Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/437

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TRAINING OF THE JESUIT TEACHER.
417

Such is the material of the future Jesuit; no mean material indeed. How does the Society carry out the modelling of the young members? How does she – to confine ourselves to the question of training teachers – train them to become efficient instructors and educators? To understand this better, it will be good to follow a young Jesuit through the course of his training. Take a young man, a student of a college, perhaps of a university. May be, he has been educated in a Jesuit college, he has seen the Jesuits working for education, has heard them preaching and lecturing, he feels attracted by their work: he wants to become one of them. Perhaps he has never seen a Jesuit, but he has heard of them, has read of the great achievements of the famous missionaries of the Order, beginning from St. Francis Xavier down to our days; he has come across a book written by a Jesuit, he hears how much they have done in the defense of Christianity, above all how they are hated and persecuted by the enemies of the Church: the ideal inspirations of his heart grow stronger, and he inquires where he can find these men so much spoken of. It is a fact that during the Kulturkampf in Germany, the German Province of the Society almost doubled its numbers. Many students, who had never seen a Jesuit, left the gymnasium or university to join the exiles, just because of the singular hatred of which the outlawed Order was the object. They concluded that a body of men thus singled out, must possess something extraordinary, something especially praiseworthy, as they could not believe that the calumnies spread by the enemies of the Jesuits could have any foundation. The student, frequently the brightest of