The thoughtful soul, whether within or without the Catholic Church, cannot fail to be impressed with the extent of her charities. The fatherless, the widow, the aged, the poor, as St. Laurence the martyr declared when ordered by the prefect of Rome to deliver to him the wealth of the church--these are her riches. But one must be within the fold to appreciate the universality of her bounty; to see that every need of suffering humanity, as it rises, finds pious souls whose vocation it is to look after that very need, to provide for that very want; and the smallness of the beginning of each world-wide charity makes the humble-hearted leap with joy that, even in the narrowest sphere, every one may be privileged to help our dear Lord in the person of his poor.
When St. Francis of Assisi gave his rule of strict poverty to the ten united with him in hungering to work for Christ, it needed more than his great faith to believe that, in forty-two years after his death, two hundred thousand zealous souls would be banded together, under his name, for prayer and alms-deeds; while, through all coming ages of the church, his followers should steadily increase, steadfast in the work for which they had joined hands.
When, in 1537, Angela Merici, of Brescia, a lady of birth and fortune, sorrowing over the death of a well-beloved sister, soothed her grief by devoting herself to the education of poor female children, at a time when four doctors of the law declared the instruction of women the work of the devil, she did not realize that from the grave of her own sorrow would spring the far-famed order of Ursulines, (a beautiful resurrection!) who collected and taught the poor orphans of massacred parents during French revolutions, and who held their infant and ragged schools long before England had thought of them.
When, in 1633, St. Vincent de Paul, seeing the misery and destitution of the poor in the streets of Paris, placed four young women, who volunteered to aid him in relieving present distress, in charge of a noble lady who had for several years devoted herself to the work under his direction, he scarcely expected to see in twenty years two hundred houses and hospitals of the order of Charity, spreading everywhere their sheltering arms for the suffering poor.