The Order of Sion is a rather peculiar one, its principal object being the conversion to Christianity and subsequent education of young Jewesses. It has been founded within the last forty years by the brothers Ratisbonne, both of them Jews of distinction converted to Christianity. The elder brother (they are both priests now) superintends the order in Europe: the younger resides at the mother-house at Jerusalem. The convent is an educational establishment, where the daughters of Orientals of all kinds are received—Jews, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, etc. In Europe the houses, of course, do not confine themselves to Jewish pupils, else they would find less work than their many hands could do, but receive boarders and give a solid education like the other and more fashionable convents. As a child I lived nearly a year in one of these houses, a large, roomy, silent villa, two hours from Paris. Behind the house was a garden and grove crossed in all directions by bewildering little paths leading into unexpected hollows where a rustic altar and statuette of Our Lady would be placed, or a crucifix erected in startling loneliness on a little hillock. A wide avenue of lime trees, where the pupils might be seen early in the morning studying their tasks, or in the afternoon eating their luncheon of grapes and brown bread, traversed this grove in a straight line, and here on certain feast-days nuns and pupils would form picturesque processions, with the customary banners, tapers, white veils and swelling hymns. Here the Ratisbonne brothers came to rest from their work of furthering the interests of the order—the elder a fatherly, portly man with white hair and a gentle manner, the younger a bronzed, black-bearded man, a true Oriental, with enthusiasm expressed in every line of his countenance and every flash of his piercing eye. He was only on a visit at that time, and then, as now, made Jerusalem his permanent home. There are one or two convents of this order in England, but I think none as yet in America.
The convent of the Assumption at Auteuil, a suburb of Paris, is one renowned for its excellent educational advantages. I spent a week there one winter on a visit to a near relative among the pupils, and had an opportunity to observe the clock-like life of the place. All the girls I have known to be educated there were better scholars than any brought up elsewhere. There were many English and American girls, besides Poles, Germans and West Indian Creoles. The war of 1860-64 left traces of strange animosity among the Northern and Southern children: it was hardly credible that such a spirit could animate young children so long removed from the immediate home influences that would otherwise have accounted for the feeling. Among the nuns were several English women, clever and deeply read, but softer-hearted than most scholars who have had too much to do with the world. There was also a sister of Père Hyacinthe among the Assumptionists, and the great orator himself often came to the convent-chapel to preach simple little sermons to the school-girls. His sister was terribly crushed by the news of his defection from the Catholic Church, and, I believe, refused even to see him again.
A very beautiful scene which I witnessed on the 8th of December in this convent was the renewal of the vows. The mass was celebrated in the chapel at five in the morning, of course by gas- and candle-light. The body of the chapel was perfectly clear, the community sat in carved wooden stalls round the altar, the pupils assisted from the galleries above, and hidden under the gallery was the small but very perfect choir of nuns and children. The hymns of Père Hermann, a famous pianist and composer, a pupil of Liszt, a convert from Judaism, and afterward a Carmelite friar, are very popular in France, and of these the music chiefly consisted. At the communion the superioress stepped forward, wearing the white woolen mantle (which with a purple tunic is the complete dress of this order) and knelt to receive the holy sacrament. A nun in the same costume, bearing a lighted taper and bowing almost to the ground, stood on each side of her as the priest communicated her, and so on till the whole sisterhood had each knelt separately and the bowing figures, like attendant angels, had done homage to each as the tabernacle, for a time, of the blessed sacrament. When the mass was over each professed sister solemnly read over the formula of her religious vows before a table on which lay a crucifix, which each reverently kissed in token of rededication of herself to the divine service.
The order of the Good Shepherd is one that is known throughout the world. It has branch houses in every country. The one to which I shall specially refer is in New York. It stands on the banks of the East River, overlooking Astoria and Long Island, and from its top windows the eye reaches far up the Sound. Like all convents, it is marvelously clean. The order is devoted to the reclaiming of fallen women, and in this instance the house is a government reformatory. A certain annual subsidy is guaranteed by the city authorities, but voluntary contributions and the industry of the inmates give more than half toward the real support of the house. Three sorts of women are under the care of the nuns: (1) those whom the judges send there as criminals for a specified term; (2) those whom their friends send in hope of their being quietly reformed without the intervention of justice; and (3) those who seek of their own accord to do penance and earn forgiveness for their sins. This is of course the most hopeful class, and it frequently happens that these penitents become in time permanent inmates, and even nuns. In the latter case, as the rule of the order does not allow of the reception of any woman with a stain on her reputation, they are clothed in the habit of the Carmelite Third Order (brown serge tunic and black veil), in which the austerities are not very great. They go through the usual novitiate and make their vows in the regular manner: they are then called "Magdalens," and inhabit a portion of the house reserved for them, say their office at stated hours in their own chapel, contiguous to that of the Good Shepherd nuns, and live under obedience to the superioress of the latter. I saw about a dozen of them taking their evening walk in a pretty enclosed garden by the river-side. Other women who do not feel inclined to so full a renunciation of their liberty bind themselves by a promise, good for one year only, to the service of the house, and wear a semi-religious kind of cap and a scarlet badge with the letter P or F: they are divided into two classes, under the patronage of Saint Joseph and Saint Patrick. They renew the promise from year to year, and often spend their lives in this lay sisterhood of penance. Every inmate, be she prisoner or penitent, is taught to sew, first by hand, then on the machine: many on their first entrance are so ignorant that they do not know on which finger to place the thimble, but after a while most are able to do a good day's work on common shirts and linen articles which the order contracts for with the wholesale shops. Another source of profit to the house is the laundry, but this is conducted exclusively by the nuns themselves. They do all the washing of surplices, altar-cloths, etc. for most of the Catholic churches of New York, for the convents and colleges, and for many private families. The fluting on children's frocks and the polish on shirts is something wonderful, and the young nun who superintends the concern seemed to be a real enthusiast in the matter. The nuns' dormitories, as well as those of the prisoners, are miracles of neatness; the refectories likewise. There are various immense airy halls where the nuns and girls sit sewing, and where a stranger sees a spectacle new to most people, certainly unexpected by the greater number—that of an assemblage of ugly faces, each belonging to an unfortunate whose temptations are usually understood to lie originally in her fatal beauty. Many of them are scarcely fourteen, and if once admitted, the melancholy chance is that they will be here again time after time: the sentences are seldom long enough to afford room for thought and conversion. Among the penitents the cases are far more hopeful, but the gentle sisters never forget their kind, conciliatory manner toward all; and unless a perverse demon whispers to their ear that these nuns are their jailers, the poor prisoners see little to remind them that they are not in a voluntarily chosen home.
Nuns are by no means a shiftless, unbusiness-like set of women: they can look after themselves as well as after the poor and forlorn: many of them, were they in the world, would be called strong-minded, blue-stockinged women. At Montreal there is a large establishment of the Sisters of the Congrégation de Notre Dame, generally called Congregation Sisters, founded by Margaret Bourgeoys. They are the great educational sisters of Lower Canada. They own St. Paul's Island, some distance above the city: this is their farm, and one of the nuns, called the sister économe, has to visit it frequently and superintend matters, being the stewardess and committee of ways and means and revenue department combined. Of course a good horse is desirable for these drives, and their horses being one source of profit, the économe feels that the reputation of the breed ought not to be depreciated by her own "turnout." The young men of the town often meet her on the road and try to distance her, but this she will never permit, and her horse, faultlessly groomed and in splendid condition, always comes off the winner in these innocent races. One day, however, the bishop, having heard of this rivalry on the road, sent for her and remonstrated, alleging that such "fast" conduct might lend itself to scandalous rumors, and was altogether unbecoming in a religious. The nun smiled, and protested that she was ready to obey her superiors' orders in every particular, as all good Catholics and good religious are bound to do, but slyly insinuated the following cogent argument: "Does not Your Lordship think, however, that, since our convent lives partly on the reputation of this famous breed of trotters, it is hardly for the credit of the house that its representative conveyance should drag along as dejectedly as a street-vendor's donkey-cart?" What the bishop's reply was "the deponent sayeth not," but we may infer that this shrewd woman was at least as capable of controlling a wide meshwork of business details as he was of managing his diocese. Now, there are many such women in convents, for the religious life leads not, as people think, to a renunciation of your own self-dependence, but on the contrary to the highest kind of confidence in your own power when backed by the help of Almighty God. Saint Teresa of Spain once said these memorable words: "Teresa and tenpence are nothing: Teresa, tenpence and God are omnipotent."
LADY BLANCHE MURPHY.