Here is one of them: A young girl just leaving school, knowing nothing of the world—especially if she be a French girl—is invited to make a retreat. What does that mean? It means confinement—voluntary, no doubt, in most cases, but still confinement—in a darkened room, with just light enough to see to read. It means absence of all ordinary occupation, shortened hours of rest, and long fasts. Some book like the "Meditations of St. Ignatius" is put into her hands, full of the grossest and most terrible material images of death and hell. They talk about the ranting of the Methodists, and I won't deny that the local preachers and exhorters go too far in this direction at times, but I never met with one who would dare to say as much as this famous saint, or as some Catechisms do. The decay of the body after death, with all attendant horrors, real or imaginary, is a favorite theme. "You will become that for which there is no name in any language!" says St. Ignatius. * Then come pictures of purgatory and hell, wrought up to the highest pitch, and then—the poor, tired, hysterical young creature is invited to pause and seriously consider her vocation in life. Is it any wonder that she decides for that vocation which is set before her as the one of certain safety? Is it any wonder either that the excitement over, she should too often find that she has made a horrible mistake?
* Bossuet has the same phrase. I don't know who stole it.
I think the peculiar circumstances under which we were placed had their effect in elevating the characters of our sisters; and yet, looking back, I can see what a petty world we lived in—a world, too, which had its envies and jealousies even as the great one. Whoever goes into a convent carries his flesh with him. No walls have ever been contrived to shut out the devil, and where these two are, be sure the third partner—the world—is not far away.
The Lord surely knew what He was about when he set people in families, and created the dear ties of husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister. Our Lord Himself lived not in a convent—as He might have done it seems, for Mr. Wesley has told me there were convents, or at least brotherhoods, in those days—but in a family, and a working family at that. One of the very few pictures of Him I ever saw that I liked, is a little print Mother Superior gave me long ago, and which I have still, representing the young Jesus holding a skein of yarn for His mother, just as Judith Postlethwate often does for me.
There are some good things to be said for convent schools, as I have remarked before. They take good care, so far as I have observed, of their pupils' health; they teach them to be neat, tidy, and punctual—all of which are very good things. I am sure of one thing: I would not send a child to a smallpox hospital unless I wished it to catch the smallpox, and I would not send a girl to a convent school if I had any objection to her taking the veil.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
FLIGHT FROM THE NEST.
I SHALL never forget my sensations when I felt myself fairly outside the convent walls. Though I had lived in France sixteen years and more, I had never seen more of it than was visible from the window of the little room over the porch—the only one to which we had access which opened on the outside world. How different the building looked from the outside. I had never even known of the existence of the two round towers at the outer corners, since only their pinnacles were visible from the court, and these I had always supposed to be on the roof itself.
"Why, Amabel, did you know those towers were there?" I exclaimed.