8th.-Ut fieri solet: Consider what Jesus Christ felt when they struck Him.

9th.-[ . . . ] (3) I asked for peace between the ambassadors.

[June.]

10th-To-day, the 10th anniversary of the cross they gave me at Tordesillas [he was made Commissary General of Spain, 10th June, 1554], I began the following_exercise with devotion and spiritual consolation: Every 3 hours I offer my thanks to the Divine Persons, for the 4th vow I have made in the Company, and in the name of some one of the attributes of God our Saviour, thanking, offering myself, and asking a share in the attributes for myself and others.

1st Hour, till 3.-I gave thanks (for the holiness) of the Father, the Son, and the H. Spirit. I offered myself, just as I am, with oonfusion, to go to India or Constantinople, and to die for Him who is my God [...]. From 3 to 6 o'clock. I gave thanks for the glory of the Father, Son, and H. Spirit. I offered myself ut dictum est. I asked to do everything for their greater glory, as the Founder understood it, Master Ignatius of holy memory, and as we, his sons, ought to try to. (6) I gave thanks for the eternity [. 1. (9) I gave thanks for the immensity of the Father, Son, and H. Spirit . . . I asked an unlimited love, part of the infinite love. (12) I gave thanks for the all-power of the Father, Son, and H. Spirit. I offered [ ] I asked to be all-powerful in Him [...]. Omnia possum in Eo qui me confortat. (15) I gave thanks, considering qui erat, qui est, et qui venturus est, for what He has done for me and for what, I hope, He still will do. I offered myself [. ] I asked to prepare myself for His coming. (18) [The Trinity as fons vita. Life in Him]. (21) I gave thanks, considering the Ego sum qui sum, whence proceeds the being communicated to all creatures [ ] I asked that all the being I had received from Him might be used in His service. Amen! (24) And so this day concluded.

[September.]

29th. Ask these 7 things: the reform of the Church; the progress of the Society in Spain; a remedy to the troubles in Europe: id. in Asia and Greece; the conversion of the heathen, the Lutherans, the Jews and the Moors: Ut fiat unum ovile et unus pastor: ut fiat voluntas tua sicut in cælo et in terra. Id. After mass, great consolation, and hope that God will accept the sacrifice. October 24th. Id. E+E+E+Fuit magna consolatio et spes et confusio! Et alia multa! Laus Deo ! . . . Id., I asked for a number of things. Id. Everything that has already been asked for New life. Thanksgiving for salvation. New ways of working in all. Laus Deo.

[1565.]

July 2nd.-E+Consolation. Dies meæ Crucis [Day of my Cross. He was elected General. E appears to stand for outbursts of feeling, usually consoling]. 10th.-Id. I asked, each hour of the day, the following graces: (1) What Jesus Christ asked. (2) That He will take me or give me strength to govern. (3) The affair of the procurator [Araoz, who could not be got out of Spain]. (4) The affair of Malta [It was besieged by the Turks]. (5) I offer myself for the Society, blood and life without counting what else I commended [to God].

27th. I have asked to see, in the Lord, His works [ .... ]. Id. Hope that the Lord will help the works of the Society, and that He will help me in it. I asked Him to take me. Id. That, in Jesus Christ, I may feel what He felt for His sheep.

August 1st.-Idem E+Ego ero tecum.

4th.-Id. I asked Him to grant me what I asked Him for the government of the Society, or to take me. Hope [. ]. Id., hope to be heard.

25th. Grace to carry the or that He may take me. Id., for Polanco.

[1566.]

May 1.-With the Empress, rejoicing in what the Lord worked in her and in me by her death. . . . Hope. [1567.]

May 1st and 28th.-Since the death of the Empress [I asked] to get out of scruples and walk in simplicitate cordis.

ST. JOHN FRANCIS REGIS*

1597-1640

It is hard to be certain why St. Francis Regis exercises so strong an influence on the imagination, and leaves on us so deep an impression of personality. Little enough is known of him; his biographies are short; padded, to an extent unusual even at the period of their composition, with platitude; monotonous in their repetitions of good deeds done; and quite singularly lacking in psychology. It might even be asked whether it be not just the stage-setting, so to speak, of his activity-the amazingly romantic town of Le Puy, where he spent his summers, and the frozen fastnesses of the Velay, where he preached missions, all the winter, which lend him, as actor in that scene, a glamour not his own. Yet there are other names, proper to that period and even to that environment, well

*Besides Daubenton, I have used little save M. Joseph Vianney's admirable St. François Régis, ed. ii., which corrects a number of dates and adds many valuable details of general history,

enough known and deriving much substance from many documents, which leave us unattracted. Possibly, we may draw a hint from that mingling of extreme gentleness with robust, almost grim, virility which cannot but be felt to exist in him. Gentleness and hardihoodto what does that recall a sensitive imagination? To St. Louis and the Crusades? Possibly. Joinville lays an irresistible spell upon his readers; the keen breeze of chivalry blows brightly through his pages; yet albeit his mellowed years, and perhaps his temperament, soften without emasculating his picture of the rugged King; albeit a touch of tender idealizing belongs to him, which is lacking in the far harder history of, say, Villehardouin, whose initiative Joinville carries on, it is behind both of these historians we must go. We must appeal, I think, to the Arthur legend itself if we are to find the spiritual atmosphere which is most closely associated (paradoxical as it may seem) with these missioners of Brittany and still more of mountainous Southern France in the dying sixteenth century. At every stage the Arthur legend was lifted further into the golden skies of romance; such harsh reality as formed its nucleus might be singularly unsympathetic to modern feeling; yet as constant and indeed ever more potent elements in its

tales of Chivalry are to be discerned that gentleness and that strength which are so notably combined in nearly all, it may be, of the Saints, but especially, perhaps, in a career like that of Regis. Are not Regis and his fellow-missioners, of whatever Order or ecclesiastical status, the "real reality" of those old civilizing Knights of whom poets have offered us the glorious, haloed images? Trivial as one man's subjective evidence is bound to be, yet I will confess to feeling, as I close a Life of a Regis or a Mannoir, as though I had been reading some new Idylls of the King. Regis, fighting his way through black forests where the only light struck upwards from fallen snow; Regis, hauling himself along, foot by foot, among the ice-sheathed crags; snowedup, for whole days, in abandoned stone-piled cabins, with no sound in his ears at night save the howling of the wolves, and the certainty that if he might at all win out to human habitation, often as not it would be "wolf-like men, worse than wolves," he should encounterassuredly it is the Quests" of Arthur's Knights that he sets actual and substantial before us. Or perhaps, after all, the explanation of his thrilling charm is deeper and yet simpler. When King Arthur had, after administering the Vows of the Round Table to