This final grade cannot be
reached until the age of forty-five, so that if the candidate enters the
order at the earliest age permissible, fourteen, he has been on
probation thirty-one years when he reaches the final grade.
The society is ruled by a general, to whom unconditional obedience is
required. The provinces, into which the order is divided, are governed
by provincials, who must report monthly to the general. The heads of all
houses and colleges must report weekly to their provincials. An
elaborate system of checks and espionage is employed to ensure the
perfect working of this complex ecclesiastical machinery. Fraud or
evasion is carefully guarded against, and every possible means is
employed to enable the general to keep himself fully informed concerning
the minutest details of the society's affairs.
_The Vow of Obedience_
That which has imparted a peculiar character to the Jesuit and
contributed more than any other force to his success, is the insistence
upon unquestioning submission to the will of the superior. This emphasis
on the vow of obedience deserves, therefore, special consideration.
Loyola, in his "Spiritual Exercises," commanded the novice to preserve
his freedom of mind, but it is difficult for the fairest critic to
conceive of such a possibility in the light of Loyola's rule of
obedience, which reads: "I ought not to be my own, but His who created
me, and his too by whose means God governs me, yielding myself to be
moulded in his hands like so much wax.
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