Spirits more fervent and minds more pious than Richelieu’s felt the same need.  On emerging from the violent struggles of the religious wars, the Catholic church had not lost her faith, but she had neglected sweetness and light.  King Henry IV.’s conversion had secured to her the victory in France, but she was threatened with letting it escape from her hands by her own fault.  God raised up for her some great servents who preserved her from this danger.

The oratorical and political brilliancy of the Catholic church in the reign of Louis XIV. has caused men to forget the great religious movement in the reign of Louis XIII.  Learned and mystic in the hands of Cardinal Berulle, humane and charitable with St. Vincent de Paul, bold and saintly with M. de Saint Cyran, the church underwent from all quarters quickening influences which roused her from her dangerous lethargy.

The effort was attempted at all points at once.  The priests had sunk into an ignorance as perilous as their lukewarmness.  Mid all the diplomatic negotiations which he undertook in Richelieu’s name, and the intrigues he, with the queen-mother, often hatched against him, Cardinal Berulle founded the con gregation of the Oratory, designed to train up well-informed and pious young priests with a capacity for devoting themselves to the education of children as well as the edification of the people. " It is a body,” said Bossizet, " in which everybody obeys and nobody commands.”  No vow fettered the members of this celebrated congregation, which gave to the world Malebranche and Massillon.  It was, again, under the inspiration of Cardinal B6rulle, renowned for the pious direction of souls, that the order of Carmelites, hitherto confined to Spain, was founded in France.  The convent in Rue St. Jacques soon numbered amongst its penitents women of the highest rank.

The labors of Mgr. de Berulle tended especially to the salvation of individual souls; those of St. Vincent de Paul embraced a vaster field, and one offering more scope to Christian humanity.  Some time before, in 1610, St. Francis de Sales had founded, under the direction of Madame de Chantal, the order of Visitation, whose duty was the care of the sick and poor; he had left the direction of his new institution to M. Vincent, as was at that time the appellation of the poor priest without birth and without fortune, who was one day to be celebrated throughout the world under the name of St. Vincent de Paul.  This direction was not enough to satisfy his zeal for charity; children and sick, the ignorant and the convict, all those who suffered in body or spirit, seemed to summon M. Vincent to their aid; he founded in 1617, in a small parish of Bresse, the charitable society of Servants of the poor, which became in 1633, at Paris, under the direction of Madame Legras, niece of the keeper of the seals Marillac, the sisterhood off Servants of the sick poor, and the cradle of the Sisters of Charity.  “They