through this order alone, and given their children's lives besides."

2. Catherine Elizabeth McAuley, the foundress of this prolific family, was born near Dublin in the year 1787. She was descended on both sides from ancient and respectable Catholic families, but, having been orphaned at an early age, she had the great misfortune to fall into the hands of guardians who were not only ignorant of the Catholic faith, but who entertained for it a bitter and unusual hatred. Her brother and sister lost their faith; but Catherine, although she grew up without proper instruction, always felt her heart yearn toward the Church of her baptism, and, although forbidden to follow her inclinations, she persistently refused to enter any other.

3. Later on, when her vigorous mind began to develop itself, books of controversy aimed against the faith were put into her hands, with the unlooked-for result of neutralizing their own purpose. History, even as written by the adversaries of the Spouse of Christ, is never a willing witness. against her, and cannot be read by those whose minds are honest and whose hearts are unclouded, without revealing the Church in all her fair proportions. Catherine found all her convictions, as well as all her inclinations, bend in one direction, and in her seventeenth year she summoned courage to obey her conscience and seek instruction and the grace of the Sacraments at the hands of Dr. Murray, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin.

4. In these matters, although it is "the first step that counts," yet with many persons, and perhaps with most of those who seem designed by God to

*

promote His glory in ways beyond the ordinary, there is much to suffer even after the first painful struggles are over between conscience and the contrary impulses which sway the soul. Catherine's difficulties were many. Her natural amiability had too greatly endeared her to those among whom she lived for them to lose her without resistance. Yet, doubtless, her trials seem harder in the accounts given by her biographers than she felt them at the time. Perhaps those only who have sold, as she did, all they had, to buy that one pearl of great price, the Catholic faith, can know how paltry the purchase-money looks beside it. Holding that prize at last, it seems only reasonable to them that no one should win it who is not prepared for its sake to throw away all else.

5. Moreover, Catherine's will was so firm when once it had fixed upon its proper object, that her conflicts with her friends, if sharp, were also short. In the end she not only attained her point of prac tising her religion without opposition, but had the happiness of seeing the friends by whom she had been adopted embrace it also. At his death, which happened when Catherine was thirty-five years old, her guardian, who had been baptized some months previously, left her sole mistress of a large fortune, and unhampered by any advice as to how it should be used. That it would be devoted to charitable purposes he doubtless thought not unlikely; but her judgment and her heart had long approved themselves worthy of the unlimited confidence which he now placed in them.

6. Nothing, however, was at this time further from her intention than the thought of founding a

religious institute. She felt assured, it is true, that God called her to do some permanent work for the poor, and she seemed never for an instant to have regarded her wealth in any other light than as a trust which He had reposed in her hands. Her first undertaking was that of establishing a refuge where female servants and other women of good character might find a temporary home when out of work, and be sheltered from the many dangers to which poverty exposes them. But her plan for carrying out this work was to form a sort of society of secular ladies, who, between the period of leaving school and settling in life, might, without inconvenience to their families, spend a few hours daily in instructing the poor and preparing them for the sacraments.

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7. "One thing," says Dean O'Brien, "which must strike the most cursory reader of her life, is how little Catherine herself knew of the mission for which the Almighty had destined her. Like St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominic, St. Ignatius, and nearly all, if not quite all, the founders of religious orders, she looks the passive instrument of God's love for man, worked by the Spirit,' as the children of God are, and for the beneficent purpose of becoming the stewardess of celestial bounty to those whom the world passes by. She wishes to build a school for poor girls, and her architect builds a convent; she engages a few ladies to help her, and, for convenience' sake, they begin to take a spare meal on the premises; religion suggests a garb grave as their occupations, and a dark costume is assumed ; intercourse begets the name of 'sister,' at first playfully applied, and spiritual authority is offended at the usurpation. Thus the casually associated little

band have insensibly come within the charmed circle of monastic feelings and habits; its spirit has insensibly stolen in among them and shaped their lives and ordinary practices, until at length they stand on the threshold of the sanctuary, and retrogression or progress becomes a necessity. Happily the step is made forward, and the Church has a new gem in her brilliant diadem.

8. "We behold here the full illustration of the words of the Master in Israel: 'If the work be from God, you cannot destroy it.' Catherine's work was like our Divine Lord and His work-'A sign to be contradicted.' She had the crosses, and conflicts, and misconceptions which wait upon great enterprises; but from all of them the weak woman came forth radiant with the victories the Divine Spirit deigned to bestow. The simple truth is that her work was a plant whose growth was in and of the Church; which belonged to the special season predetermined by Heaven, and was, therefore, only one of the series of the Father's planting' which, in mysterious order, grow along the fields of ages, and mark the necessities of mankind, as well as the vigilance and lovingness of God.

9. "The same Wisdom which gave a Paul and an Antony to piety, a Benedict to learning, a Bernard to discipline, a Dominic to assailed orthodoxy, a Francis to spiritual life, a Peter Nolasco to philanthropy, a Vincent de Paul to ecclesiastical reform and charity, a Nano Nagle and a De la Salle to the education of the poor,-the same gave to Ireland, coming on the famine time, the cholera time, and the days of awful emigration, and Queen's Colleges, and growth of materialism, the Order of Mercy.

Refuge was to be needed for our young women, and homes for our orphans, and education for our girls, and angels of God's love for our decaying and dying brothers in hospitals, garrets, and cabins ; and, just as it always happened, at the proper time -neither sooner nor later-God spoke by the presence of the Sisters of Mercy: 'I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.'"

LESSON LXXXIV.

PICTURES ON MEMORY'S WALL.

1. AMONG the beautiful pictures that hang on mem、 ory's wall

Is one of a dim old forest, that seemeth best of all: Not for its gnarled oaks, olden, dark with the mis

tletoe,

Nor for the violets golden that sprinkle the vale below;

Not for the milk-white lilies that lean from the fragrant hedge,

Coquetting all day with the sunbeams, and stealing their golden edge;

Nor for the vines on the upland where the bright red berries rest,

Nor the pinks, nor the pale, sweet cowslip, it seemeth to me the best.

2. I once had a little brother, with eyes that were dark and deep;

In the lap of the old dim forest he lieth in peace asleep.