METHODIST ORGAN LAUDS ST. IGNATIUS.

New Zealand Tablet, 18 March 1920, Page 17

METHODIST ORGAN LAUDS ST. IGNATIUS.

The following eulogy of St. Ignatius Loyola and of his Order has appeared in the Pittsburgh Methodist Christian Advocate : “It is true that Protestant Britain gave us a Macaulay and a David Livingstone, that our own country has sent forth a Thorburn, a Bashford, and a Headland to work mightily for the Gospel, yet it was Catholic' Spain that gave birth to the first real modern missionary. This was Ignatius Loyola, a man with a world vision. It was the Jesuit priest who first broke down the barrier of seclusion in China and Japan, and gave to a wonderful posterity its first authentic news of these distant lands; it was the Jesuit priest, in the days of French dominion in the valleys of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, who bore with him the story of the Cross to the Indians, and who nurtured the- soul-life of the barely French settlers in Lower Canada; it was the Jesuit missionary who first planted education among his fellow-men wherever the armies of Europe planted the flag of conquest and dominion. We owe debts to Ignatius Loyola— splendid ideal of universal missionary enterprise, and tho union of a doctrinal loyalty and an efficient educational scheme.”