“Now for your affair.  We do not practise either the benevolence or the philanthropy that you know about, which are really divided into several branches, all taken advantage of by sharpers in charity as a business.  We practise charity as our great and sublime Saint Paul defines it; for, my dear lad, we think that charity, and charity alone, which is Love, can heal the wounds of Paris.  In our eyes, misery, of whatever kind, poverty, suffering, misfortune, grief, evil, no matter how produced, or in what social class they show themselves, have equal rights.  Whatever his opinions or beliefs, an unhappy man is, before all else, an unhappy man; and we ought not to attempt to turn his face to our holy mother Church until we have saved him from despair or hunger.  Moreover, we ought to convert him to goodness more by example and by gentleness than by any other means; and we believe that God will specially help us in this.  All constraint is bad.  Of the manifold Parisian miseries, the most difficult to discover, and the bitterest, is that of worthy persons of the middle classes who have fallen into poverty; for they make concealment a point of honor.  Those sorrows, my dear Godefroid, are to us the object of special solicitude.  Such persons usually have intelligence and good hearts.  They return to us, sometimes with usury, the sums that we lend them.  Such restitutions recoup us in the long run for the losses we occasionally incur through impostors, shiftless creatures, or those whom misfortunes have rendered stupid.  Through such persons we often obtain invaluable help in our investigations.  Our work has now become so vast, its details are so multifarious, that we no longer suffice of ourselves to carry it on.  So, for the last year we have a physician of our own in every arrondissement in Paris.  Each of us takes general charge of four arrondissements.  We pay each physician three thousand francs a year to take care of our poor.  His time belongs to us in the first instance, but we do not prevent him from attending other sick persons if he can.  Would you believe that for many months we were unable to find twelve really trustworthy, valuable men, in spite of all our own efforts and those of our friends?  We could not employ any but men of absolute discreetness, pure lives, sound knowledge, experience, active men, and lovers of doing good.  Now, although there are in Paris some ten thousand individuals, more or less, who would gladly do the work, we could not find twelve to meet our needs in a whole year.”

“Our Saviour had difficulty in gathering his apostles, and even then a traitor and an unbeliever got among them,” said Godefroid.