"education so largely prevails in the activity of the Order that it can be called in a special sense a teaching or school order."[1] "Evidently these university men, who were engaged in drawing up the Institute, considered that, if the greatest Professor's talents are well spent in the exposition of the greatest doctrines in theology, philosophy, and science, neither he, nor any one else, is too great to be a school master, a tutor, and a father to the boy passing from childhood to the state of manhood, – that boyhood which, as Clement of Alexandria says, furnishes the very milk of age, and from which the constitution of the man receives its temper and complexion."[2]
Ignatius, then, had founded a religious order which made the education of youth one of its primary objects. It will be well to speak here of a much discussed and most important question, namely, the educational work of religious orders in general, a work not favorably viewed by the majority of non-Catholics, to whom "monasticism"[3] is one of the features in the
- ↑ Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, vol. I, p. 382. In another passage he styles the Society a Professoren-Orden.
- ↑ Hughes, Loyola, p. 43.
- ↑ It is common among non-Catholics to style the members of all religious orders "monks." However, this popular appellation is not correct. The general term is "religious." This word was used in this sense very early in English (v. g. by Chaucer, Troylus and Chryseyde, CIX, 759). It seems that after the Reformation, Protestants refused to honor members of religious orders with this title. J. L,. Kington Oliphant, of Balliol College, Oxford, states in his work The New English (vol. I, p. 482), that "the phrase the relygyon is employed for monk's profession, almost for the last time" between 1537 and 1540. Protestants preferred to use the word "monk", which soon became a term of reproach. They saw in the monks the very type of laziness, uselessness, ignorance, fanaticism and
