I believe that no one will dispute that the
mind which conceived it was of the first order.

Father Hecker remarked, as did many others, that, starting from the
sixteenth century, the Church, although ever exerting a considerable
influence, no longer appeared at the head of the world's activity.
This was in contrast with what she had done in the era of the
conversion of the Roman Empire, during that of the invasion of the
barbarians, and amid the immense religious movement which
characterized the apogee of the Middle Ages. Father Hecker discovered
the cause of this lessening influence in the fact that since the
sixteenth century the Church had been compelled to stand upon the
defensive. This had greatly paralyzed her power of initiation and her
liberty. As a consequence of the Protestant heresy, which threatened
the utter destruction of the principle of authority, the Church had
been forced to concentrate on that side of her fortress all her means
of defence. In order to protect herself from the excesses of the
principle of individuality and free inquiry, she had been obliged to
resort to a multitude of restrictive measures, which were conceived
in a very different spirit from that which animated her in previous
centuries. In the sixteenth century the Church placed before
everything else the idea of authority. She sacrificed the development
of personality to fostering the association of men whose wills were
absolutely merged by discipline in one powerful body. It can be seen
at a glance how intimately and profoundly the spirit of the dominant
religious orders of the later era differs from that of the great
orders of the Middle Ages, in respect to the expansion of nature and
the development of individuality. The needs of the sixteenth century
were altogether different from those of the ages preceding it, and to
meet those needs God inspired St. Ignatius with the idea of a
different type of Christian character. The result was the triumphant
repulse of Protestantism from all the southern nations. But the
victory was gained at the price of real sacrifices; the Catholics of
the recent centuries have not displayed the puissant individuality of
those of the Middle Ages, the types of which are St. Bernard, St.
Gregory VII., Innocent III., St. Thomas Aquinas. The Divine Spirit
often exacts the sacrifice of certain human qualities for the
preservation of the faith; and it is in this sense that we should
interpret the mysterious