shall not have, as a regular rule,” said St. Vincent, “any monastery but the houses of the sick, any chapel but their parish-church, any cloister but the streets of the town and the rooms of the hospitals, any enclosure but obedience, any grating but the fear of God, or any veil but the holiest and most perfect modesty.”  Eighteen thousand daughters of St. Vincent de Paul, of whom fourteen thousand are French, still testify at this day to the far-sighted wisdom of their founder; his regulations have endured like his work and the necessities of the poor.

It was to the daughters of Charity that M. Vincent confided the work in connection with foundlings, when his charitable impulses led him, in 1638, to take up the cause of the poor little abandoned things who were perishing by heaps at that time in Paris.  Appealing for help, on their account, to the women of the world, one evening when he was in want of money, he exclaimed at the house of the Duchess of Aiguillon, Cardinal Richelieu’s niece, “Come now, ladies; compassion and charity have made you adopt these, little creatures as your own children; you have been their mothers according to grace, since their mothers according to nature have abandoned them.  Consider, then, whether you too will abandon them; their life and their death are in your hands; it is time to pronounce their sentence, and know whether you will any longer have pity upon them.  They will live if you continue to take a charitable care of them; they will die and perish infallibly if you abandon them.”  St. Vincent de Paul had confidence in human nature, and everywhere on his path sprang up good works in response to his appeals; the foundation of Mission-priests or Lazarists, designed originally to spread about in the rural districts the knowledge of God, still testifies in the East, whither they carry at one and the same time the Gospel and the name of France, to that great awakening of Christian charity which signalized the reign of Louis XIII.  The same inspiration created the seminary of St. Sulpice, by means of M. Olier’s solicitude, the brethren of Christian Doctrine and the Ursulines, devoted to the education of childhood, and so many other charitable or pious establishments, noble fruits of devoutness and Christian sacrifice.

Nowhere was this fructuating idea of the sacrifice, the immolation of man for God and of the present in prospect of eternity, more rigorously understood and practised than amongst the disciples of John du Vergier de Hauranne, Abbot of St. Cyran.  More bold in his conceptions than Cardinal Berulle and St. Vincent de Paul, of a nature more austere and at the same time more ardent, he had early devoted himself to the study of theology.  Connected in his youth with a Fleming, Jansen, known under the name of Jansenius and afterwards created Bishop of Ypres, he adopted with fervor the doctrines as to the grace of God which his friend had imbibed in the school of St. Augustin, and employing in the direction of souls that zealous ardor which makes conquerors, he set himself to work to regenerate the church by penance, sanctity, and sacrifice; God supreme, reigning over hearts subdued, that was his ultimate object, and he marched towards it without troubling himself about revolts and sufferings, certain that he would be triumphant with God and for Him.