else. The experiment, so far as it has been carried out, has not proved in all respects successful; and though nothing could be more unphilosophical than to imagine that the middle ages, or any other periods of the world, are to be lived over again, it assuredly is not unwise to ask ourselves what lessons are to be learned from past times, and how far the institutions which they built up for the relief of man's estate are applicable to present times, and to those that await us. The latter end of the last century ushered in the most momentous event since the Reformation, and the one most analogous to it in the political order, viz. the French Revolution. Incomplete as is the restoration of religion in France, the degree in which it has taken place is the fact of chief importance amid the mutations to which France has been subjected in the present century. To what is it that society owes this partial restoration, and the return of civil order, so closely connected with it? Has England no difficulties, political or social, for which a remedy can be found in manners or institutes such as were her glory in the time of the Heptarchy, of the Conquest, of the Crusades, of Magna Charta-such as her Edwards, her Henrys, and her Alfred revered? These are questions on which the humble persons recorded in the following volume, whether founders of convents or fellow-labourers in the same wide field of religious charity, perhaps never meditated, but for the solution of which their biographies furnish no small materials. They teach us how it is that even among those who have lost the divine gift of faith, religion still retains in part her healing power.

In the midst of the stupid insults and injuries with

PREFACE.

olies. It was possible to dethrone religion; but the painted courtesan who was borne along in a triumphal car as the Goddess of Reason, proved unable to act as a substitute. It was possible to deny the mysteries of the Faith, but impossible to repel sorrow, disease, and care by windy phrases. The sighs of prisoners in dungeons, and the groans of sufferers in hospitals, were the refutation (where none would listen to argument) of declamations announcing the millennium of self-will, and the new gospel of empirical science. It has been with the mind of France as with the body. The disease of ignorance needed a cure as well as other diseases; and the mere secular treatment of that disease turned out, on experience, to be but quackery. Polytechnic schools without religion might do many ingenious and surprising things; but they could not lay a foundation for social order, prevent the necessity of a new revolution every dozen years, or provide an enlightened nation with as much discretion as is needed to hinder it from cutting its own throat. Education, as well as the relief of temporal distresses, has accordingly in France been obliged to renounce its pompous but barren pretensions; and to take an humbler placebut one which enables it to do its work-among the corporal "works of mercy." The religious institutions or associations, devoted to man's outward condition, to be found in Paris alone, amount to between seventy and eignty, different in kind; and to a far larger number if we reckon the various institutions classed in several cases under the same general name. The perusal of the list would astonish those who know of Paris little more than is to be picked up in cafés and theatres.

Notre Dame, with all that it represents, is as much a fact as the Palais Royal, with that world of which it is the centre. In that great city, which the powers of good and evil have so often chosen as the chief arena of their conflict, there exist the extremes of virtue and vice, each developed to the uttermost, as might have been expected, by the pressure of its opposite. The superficial or prejudiced traveller sees in Paris nothing but the Paradise of the senses and the temple of vanity; those who are initiated into its deeper life might be tempted, if they restricted their attention to one aspect of the question, to pronounce Paris a city of saints. Enough has already been done to indicate tc all except the fanatics of revolution, where it is that the hope of France lies.

This subject is especially illustrated in that portion of the present volume which relates to the Petites Sœurs des Pauvres, one of the most recent of orders. Few things are more interesting than to trace the growth of such institutions from the first germ to the developed plant; and to do this is comparatively easy when the order is recent. Mechanism is among Protestants all in all, in spiritual things as well as secular, where more than individualism is attempted; a principle strikingly contrasted with that which in the Catholic Church holds a corresponding place, viz. that of organisation. What is mechanical is made; what is organic grows. The one is fashioned from without, the other is developed from within; the one is dead, the other lives; the one is the work of man, the other that of God. The land swarms with religious joint-stock companies, provided with all the usual mechanism of

managing committees, secretaries, &c. &c. A single day and a single meeting is sufficient to set the machine at work. It is provided with all the external apparatus it can need; not a rope, pulley, or wheel is wanting to it; but let a single joint of the complex structure get out of order, and the whole comes to a standstill. It has no Divine vitality, no recuperative power to correct mischances or adapt old powers to new circumstances. The machine is perfect; but (supposing the end sought to be moral or spiritual) it has one fault, viz. that it will not work. Far otherwise is it with those instrumentalities the law of which is organic, not mechanical, and the source of which is from above. A single holy thought, devout purpose, or sacred sorrow, is dropped like a seed into the heart of a lonely recluse, one without wealth or influence, possibly without ordinary education-like Jeanne Jugan, of whom we read, "she can neither read nor write; but her knowledge of Scripture is great." The seed grows on in the darkness, and perhaps seems to perish; but after a season the shoot is above ground, minute but alive. It assimilates what surrounds it, and gains strength. Sympathies that move scarce consciously, and an imitative aspiration, like that which prompts children to acquire language, compel persons of the most opposite natural characters to sink their idiosyncrasies and join in one supernatural work. That work is often determined by apparent accident. No grand project has been matured; nothing that is intended to show an original conception or a striking result. The work that lies next at hand-to that the new energy turns itself, even when it had intended otherwise, with a pliancy equal to its