serve God and humanity in those Protestant Churches which prize the freedom of the individual Christian more than the most efficient religious machine whose every wheel and screw and pin is supplied by a human soul, self-robbed of its will and conscience.

It is not often that we are able to contemplate such a system from within, so as to ascertain with what friction the admirable mechanism works. A precious opportunity of this kind is furnished to us by a recent publication,* which admits us to the most intimate confidence of a noble Christian woman, enlisted in the great army of the Sisters of Charity. We find that her life of devotion to her fellows was also, from beginning to end, a life of hard and bitter conflict with inimical spiritual forces; we hear accents of despondency constantly mingling with the utterances of a singularly cheerful and courageous labourer, whose toils were always successful; and we see her, in age and feebleness, finally cast out as an unholy thing from the Church into which she had been born. These apparent contradictions are worth examining into, and we shall find ourselves well repaid for the necessary exertion.

AMELIE DE LASAULX was born in the year of Waterloo; and she lived to spend the last remnants of her strength in caring for the wounded and dying victims of the Franco-Prussian War. Within two years from this fatal period she died, at peace with God and man, though expelled from the Order to which she had given her lifelong service, and despoiled after death of the robe of a Sister of Charity, that being a garment too holy to enfold the corpse of one who had incurred the displeasure of Infallibility. By studying her life we shall find ample reason for both the

God-given peace and the priestly curse.

The family of the Lasaulx, of Coblentz, were distinguished for talent and for eccentricity, and none were more so than Jean-Claude, the father of Amélie. He, being sent to study law at Würzburg, transferred his attention to medicine; and after five years, which he was supposed to have devoted to that science, returned to his father's roof, bringing with him, not the diploma which his family expected, but a young bride whom he had no visible means of supporting. Amélie was the youngest child of this imprudent marriage; but at the time of her birth her father, by his own abilities and the good offices of his friends, had attained a respectable position as an architect; his strong natural genius for the art amply compensating for the total ignorance of its principles with which he had entered on the profession. Of his six children, none were dearer to him than the daring, sparkling little Amélie, whom he styled his 'youngest son;" for she was much more distinguished by a boyish activity and courage than by any precocious spirituality or girlish meekness. With large black eyes shining with gaiety, with rosy cheeks and a ringing laugh, she was always in good humour and full of wild imaginations. She was never known to descend the stairs in any other fashion than by sliding down the banisters, was very expert in walking on stilts, and had a passion for skating; but, as no other young lady in Coblentz indulged in the last-named pastime, she practised it in guilty secrecy on a lonely creek of the Moselle. The only clouds which darkened this happy, careless childhood appear to have arisen from the peculiar temper of Madame de Lasaulx, who to much force of character joined an icy re

serve of manner, and when displeased made her family aware of the fact by a rigid silence, which sometimes lasted for weeks, spreading like a spell over the whole household, all of whose members learned to express their vexation in a similar manner.

Madame Lasaulx was a much more devout child of the Church than was her husband, of whom it was said that when he had built a church and given up the keys, he never set foot in it again'; and this through perfect indifference to the only form of Christianity which he knew intimately. The religious element in the family did not, therefore, present itself very favourably to the father's darling, and it is not surprising that she felt no attraction towards a consecrated life. A gentle and enthusiastic elder sister took the veil, and it was jestingly hinted to Amélie that she might one day follow that example. I had rather climb the garden-wall and jump into the river,' was her indignant reply. As she grew into womanhood, the very slender instruction she had received at school was supplemented by intercourse with many persons of great distinction, whom she met, not at her own home where the social atmosphere was often of the coldest, but at that of an uncle, an eminent lawyer, the Counsellor Longard. This dwelling was a home of cheerful piety and of cordial but discriminating hospitality, and remained always the great attraction and the true centre of life for all the young Lasaulx, among whom there was not one person of weak or commonplace character. The pleasures, at once simple and refined, which Amélie there enjoyed, with her own strong natural delight in the beauty of the world and the charms of literature, made her girlhood' an uninterrupted festival.'

Such joys, however natural and innocent, are liable to be soon over

cast; and the very grace and vivacity which made the young girl attractive procured for her much distress. She received various offers of marriage which she could not be induced to accept, and was punished for her obstinacy by several months of silence. At last, however, her heart seemed to be won, and she accepted the suit of a young physician, who, unfortunately, did not much please her parents, nor long please herself. 'A chance word sufficed to tear asunder the rosy cloud in which her imagination had enveloped her betrothed, and to show her the true selfishness of his character. The grief that she experienced was almost despair; for several hours she seemed like one beside herself. She withdrew her plighted troth immediately; but this agitation had shattered her, and a few days saw her prostrated by a fever, which brought her to the brink of the grave. She recovered; but the joyous girl Amélie never rose again from that couch of sickness.' It was a new and nobler being whose real life now commenced. I have been compelled,' she said, 'to renounce the thing which has most value in the eyes of the world, but I have acquired benefits which amply recompense me.'

Hoping to dispel the melancholy which seemed to possess her, her family sent her on a visit to her brother Ernest, a young man of rare abilities, who had become a Professor at the University of Würzburg. His house was near the great hospital, and from its windows Amélie could watch the constant arrival of sufferers and the sadder departure of the coffined dead. From this spectacle she derived the idea of devoting her life to the service of the sick and wretched; such an employment alone seemed ample enough to fill the mournful void in her heart and life. 'My hands ached to be at that work,' she said in after years. She felt in

herself the helpful capacity to care for those who so needed care; and, to use her own strong words, her vocation haunted her like a sin.' No dreams of saintly indolence, no mystical visions were hers, nor did she think of finding a balm for her wounded heart in the silence and shadow of the cloister; on the contrary, the conventual life repelled her as imprisonment in a cage would repel a wild forest-bird. What she passionately desired was the work of tending the sick and helpless.

Divided between repugnance and longing, she sought for a sign from heaven to guide her steps. The omen on which she fixed was a practical one. She often saw passing in the street a man reduced by drunkenness to the lowest debasement; she asked herself if she were capable of tending such a being if he were consigned to her care as a patient; and she could not answer affirmatively. One day, however, she was requested to pray beside a dying man who had been received into an hospital she often visited. Hardly daring to look on the livid face, she repeated her prayers at first with closed eyelids. When she summoned courage at last to consider the patient more attentively, she recognized in the altered countenance the very drunkard from whom she had often turned with loathing. She felt that her sign was granted, and no longer tried to resist the 'mighty yearning like the first fierce impulse unto crime,' which had taken hold of her strong, single-hearted nature, and which left her no rest until she had taken the necessary steps for entering on the life of a Sister of Charity.

She chose the celebrated Order of St. Vincent de Paul, and the Congregation of St. Charles de Borromeo, whose headquarters were at Nancy. Here we come on the stain with which the Romanist contempt for natural ties disfigures her history.

She left her home almost clandestinely, taking leave of no one, not even of her father, on whom her departure inflicted a cruel loss. Such a procedure was not calculated to recommend religion to the easy-going sceptic; and, in fact, it exerted on him

strongly repelling influence. The daughter, however, passed with unshaken resolution through her three years' novitiate, and was received into the Order of her choice under the monastic name of Sister Augustine, pronouncing the perpetual vows according to the following formula: 'I promise to God to live and die in the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Charles, without ever separating from it, and to consecrate the rest of my life to the poor and friendless sick, according to the statutes and rules of the community. I promise never to consent that the Congregation should renounce the care of the sick, and never to quit the Congregation myself through disgust, caprice or passion. I submit beforehand to the canonical penalties, if ever I should be unfaithful to this engagement.'

Henceforth her outward life was regular and monotonous as the pulsations of a clock. The two or three noteworthy events which varied it can be enumerated in a few brief sentences. Entrusted with the care of the dispensary in the hospital at Aix-la-Chapelle, for which she had been prepared by a regular apprenticeship to the druggist's business, she was once allowed to visit her father, who was still hardly reconciled to her mode of life. Soon after, she was summoned, too late, to his death-bed. A distressing presentiment had warned her of this loss at the moment when it befell her.

At the age of thirty-three she was raised to the rank of Superior, and to the management of the new hospital of St. John, at Bonn. In exercising that important trust she passed the most active years of her life. The

great wars of 1864 and 1866, summoning her to the battle-field in her capacity of nurse, gave her a few months of free movement and ceaseless toil. Thenceforth to her death she remained imprisoned in the life she had chosen.

The

It was well for Sister Augustine that she had not entered the cloister hoping to find peace there. rules of her chosen Order were few indeed and simple at the time of her entering it, though many years did not pass without the introduction of frivolous and vexatious alterations. But the confinement between four walls was more oppressive to her than she had anticipated; the necessity of passive obedience, which lies at the root of all monastic life, was still more hard to bear. She taught herself to consider these things as the price by which she had bought the right to consecrate her life to the service of her brethren.

'God only,' she wrote, knows how I suffer in being deprived of the liberty of my movements....My Saviour was not fastened to the cross by nails, but by the love of His brethren: the love of my brethren must forge my chains, or their weight will be insupportable....Never have I sustained such long and cruel internal conflicts as during the seven years I passed at Aix-la-Chapelle. Whether the fault was more with me or with those around me, I know not; but I have often, with barning tears, implored God to stupefy me and render me insensible to all which had appeared great and noble to me since my youth. Later, how have I prayed the Lord to pardon me this mad request! I have never for an instant been the poorer for renouncing all possessions of this world; but how miserable should I have been had I renounced the treasures of the heart! What ingratitude to reject such precious gifts because they seemed to me too great for the cloister!"

'Too great for the cloister!' these words might almost furnish the epitaph of this noble being, who, while erushed by a feeling of absolute loneliness, finding her whole manner of thought foreign to the spirit of

those around her, could yet rise to a conception of Christianity unusual in its simple grandeur. The very solitude in which her soul dwelt helped her to concentrate her affections on her Saviour, while she so utterly despised and passed by the weak idolatries of saint and angel worship that we can only find one allusion to such practices in her own recorded words; and this one instance is significant. A well-meaning friend was urging on her the example of some canonized mortal-'I think you have not often heard me speak of the saints,' was the only reply. On the other hand, the references to the words and example of the Redeemer, which abound in her letters and journals, are such as might have been uttered by a member of the simplest and purest Church in Christendom, and would be well fitted to make us forget to what communion Sister Augustine belonged, did we not find also abundant evidence that her manner of thinking and believing brought her into perpetual and painful collision with her co-religionists.

'Her attitude remained constantly defensive. Without disputing, without contradicting, she maintained a silent opposition which her superiors at last tolerated also in silence, not knowing very well how to attack it.' It was not against the rules of the Society that she rebelled: these were sane and simple, authorizing the Sisters to content themselves with internal devotion alone when their duties as nurses required it; it was against new fantastic interpretations of the rules, incessantly introduced, which tended to make them burdensome. The asceticism of Rome insinuated itself in prohibitions to the Sisters to converse with their patients except in briefest necessary phrase, or to allow their own thoughts to turn with love towards their forsaken home or country. The meditation which was read to us this morning,'

writes Sister Augustine, 'teaches us not to bestow any love on men, in order to love God more. My Lord,

if on such a path I must seek Thee, I shall never find Thee! Is love a weed, a poison, that we must shun, or must we trample it under foot to make it grow? The Apostle John preached very different maxims.'

One of the original rules had specified that in urgent cases even the perpetual lamp, which was kept burning before the altar, might be employed for the service of 'our neighbour.' In 1862, this was absolutely forbidden. Almost all the new practices were designed to stimulate a fantastic pietism, and to annihilate the personality of the Sisters, making them, in the hands of their Superiors, mere tools, deprived of will, feeling and judgment. Sister Augustine declined to admit that our duty as Christians is to crush all our moral force; she rather sought to regulate it, submitting all natural desires and hopes to the will of God as revealed in His commandments, in the conscience, and in the special circumstances of life.

'I remember,' she wrote in 1854, 'my youthful enthusiasm for the lofty toils of a Sister of Charity, my ardent desire to share them. And yet I trembled at the idea of entering the cloister. I know not what divination revealed to me in the monastic system an unhealthy conception of Christianity, which saps the foundations of that building at the very moment when it pretends to raise it. I have suffered a martyrdom from those maxims, those monkish theories with which they seek to tear up what God Himself has planted in our hearts. What an unworthy caricature they produce of piety and charity! No, Christianity should hallow our natural feelings. To try to crush them wholesale is a criminal work.'

It would be difficult for the most fiery Protestant to denounce the monastic ideal of religion in stronger

terms.

It is refreshing to turn from the constant silent warfare of Sister Augustine's hidden life, and to look

on her as the world saw her when organizing and administering the new Hospital at Bonn, over which she was placed as Superior in 1849. The comparative freedom of her new position suited her, and the authority with which she was now invested suited her no less. She frankly owned that it would have been a grief to her had she never been made a Superior. She directed all the internal arrangements of the building in strict conformity with conventual rule, and yet succeeded in imparting to them an air of grace and comfort. She was largely aided in obtaining this result by the gifts of her personal friends and the offerings of grateful patients, who now saw a rare opportunity of testifying their feelings to one whose position forbade her to receive personal benefits. The MotherGeneral of the Order was a little scandalized at the home-like charm of the interior, when she arrived on her visit of inspection; yet, on a closer scrutiny, she could discern nothing unusual but the skilful arrangement of details. This spirit of cheerfulness pervaded the whole establishment, of which no department escaped the Superior's care. The sick were always the objects of her enthusiastic devotion. Sometimes assisting the surgeons in their operations, sometimes-her favourite task spending the watches of the night beside the dying; anon dispensing drugs, or dressing the wounds of bruised and maimed sufferers, she knew hardly more of intermission in the work of Mercy than did her Master Himself when on earth. 'Things go well with us,' she wrote to a friend, when they go ill elsewhere; for we love work.' Unceasingly she repeated to the Sisters under her charge: Do not weary yourselves, do only what is needful, you will always have work.'

She made a point of undertaking herself all the most painful and repul