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establishment assumed the form and rules of religious life, and was confirmed as a religious community by Pius IX., in 1863. A small congregation of men was also founded to take charge of the male children, and to help in the instruction of the others. They were both placed under the patronage of "Our Lady of Sion." The primary object of these foundations was to pray for the conversion of the Jews and to give a good Christian education to whatever Jewish children might enter the Church.

So well, however, were the principles of religion taught in the new convent that several rich Christian parents asked to have their children admitted as pensionnaires. This request was granted; and in the course of a few years Notre Dame de Sion, always keeping to the object for which it was first founded, grew to be one of the first boarding-schools for ladies in the French capital. The religious vocations to the Order became so numerous, and the resources brought to the community by various rich postulants were so great that Père Ratisbonne was soon able to open a large orphanage, an industrial school, and a school for the poor.

At this period a vast property was purchased at Grandbourg, in the diocese of Versailles, and presented to the Congregation by an admirer of the good work. Here the Sisters of Sion have now a wellmaintained boarding-school and a country-house, where the novices and nuns of the city spend part of their summer holidays. At Evry, in the same locality, they have three houses, one a large industrial school, another a free school for the poor, and the third a home for poor children.

The Patriarch of Jerusalem, hearing of the many conversions wrought, no doubt, by the prayers of the pious congregation, invited a colony of the daughters of Sion to the Holy Land. Père Ratisbonne readily agreed. In 1861 four nuns started on this important mission. On their arrival they purchased, for seventy thousand francs, a plot of ground on which were lying the ruins of the Prætorium of Pontius Pilate. Over these ruins a splendid convent was built, and on the 20th of January, 1862, the sisters were able to take possession of it. "It was here," say the Annals of Sion, "that the first scenes of the Passion were enacted; it was here that the Jews, blinded with rage, obtained the wicked sentence, and asked that the blood of the Just should fall on them and on their children; it was here that Pontius Pilate, showing our Lord crowned with thorns to the people, cried, "Behold the Man!" Is there not a well-traced design of Providence in the transformation of those sacred ruins? The principal arch of the ancient sanctuary, which tradition calls the arch of the "Ecce Homo," is now contained in the chapel of the Sisters of Sion. The place that once resounded to the cries of "take and crucify Him," now re-echoes the chanting of the nuns, who repeat three times a day, at the hour of

the Great Sacrifice, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

The children of Père Ratisbonne were not long at Jerusalem when, by the assistance of their founder, they were able to purchase another property, St. John in Montana, not far from the city, and an orphanage for poor children was built on the memorable site where the Blessed Virgin visited St. Elizabeth in the midst of the mountains of Judea.

Boarding-schools, orphanages, and poor schools were subsequently founded in Constantinople, where they were strongly commended by Cardinal Franchi, who was sent on an extraordinary mission to that city in 1870. About the same period foundations were made at Jassy and Galatz, in Moldavia, where the Jews are very numerous, and whither the sisters had been invited by the Vicar-Apostolic, Mgr. Salandari. In 1863 another colony settled down in the ancient city of Chalcedon, in Asia Minor, from which, in a few years after, a branch was established in Smyrna. At a date still more recent houses were founded in Egypt. During the late bombardment the sisters had to fly from their schools in Alexandria, and when they returned they found that their house had almost miraculously escaped the general conflagration.

During all this time the work was spreading over France. Schools were opened at Marseilles, at St. Omer, at Evry, and at Bourdeaux.

In London they were introduced under the patronage of Cardinal Manning. They have a first-class boarding-school for young ladies at Bayswater, a middle-class school in the same locality, poor schools in the quarters of Holloway and Drury-lane, and schools at Worthing in Sussex, were they were established by Dr. Grant, Bishop of Southwark.

It was Père Ratisbonne who gave life and vigour to this great work. He was always at the helm directing and encouraging those who desired to give him assistance. A few earnest lectures from him infused into the young novices a spirit that made them care not whether they were to be sent to the far-off Asia Minor or to Egypt or allowed to remain in their native France. The good Pope Pius IX. gave him many marks of his affection and Leo XIII. appointed him "Prothonotary Apostolic," in the latter years of his life.

During the war of 1870, the mother-house of all the convents of Sion, in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris, was transformed, like most institutions of the kind, into an ambulance hospital; but the Prussian fusilade from the heights of Mendon and St. Cloud soon compelled the sisters to disperse. Some took refuge at St. Omer and others came to London, where they founded the two houses that are now doing so much good amongst the desolate poor of the great metropolis. When the war was over they found their convent utterly wrecked. The bombshells of the first siege had shattered the walls and the work of ruin was made complete by the petroleum of the communards and the explosion of the powder depôts of the neigh

bouring Luxembourg. Generous benefactors came again to the rescue, and the house was rebuilt in its present shape, with its beautiful chapel and its spacious halls and corridors.

Many an Irish lady has passed through those halls, having come there as others did from Spain, from Italy, from America, from Germany, and from almost every country in Europe. Some of them are at present in convent homes in Ireland and elsewhere; others are wending their way through the busy world outside; but they all remember the kind father, with the flowing white locks and the sweet countenance, that welcomed them to the hospitable soil of France, that took such a sympathetic interest in them during their schooldays at Notre Dame de Sion, and that used to come on St. Patrick's Day with a green shamrock in his fingers, and gather around him his little "colonie Irlandaise," and speak of "La verte Erin " and her struggles for the faith, and always conclude by asking them to get St. Patrick and St. Bridget, and St. Malachy, the friend of his favourite, St. Bernard, to intercede for the obstinate children of the "house of Israel."

On the 21st of last December Père Ratisbonne presided at the profession of an Irish lady, Miss Synan of Limerick, in religion Sœur Madeleine. After the ceremony he grew faint and sick, and it soon became apparent that death was approaching. He lingered in a state of great exhaustion until the 10th of January, when he quietly expired at the advanced age of eighty-two years, having received the last Sacraments from the hands of the Archbishop of Paris, and the final blessing of Leo XIII.

The sorrow of his religious children on hearing the sad news recalls his own beautiful chapter on the death of St. Bernard, with a passage from which we may be allowed to close this hurried sketch.

"On the morning of the twentieth day of the month of August, 1153, the solemn chanting of seven hundred monks, accompanied by the tolling of the death-knell broke the silence of the desert and announced to the world the death of St. Bernard. The saint was sixty-three years of age. For forty years he had been consecrated to Christ in the cloister, and for thirty-eight Abbot of the Monastery of Clairvaux. He left 160 religious houses that he had founded in diverse countries of Europe and Asia, and in after years there were counted up to 800 abbeys, branches of the Order.

"It would be hard to describe the sighing and groaning of the monks when they saw themselves deprived of their father.

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"O well beloved founder,' cried one of them, 'you were the port of the shipwrecked, the girdle of the oppressed, the eye of the blind, the support of the weak! You were, O father, the model of perfection, the mirror of sanctity, the type of Christian virtue. You were the fruitful olive-tree, the flourishing vine, the cedar with a thousand

branches, the magnificent plain-tree. From your tongue and from your hand came the precious balm that cured our disease! Oh, happy the saint who was loved of God and man! He has passed from work to repose, from the promise to the crown, from faith to light, from the pilgrimage to the fatherland. Beautiful passage for the saint of the Lord, but sad exile for those who remain in the valley and weep in the desert!'

"And we too," added the pious biographer, "who write these lines, join in the sorrow of those holy monks; for we lose in finishing this work the dear object which for many years of suffering consoled us in our trials, and sweetened our misfortune. We were accustomed by a sort of voluntary illusion to live with our saint, to accompany him everywhere, to take a delight in his words and in his works, as if we had the happiness to be counted amongst his disciples. And now here is death-inevitable death, which stops our pen and puts an end to our journey.

"Farewell, dear and well-beloved Bernard! Bless this book and the hand that has written it. Alas! was it not a rash undertaking to tell the history of your life? Have we not darkened your glory and discoloured your labours? No doubt we have; for it is impossible to understand here below the great things which the Lord accomplishes in those who serve Him. But we trust that the Spirit of God will supply what was wanting in our attempt,; that He will stir within the hearts of our readers the holy joys of peace and charity, fraternal charity, divine charity, without which life has no charms, and without which we are neither brothers, nor children of the same father.

"We ask these graces from the great St. Bernard for all those who shall read those pages, and particularly for the kind reader who, when he has closed this book, shall offer a prayer for the unworthy writer, and for the souls that are united to him in God, in the heart of Our Lady of Sion."

names.

NEW BOOKS.

THE first Catholic Lord Chancellor of Ireland has gathered into a large octavo, produced with the usual elegance of the London firm of Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., a selection of his "Occasional Papers and Addresses." The title has been happily chosen. The genial oratory of Lord O'Hagan is not represented here by any of the speeches which established his fame at the Bar, but chiefly by addresses of a more academic kind which depend less for their interest and value on the passing circumstances of the time in which they were delivered. Almost the only political speech preserved in this splendid volume is that spoken from the hustings at Tralee, after the election of the Attorney-General in 1863. The longer discourses treat either of the higher aspects of Jurisprudence or of the social conditions of Ireland; but most readers, after consulting the index of subjects, will turn with more eagerness to the pages consecrated to four or five very eminent Three of these indeed-Cardinal Newman, Henry Grattan, and Sir Alexander Mac Donnell-appear only in connection with a few graceful phrases of warm and eloquent appreciation; but Daniel O'Connell, Thomas Moore, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, are discussed in brilliant and elaborate essays. The last of these is more sure to possess the charm of novelty for the majority of readers than the orations inspired by the centenaries of the author of the "Irish Melodies," and of the author of Catholic Emancipation. We do not know where to refer for a more effective popular study of the strangely gifted man who was the first (but not the last) to bring distinction on the name of Coleridge. But no part of Lord O'Hagan's volume is more beautiful or more interesting than the biographical sketch of his friend, Dr. Russell, President of Maynooth, ending with the singularly felicitous quotation from some out-of-the-way rhymester of the middle ages:"Ultra modum placidus, dulcis et benignus, Ob ætatis senium candidus ut cygnus, Blandus et affabilis et amari dignus

In se Sancti Spiritus possidebat pignus."

Of which we venture a crudely literal version:

"Placid beyond measure, gentle and benign;

Locks of swan-like whiteness bore of age the sign;
Worthy to be loved, most affable and kind,

Of the Holy Spirit he the gifts combined."

We have had "Shakespeare Birthday Books," and "Tennyson Birthday Books," and even "Arnold Birthday Books," and sundry others; but there is a great deal more of freshness and originality in "The Irish Birthday Book: Selections from the Speeches and Writings

VOL. XII., No. 130.

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