Excerpt from The Dublin Review, Vol. 12: July-October, 1884 When we have glanced at these three aspects of the origin of the Sisters of Charity we shall have a mere outline of a wonder ful work that Vincent de Paul always counted as directly divine. And first we have said that it arose through individual effort at a time when any one would have thought such efforts were lost like drops in an ocean of misery. The place and time will be suggested to us if we make thb Paris of to-day dwindle and change into the city of between two and three centuries ago and if to place a background to the latter part of our story we gather a few suggestions of the sufferings inflicted on the French people by the war of the Fronde. The whole history of the foundation may be matched side by side with English events, by noting that Louise de Marillac was born in 1591 - that is, when Elizabeth's anti-catholic laws were being worked in full fury at Tyburn; and the death of the foundress occurred in 1660, about two months before that day of May when Charles II. Landed. In the September Of the same year, in Paris, a priest died, at an age halfway between eighty and ninety with bright intelligence to the last, and promising with his dying breath that God who had begun the work, which he humbly disclaimed, would also finish it. He died who had been the sanctifier of the priesthood of France, the apostle of the poor; Monsieur Vincent, as he was called, had seemed during his fifty years in Paris a character inseparable from it, a part of its life that could not some day be gone. And truly his work has never passed away; it has become to us in the modern world an inseparable part of the life of charity, and the day will never come when it will be in the world's midst no more. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.