesy, had virtually debarred him from his apostolate, so long as he remained a student. It was the end of the obstinate struggle between Ignatius and the Spanish dons. He now entered something like a protest. He promised obedience while he was within the tribunal's jurisdiction, but reserved interior liberty; since they had virtually prohibited his teaching, without condemning it. This meant withdrawal, and the Inquisitors tried to prevent it; but the Saint adhered to his submissive protest. Three weeks later, driving an ass which carried his books and clothes, he left for Barcelona; and from Barcelona, with a small sum provided by his friends, he departed on foot for Paris. It was about the end of 1528. His four disciples remained to finish their course at Salamanca.
They were to rejoin him no more. He was to take nothing with him from Spain but the lessons and graces of his preparation. In Paris his Order awaited him. Spain was not to afford him even a theological training. With all his persistence Ignatius had tried to force on it a great Saint and a great Order; and it had refused to assimilate the Saint except without his Order.
By a strange chance, throughout this struggle the Founder of the Society which passes as the suppressor of religious individuality stood for individuality against autocratic formalism. But he combated with an unalterable and patient respect for authority which is an example to every religious reformer, every man with a new message to a sluggish world.
Spain was no place for him because, seeming alive, she was but a swathed mummy, which would fall to pieces when its bands were removed. She had no national part in that agitated European life on and amid which his Order was destined to act. So far was he himself from conceiving its action, that even at the crucial moment his mind recurred to its first project and the beloved Holy Land. But Providence saw clearly, and, by devious-seeming ways, drew him to his end. Saint and Order yet ungotten went forth now from Spain; whither the first was never to return save as a brief visitor, the second to return and to remain in conquest.