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you must be busy, whom you must assist, or for whom you must in some way work,-the love of whom fills your heart and shuts out the sense of emptiness; go, and seek for those who in the love of CHRIST will be to you the same as "Mother and sister and brother." Get something To Do-something to think of that will draw you away from the constant mental declination of the first personal pronoun in its singular number. Health, pleasure, change-you seek them here in vain. Go home; and you may find them all if your hearts are filled and your time employed in doing good.

"I want an object of interest," said a lady to me one day. Want it! in this wide world of GOD'S creation! How incredible seems the idea to one who has had almost too many of such!

Now these ladies whom one meets at home and abroad-widows as well as maids-objectless, homeless, dissatisfied, or at least secretly in unrest, in danger of becoming selfish, hypochondriac, and vexatious-in general belong to a veteran corps, from which it would be difficult and unwise to think now of obtaining recruits wherewith to form Sisters of Charity. But only think if many of them had entered the service ten, fifteen, twenty years ago!

She came to the Cross when her young cheek was blooming,
And raised to the LORD the bright glance of her eye;
And when o'er its brightness death's darkness was glooming,
The Cross did uphold her, the SAVIOUR was nigh.

Oh! the ruddy cheeks I have seen, when the bloom of youth had long passed away, beneath that same white cap of which I have spoken so often! And no Sister of Charity can be received after twenty-eight years of age; so those cheeks had stayed, or grown ruddy a good long time.

I showed an Irish lady of the boarding-house the portrait of St. Vincent's sister. "Popish thing!" she exclaimed, and turned her head in disgust from the picture of the sister teaching the poor children to the card table where some of her large community were playing. Yet she too wanted something to do. Poor woman-it was not her fault, but she was, unconsciously to herself, afflicted with a grievous and very tiresome stutter. Soon after she had turned from my portrait, I heard her beg a young foreigner to give her some amusement, and promise her in return that she would "talk E-e-e-ngl-i-sh with her f-or f-o-u-r h-o-u-rs."

These things are ridiculous, but there are others much more so to be seen and heard, even among persons, not of this corps, but who very conscientiously consider the Sister of Charity "a Popish thing," but, very mistakenly, consider her work and life to be Popish things also, and therefore hold it to be unprotestant, if not exceedingly improper, to imitate her even in doing good.

Many of these persons, more than one might suppose, live in Roman Catholic France-even in Papal Italy. They spend their time, their money, their

life-in what? In a perpetual controversy with all they see and hear. They have stories to tell of perversion, and stories to tell of conversion. If it is on the native side it is the first, if on the side of the foreigner the last. One of these ladies talking to me of the Sisters of Charity, used rather strong terms-"I hate, I detest, I abominate."

"Why, what do they do?"

"Poh! They walk with their hands in their sleeves," was, I assure you truly, the answer made. "Then why do you live voluntarily, in a Roman Catholic country when you feel so strongly against its religion and its institutions? Why not live in your own, professedly Protestant one? There you might do good; here I should think you only annoy yourself."

"France is my country-my dear, dear country! We were banished from it by Louis the Fourteenth ; but I am now returned to it."

"Ah! then I too ought to claim France as my country, and come to live and work in it, since I have always understood I came over from it with William the Conqueror."

These things are ridiculous; we have said so, and thought so before now.

Napoleon the Great was certainly not a good friend to the Pope; I believe he was not reckoned friendly to Popery; I am not sure that he called himself a Roman Catholic; and I have some idea that the true Roman Catholics of his

time might have called him a Protestant. The Protestants of England, who localise the word, may laugh at this, nevertheless it is a fact that Protestant is a term of wide signification. But whatever else Napoleon I. was we are beginning more and more to discern that he was a great politician; that in his plans for the internal government, prosperity and elevation of a nation, he was still greater than in those for foreign conquest. Well, Napoleon I. did not object to employ Sisters of Charity in France, because they were "a Popish thing." He found they were useful; he saw the country required them; and he gave them to the country.

Napoleon reinstated the working religious órders in France; such as that of Vincent de Paul, of Jeanne Biscot, or of the Sisters of St. Agnes, and others also, which had been almost, or altogether destroyed at the Revolution; and the objects and work of which commended itself to his capacious mind as beneficial to the country he was restoring. By an imperial decree he authorised and confirmed the rules of the Sisters of St. Agnes, as being those of "an institution which conferred a national benefit." Perhaps Queen Victoria may do something of the same kind for her nation and people.

Under the Consular government, the Minister of the Interior might perhaps so far retain the revolutionary scruples, as to avoid giving the head of the Sisters of Charity the title of Superior; as she is, in the decree of 1801, styled Citizeness Duleau, for

merly Superior of the Sisters of Charity; and as such authorised to educate girls for the care of hospitals; to unite herself to such persons as she thinks likely to ensure the success of the institution; to inhabit a house granted by the government, and to receive pensions of three hundred francs for such persons as are totally destitute. The two first motives assigned for this act of the Consular government of France are these.

That services rendered to the sick can only be properly administered by those whose vocation it is, and who do it in a spirit of love.

That among all the hospitals of the Republic, those are the best attended which have preserved the noble spirit of their predecessors, whose only object it was to practise a boundless love and charity.

That there is a fear that the order of Sisters, which is a glory to the country, should become extinct and therefore Citizeness Duleau is ordered to do so and so, and the government of the Republic insures to the institution an annual grant not to exceed twelve thousand francs, or four hundred and eighty pounds.

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