The Society of the Jesuits, a religious order of the Romish church, was founded by Ignatius Loyola, the son of a Spanish nobleman, born in the year 1491 at Guipuzcoa, in the province of Biscay. In his youth he was employed as a page at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, but he grew weary of its gaieties, and longed to be engaged in the wars of his country. In 1521 we find him defending Pampeluna against the French; but the young intrepid Loyola was severely wounded in both legs. Fever followed, and the future restorer of the papacy was nearly brought to a premature grave.
By nature ardent, romantic, and visionary, he devoured greedily, during his long illness, the romances of Spanish chivalry, founded on the conflicts of his nation with the Moors; and when these were exhausted, he betook himself to a series of still more marvelous romances-the legends of the saints. With a morbid intensity he studied those books of mystical devotion, until he resolved to emulate in his own life the wondrous virtues ascribed to a Benedict, a Dominic, or a Francis. Accordingly, on his recovery, he retired to a Benedictine monastery at Montserrat, near Barcelona; and there he passed the night at the celebrated shrine of the Virgin Mary. He suspended his lance and shield before an image of the Virgin, vowed constant obedience to God and His church, thereby abandoning a temporal for a spiritual knighthood.
To celebrate his self-dedication to Our Lady, he withdrew to the adjacent town of Manresa. Holiness, in the view of such men, does not consist in the moral likeness of the soul to Jesus, but in the mortification of the body. Next to his skin he wore alternately an iron chain, a horsehair cloth, and a sash of prickly thorns. Three times a day he laid the scourge resolutely on his bare back. This was not to mortify the deeds of the body, but the poor unoffending body itself. Such is the blinding power of Satan, and such the suited darkness for his purpose. After traveling barefoot to Rome, Jerusalem, and other places rendered sacred by the Savior's history, he eventually found his way to Paris. Here he met with Francis Xavier, who afterward became the great apostle of India. Other kindred spirits joining them, a small band of zealous associates gathered round Loyola, which gave origin to the society of Jesus-about eight or nine in all.