Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][merged small]

picious places, she goes out alone, never two and two unless occasion require. She goes about her charitable offices as a matter of daily business, quiet, quick, diligent, and active. She seems one of every family where she goes, and perform her duties.

yet she goes merely to

Would you like to see her portrait? If so you can see one now that has been taken from nature. The artist chose to take her in the act of teaching, and, I fancy in a style of teaching that does not very often fall to her lot; but I suppose he thought it picturesque to put that child's head in her lap, and make the other stand with its book before her. You would be more likely to see her in a class room with a hundred children instead of two.

Now, however, you can judge of her dress. It is, you see, a sort of jacket and skirt of strong grey blue cloth; in make it is not unlike the present fashion, yet it is two centuries and a half old. It was probably the common dress of the peasants of the day when the order was formed, or not very unlike it. The Church of Rome stamps Esto perpetuo on all her works, even on the make of a woman's dress; there it is, even to the coarse blue apron with pockets.

"What a very curious cap your's is," I said to a Sister Superior.

"It is the same St. Vincent gave us," she answered, just as if the identical cap on her head had been made more than two centuries ago.

"The cap St. Vincent gave you

"Rather that which Louis XIII. gave him for

us,” she answered smiling. "Have you heard our tradition about our cap?"

"No."

[ocr errors]

"Ah! well, St. Vincent was sitting down to dinner one day with the King, when there passed by the windows one of his daughters; we had then only this crown to our cap, there was no front projecting over the face as a screen. Now, this sister was here the speaker raised her hand to her own face, and moved it about and about, with an expressiveness that clearly said she was a very good-looking, handsome, striking sort of a person; but not liking perhaps, to use such mundane words-she finished the expressive motions of the hands and eyes with the words "in short, my dear, she could not help it, the girl was as God made her. But his majesty seeing her pass by with her face so much exposed, and only a little white linen skull cap on her head, said to St. Vincent, Who is that girl there?'

[ocr errors]

"Sire,' he replied, she is one of my daughters.' "The King took up his napkin, and throwing it to St. Vincent, said, 'There! take that, and make a covering for her head.' He did exactly what he was desired, and you see to-day the cap he gave that girl."

There it was sure enough; a slightly disarranged dinner napkin, half unfolded, with its curious peak remaining in front.

Now there are those of the French Protestants who deny that Vincent de Paul was the first projector of the work of Christian charity which has carried his name to the ends of the earth. They say it began on their side; that it was the Protestants of France who began it and set him the example he followed. The author of the good work is, I believe, only know in the unhappy annals of their long suffering people. I think his name was Robert Le Marc. What I have been told by some of them is, that soon after the Bible in their own tongue began to be known, Robert Le Marc wishing to revive the scriptural institutions of which some hints are scattered in the Bible, especially in the Epistles, established an institution which was, I suppose, to be founded on that of which St. Paul seems to say Phoebe was a member when he commended her as a servant of the Church. And it is, I believe, on this authority, and to revive this defunct order that the interesting, and very Protestant Institution of Deaconesses was founded about thirteen years ago in Paris.

What became of the original one instituted by Robert Le Marc, or Robert Marc, I do not think is now known; it probably underwent the fate which institutions among ourselves frequently do, and ceased to exist. Mere zeal will not keep such things alive, for zeal itself will die. If dependent on the zeal, the protection, the guidance, direction of anything external to itself, a religious work has no security, no source of uninterrupted action; it must,

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »