Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. 1540-52. CONSTITUTIONS OF THE SOCIETY.' The times in which Ignatius wrote the Constitutions were, for the Court of Rome and the Catholic religion, times of anxiety and danger. The Reformation was making rapid progress, and all Christendom, Catholicf as well as Protestant, resounded with the Hundred Complaints (Centum yravamina) brought forward at the Diet of Nuremberg against the Roman court ?complaints and accusations which the wonderfully candid Adrian VI. acknowledged to be too well founded. This pontiff, by his nuncio, frankly declared to the Diet, that all this confusion was originated by men's sins, and, above all, by those of the clergymen and prelates?that for many years past the Holy See had committed many abominations?that numerous abuses had crept into the administration of spiritual affairs, and many superfluities into the laws ?that all had been perverted?and that the corruption, descending from the head to the body, from the Sovereign Pontiff to the prelates, was so great, thatthere could hardly be found one who did good. When a pope confessed so much to Protestant ears, it may well be imagined to what a degree of rottenness the moral leprosy must have arrived. These famous Constitutions were composed by Loyola in the Spanish language. They were not at first the perfect system we now find them ' and it was not till about the year 1552 that, after many alterations and improvements adapting them to the necessities of the times, they assumed their ultimate form. They were translated into Latin by the Jesuit Pulancus, and printed in the college of the Society at Bome in 15S8. They were jealously kept secret, the greater part of the Jesuits themselves knowing only extracts fiom them. They were never produced to the light until 1781, when they...