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pal) Church. The wants and necessities of my soul were so pressing that I looked straight up to God, and I told him, since I cannot see the way to please you whom alone I wish to please, everything is indifferent to me, and until you do show me the way you mean me to walk in, I will trudge on in the path you suffered me to be born in, and go even to the very sacraments where I once used to find you. So away I went, my old Mary happy to take care of the children for me once more until I came back; but if I left the house a Protestant I returned to it a Catholic, I think, since I determined to go no more to the Protestants, being much more troubled than ever I thought I could be while I remembered God is my God. But so it was, that the bowing of my heart before the bishop to receive his absolution, which is given publicly and universally to all in the Church; I had not the least faith in his prayers, and looked for an apostolic loosing from my sins, which, by the books Mr. Hobart had given me to read, I find that they do not claim or admit; then trembling to communion, half dead with the inward struggle when they said the body and blood of Christ;' oh, no words for my trial! And I remember, in my old prayerbook of former edition, when I was a child, it was not, as now, said to be spiritually taken and received; however, to get thoughts away, I took the Daily Exercise of good Abbé Plunkett to read the prayers after communion, but finding every word addressed to our dear Saviour as really present, I became half crazy, and for the first time could not bear the sweet caresses of the darlings or bless their little dinner. Oh, my God, that day!"

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thought, till told by Mr. Hobart, that their faith could be so full of consequence to them or me, I will go peaceably and firmly to the Catholic Church; for, if faith is so important to our salvation, I will seek it where true faith first began—seek it among those who received it from God himself. The controversies on it I am quite incapable of deciding; and as the strictest Protestant allows salvation to a good Catholic, to the Catholics I will go and try to be a good one. May God accept my intention and pity me! supposing the word of our Lord has failed, and that he has suffered his first foundation to be built on by Antichrist, I cannot stop on that without stopping on every other word of our Lord, and being tempted to be no Christian at all; for if the first church became Antichrist, and the second holds her rights from it, then I should be afraid both might be Antichrist, and I make my way to the bottomless pit by following either."

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On the 14th of March, 1805, Mrs. Seton abjured Protestantism, and was received into the Catholic Church. This step brought upon her not only the opposition of her former friends, but estrangement from them. Left a widow with five children without sufficient support, she was now deprived of aid that would have been gladly given her had she remained an Episcopalian. But though she still had friends to assist her, she was unwilling to be wholly dependent on them, and, therefore, opened a boarding-house.

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the next year her young and dear sister-in-law, Cecilia Seton, when only fourteen years of age, became a Catholic in spite of all opposition; and for a time, while the displeasure of her relatives lasted, found a home with Mrs. Seton. But the heart of the latter was drawn to a higher life; it was her desire to place her sons at a Catholic college, and to be admitted herself with her daughters into

some convent where she might teach, and her children might be properly educated as Catholics. And now, in God's own way, simply and quietly, this true-hearted woman's vocation was marked out. Not as in the case of Mère Marie de la Providence, which we have linked with Mrs. Seton's, though that was God's own way also, did a voice speak first to the inmost soul, showing a new path, and shaping the life by strange events towards it. The Catholic Church was in its small beginning in the United States, and more than one of its faithful, hardworking priests knew of and cared for the brave convert to the faith who had left much to find all. Distinctly through their lips God revealed his will for her. She had planned to go to the nuns in Canada, but her plans were given up in the hope that she might do a greater work at home. Her advisers bade her "wait the manifestation of the divine will, the will of a Father most tender, who will not let go the child afraid to step alone." Greatly must her meek obedience have cheered them, proving to them her fitness for a work which would sustain their hands and the hands of their successors in many and many an hour of trial. "I have only to pray God," one wrote to her, "to bless your views and his, and to give you the grace to fulfil them for his greater glory. You are destined, I think, for some great good in the United States, and here you should remain in preference to any other location. For the rest, God has his moments which we must not seek to anticipate, and a prudent delay only brings to maturity the good desires which he awakes within us."

And so she gave herself to God to do what he should bid her do through the voice of his chosen servants upon whom his Spirit rested. It was a great work that lay before her; "the very idea," she says, "is enough to turn a stronger brain; but I know very well he sees differently from

man, and as obedience is his favorite service and cannot lead me wrong, according to the old rules I look neither behind nor before, but straight upward without thinking of human calculations."

In 1808, with a view to the work which might be shaped out for her, she opened a small boarding-school in Baltimore, and then, one morning after receiving Holy Communion, she was impressed with a wish to give herself "to the care and instruction of poor female children, and to organize some plan for this purpose that might be continued even after her death." Circumstances combined to show that God's time was come; spiritual daughters desirous of the religious life gathered round Mrs. Seton; Emmettsburg, now so famous in the annals of the Catholic Church in this land, was selected as the place for the home of the great future work; a modification of the rule of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul was adopted for the community; and there until 1821 Mother Seton labored for the glory of the Lord, who had brought her into his one and only Church, and for the good of souls redeemed by his most precious blood.

She desired that her society should be completely affiliated with that of the Daughters of St. Vincent de Paul in the Eastern hemisphere, and though this was not accomplished during her lifetime, it has taken place since her death, and the whole globe is belted with these whitehelmeted ranks of consolation. The sick and the suffering know them well and love them; they are tender nurses to little children whose mothers own them not; they are found, fearless and calm, upon the battlefield, ministering to the wounded and the dying; plague-stricken cities know them as of the number of those who fear God and fear nothing else save sin; who love God, and for his sake love all for whom he died. Converts to the Church know them,

as they open hand and heart and peaceful chapel to bid the newcomers welcome. Men who mock at religion bow humbly and reverently before them. And they count among their holy dead some bloodstained martyrs who have met death in the heathen land at the heathen hand; they count among their living those who have been driven into exile because they stood firm to their duty and their God. This army of St. Vincent is known the wide world over. There is another world for which another noble band is spending its all.

In the year that closed the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and upon the great festival of the Annunciation, there was born in France a child who was, some thirty years later, to furnish a new order in the Church. Watching the life of Eugénie Smet, both in her childhood and young womanhood, who would have dreamed what the object of the order would be? Her home was happy, her parents were in easy circumstances, her health was good, she possessed talents, and the power of influencing those about her. Bereavement, so far as the loss of friends by death is concerned, seems to have been well-nigh an unknown thing to her until after her vocation was plainly marked out before her, and her work begun.

Early in life she was drawn to the religious state, but felt no special attraction to any of the existing orders. For a time she found scope for her holy activity and zeal in the performance of good works in her native place, and so important and useful did she become that for this reason, as well as severe neuralgic pains which after a time came upon her, she seemed precluded from the path which still allured her, though she could not tell in what direction. On the feast of All Souls, 1853, light shone out upon that path, and lo! it was one as yet untried, where her own brave feet must lead the way.

This bright, keen-spirited girl, full of activity, and tenderly attached to her home, her family, her friends on this side the grave, was drawn by God away from all that living, visible, tangible affection, so precious to her, and bound as by an irresistible spell to the invisible realm of the dead, to the purgatory where earthly joys are as the veriest nothing to the holy souls whose one longing is to see the face of God.

She had from mere childhood felt a strange and strong attraction to them. On that All Souls' Day, which was as a turning-point in her life, "just after receiving our blessed Lord into her heart, and whilst she was renewing the consecration of her whole self and her whole life to the Divine Master whom she had deliberately chosen as the spouse of her soul, a thought passed through her mind. She said to herself, religious communities exist which answer every need of the Church militant on earth, but not a single one specially devoted to the relief of the suffering church in purgatory. Was she called, perhaps, to fill up that void?

"Startling are the first whispers of grace to a soul watching for God's leadings. The idea seemed too bold. a one. She felt at once what it would involve, with that strange rapidity of thought which in an instant presents to the mind a whole series of consequences and considerations. She saw rising before her the old dread of a total separation from those she loved, the long array of obstacles, of oppositions, of reproaches, which meet even an ordinary vocation to the religious life; then the appearance of extravagance which the thought of founding a new order would bear, the scorn and ridicule it would excite in worldly persons, and the contempt with which even the good and wise would treat it; then, more dimly, a consciousness that those who might pledge themselves by vows to be victims for the

holy souls would have to bare their breasts, as it were, to every kind of suffering, spiritual and temporal. No use, she mentally exclaimed, this is going too far; it is not this that God wants of me."

But it was this that God wanted of her, and for this he gave her the will and the power. In Paris, in the year 1856, her work began. She began it smarting under the anguish of separation from her home; she began it poor in this world's goods and with her mind entirely in favor of not taking as part of the active religious works of her order any which could bring payment. She and her first companions tasted poverty's cup right swiftly. "Water has to be bought at Paris, as well as other things. These ladies had to limit themselves to a pennyworth a day of that necessary of life. Their shawls were turned at night into blankets. One chair was all the whole set of rooms had to boast of; the need of seats was supplied by the purchase of two narrow wooden benches. Eugénie's strength broke down, and her severe neuralgic pains returned with violence." But still the little band persevered, and well did the faith of the foundress testify to the fitness of her name in religion, Mère Marie de la Providence.

The pen pauses while thought busies itself with the wonderment as to what impression such a life as this makes upon men who utterly deny that prayers for the dead are of any use at all, and consider them as "Romish errors," or upon those who think of their dead as happy and safe in some middle land of peace, where a pious aspiration for their repose may follow them, but not by reason of any special need for prayer in which those souls may be placed before they can appear in the awful presence of him whose eyes are too pure to behold evil. They do not know the intensity of faith whereby the Church holds as an integral part of her communion a shadowy land

of anguish, where her children suffer in meekest patience the just penalty of sins, nor do they know the intensity of love whereby she follows them thither, offering prayers and holy deeds and the tremendous sacrifices in their behalf. It might be well worth their while to ponder deeply upon the meaning of Mère Marie's life-upon God's visible manifestation of blessing on it-upon the exterior and interior holiness which characterized it. Is all this the sign of a mistaken belief?

According to Eugénie's ideas, we are told, an order devoted to the Holy Souls was to have nothing to do with means less absolutely directed to its end than works of mercy; it was to rely upon him who feeds the birds of the air, and clothes the lilies of the field, for the necessaries of life, of a life entirely devoted to poor sufferers on earth and the poor sufferers on the other side of the grave. But it was to be also a life which, in measure as it relieved the pains of others, seemed to accumulate them for its own in unison with him who carried our sorrows. The playful child, the "strong, healthy, high-spirited, and highly gifted girl" of Lille, was to taste before death every trouble that she dreaded most. She herself had said, Amongst the things I was most afraid of that did not involve a sin-there were five I particularly dreaded: to have to leave my family; to found the communistry; to have nothing to depend on for the support of my daughters; to get into debt; and to have a cancer. Well, by God's goodness every one of these has happened to me.

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And to add to all other trials, France was a scene of torturing suspense and distress. On the 1st of November, 1870, Mère Marie writes: "The Commune is proclaimed, so they say. But I will not disquiet myself about anything. I rely on the Divine Heart of our Lord. will take care of my poor daughters.

He

I am suffering martyrdom. This is as it should be. This is the proper way of celebrating the seventeenth anniversary of my first thought regarding my dearly loved souls in purgatory. Yes! on this day, just seventeen years ago, our Lord inspired me with the thought of founding this community. How many favors I have since received! And, if I had faith enough to feel it, what an immense mercy my sufferings are. To-day I feel as if I were on fire; my hands are burning. Jesus, I want nothing but that your will should be done. O Jesus, my master, let every pain be an act of love soliciting the deliverance of a soul in purgatory."

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That was her life-thought. "We say every day in our office for the dead," such was her teaching, rifice or oblation thou wouldst not, but thou hast given me a body. Then said I, 'Behold I come.' Yes, let us repeat, 'Lo, I come to work all my life by prayer, by suffering, and by action, for the deliverance of the souls in purgatory, and I come for good and all,"

On All Souls' Day, 1870, when her bodily malady was like slow torture, she said in the evening, the clock having stopped, thus making her think, perhaps, of the long, sleepless night before her, "How unfortunate! we shall not hear the clock strike, and shall not be reminded to make the sign of the cross. I suffer for the souls in purgatory; that thought helps me to bear my illness. I can only satisfy my longing to help the souls that God loves by suffering for them. I believe that during seventeen years I have had no other thought than this. I love to help the souls in purgatory, for God's own glory is interested in their release.

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This is a time of grace,' she said, "a time of expiation and of merit; we shall be very foolish if we let it pass without profiting by it, not for ourselves, but for the souls who expect so much from us."

How shall we cease to tell of her closing days? How choose from all that union of life in death with her Master's final anguish the portions. to be inserted here? As she looked upon the blood flowing from the wound that was killing her, she used to exclaim, "My God, how glad I am to shed my blood for you! To accomplish your blessed will. Jesus on the cross suffered more than I do. O, will of God, will of God, these words give strength to bear everything."

"Even when crushed by bodily suffering, Mère Marie found strength in her ardent charity to direct, and even sometimes to prepare food with her own hands for the poor whom her nuns continued to visit amidst all the horrors of the siege. She used to send out every day soup to the sick, and watched over all the details connected with the relief of the wounded. December was marked by increasing pains and an increasing fervor of love, which struck all those who approached the voluntary victim of her devotion to the Holy Souls. On the festival she used to say, 'For me there are no feasts now but those of eternity; here I can do nothing but lose myself in the depths of. God's will.' At the close of that terrible year of 1870, and the beginning of 1871, which opened amidst such dire calamities, she said to her spiritual children assembled round her bed: Cling to the Cross, our only hope. Life is short, eternity endless. Let us think only of eternity.' The doctor having pronounced that she might die at any moment, Père Olivaint proposed to her to receive extreme unction. She agreed to it with a joy that lighted up her dying face. After receiving the last sacrament, Mère Marie de la Providence accomplished the act which the rule enjoins upon all religious persons on their deathbed. She placed herself at the feet of all her sisters, and distinctly and earnestly, though some

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