prudence the new order was directed to employ the means best understood by the age.  Cold calculation had succeeded to ardent zeal:  the public mind no longer instinctively revered the old heroic type of dragon-tamers, be they called Roland or Saint Benedict.  The new current required a new rudder, and the Visitation nuns supplied the need.  At first they were not even meant to be cloistered, but to form a kind of missionary society (as their very name implies) among the Calvinists of Savoy and France.  This original intention was soon overruled by the Italian advisers of Saint Francis:  the southern European mind has ever been slow to conceive the idea of a more spiritual protection than bolts and bars.  But even in their cloistered sphere the Visitation nuns clung to useful, active work, and became a teaching order.  They and the Ursulines (who in Italy, at least, are cloistered) shared this task among them till the more modern order of the “Sacred Heart” almost monopolized it.  I have myself known women of the most tried virtue and rare learning among the “Visitandines.”  Their rule is less strict about visitors, and even strangers are admitted to the parlor without a curtain being drawn behind the grating.  Their features are thus perfectly visible, and you can even shake hands between the bars.

Even to this day there is hardly a noble family of Catholic Europe that has not one or more representatives among the religious orders.  In England, both among “converts” and families of old Catholic stock, there are many girls whose names have been absorbed into those given at the same time as the ring and veil of a novice.  In Flanders there are fully half a dozen convents—­at Bruges, Antwerp and Louvain—­emphatically called “English,” and founded by scions of great English families exiled for their adherence to the old faith under Elizabeth and James I. They are mostly Augustinians.  The new order of the “Sacred Heart” has drawn to it women from Russia, Spain, America, as well as from its native land of France, and the Sisters of Charity have won a worldwide fame in the hospitals of the East and the recent battle-fields of the West.

I have dwelt chiefly on the life of the old contemplative, cloistered orders, because they are less known to the public and more mistakes are made about their constitution and rules, and also because in these old cradle-institutions are hidden the roots of the whole religious system which to this day crops out so vigorously in works of mercy over every land where the Catholic Church has a foothold.  Among the uncloistered orders of religious women—­and here we expect to be better understood and more fairly met by those whose knowledge of “religion” is not personal—­there are many that fulfill heroic missions, perform useful tasks, or even silent, uncomplaining drudgery.  In all large European towns the cornette of the Sister of St. Vincent of Paul is seen in hospital, prison and asylum, in the garret of the dying workman as well as by the bed where the warrior lies in state—­in the humble schools of the lowest suburbs and in the creches of the darkest byways.