When Madame Boll ended, I could see on the edge of one of her delicate leaves a drop of dew, and I said to myself, "How very like a tear!"
From The Month.
LABORERS GONE TO THEIR REWARD.
In the days in which we live, more perhaps than at any other time, education, the school, and the college are made the positions of vital importance in the battle-field of contending principles. Services rendered and losses sustained on such points are, therefore, worthy of special notice, of particular gratitude, or of sorrow. In the month of May of this year two souls went to their rest, both of whom had labored long, signally, and successfully in the cause of Catholic education—especially for the higher classes; both of whom have left behind them institutions in which their spirit is enshrined: destined, we trust, to continue through centuries yet to come the work, the beginnings of which were committed to those whose loss we are now lamenting. On the 14th of May Monsignor de Ram, the restorer of Catholic university education in the countries over which the French revolution had swept, died peacefully, but almost without warning; and a few days later, his decease was followed by that of the reverend mother Madeline Sophie Barat, the foundress and first superioress-general of the congregation of the nuns of the Sacred Heart. Let us devote a few lines to each.
Monsignor de Ram was born at Louvain, of parents distinguished for piety and noble descent, September 2, 1804. He early devoted himself to the service of the Church; was ordained priest, March 19,1827; and became at once professor in the ecclesiastical seminary of his native diocese, Mechlin. He had no sooner grown up than he was struck by observing that his native language, the Flemish, which of all European tongues most nearly resembles our own, was almost wholly without books of a good tendency. The reason was evident. The population by which it is spoken is comparatively small, and is hemmed in by others which speak French, Dutch, or German. Hence it has almost sunk into a patois. Men who speak Flemish to their servants and laborers read and write in French. The first labors of Mons. de Ram were devoted to meet this want, by publishing several very useful books in Flemish. He was only thirty when the bishops of Belgium resolved to erect a Catholic university. The attempt could never before have been made; for in Belgium, almost more than anywhere else, education had for two hundred years been seized by the state, and used to an irreligious purpose. The revolution of 1830, though not made by the Church nor in its interests, had given it a freedom which it never possessed before. The first use made of this freedom by the bishops of Belgium was to erect a Catholic university, and the young and zealous priest de Ram was set over it by their deliberate choice. To its service he devoted the rest of his life. Beneath his care were trained during thirty years a continual succession of young men, who are at this day the strength of the Church in Belgium, and to a considerable degree in France. [{856}] England also has sent students there. Those who have had the happiness of attending the meetings of the Catholic congress in Belgium must, we think, have been struck by the high Catholic tone of a number of young men of the middle and higher classes, and by their intelligence. For those men Belgium and the Church are indebted to the Catholic university of Louvain, and of that university Monsignor de Ram has, until his death, been the soul. On Friday, May 12, he returned from attending a meeting of the academy of Brussels. On the evening of Sunday, 14th, he had entered into the unseen world. His age was only sixty; and as he was willing, so it might have been expected that he would be able, to continue for years to come the labors in which his life had been spent. Such was not the will of his Lord, whose call he was at once ready to obey.
At Paris, on the morning of Monday, May 22, only seven whole days later, the superioress of the Society of the Sacred Heart had attended the mass of the community. She had completed in the preceding December her eighty-fifth year. Her day of labor was at last over. She was seized with apoplexy, and never recovered the power of speech. She gave, however, clear signs of intelligence, and received the viaticum, as well as the last unction. On the 24th the blessing of the Holy Father reached her by a telegraphic message. On the 25th she slept the sleep of the just.
She was born in December, 1779. She had an elder brother, who before 1800 was a priest, and had joined himself to a society which was formed at Vienna in the latter part of the French revolution, under the title of the "Fathers of the Sacred Heart." The first superior of this society, Father Tournely, had been a pupil of the illustrious Father Emery at St. Sulpice. His object seems to have been to continue under another name the spirit and practices of the Society of Jesus, which had been swept away twenty years before by the insane union of the monarchs of Europe with the revolutionary infidels, until times should allow of its re-establishment. This, however, he did not live to see. His successor, Father Varin, joined it at its restoration. He relates that the great desire of Father Tournely was the foundation of a congregation of nuns devoted, under the protection of the Sacred Heart, to the education of young persons of their own sex. At one time he had hoped to see this project carried into execution by the Princess Louisa of Bourbon-Condé, who actually came from Switzerland, where she was in exile, to Vienna, to confer with him on the subject. But God called her to the contemplative life, and she became a Benedictine. Father Tournely, however, never doubted its execution. Walking one day on the fortifications now destroyed, but then surrounding Vienna, he said to Father Varin, alluding to this disappointment, "Dear friend, I thought this had been the work of God, and if it is not, I confess I do not know how to discern between the spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood." Then, after remaining silent awhile in recollection, he turned to his friend, with something of fire more than natural in his expression, and added: "It is the will of God. As to the occasion and the instrument, I may have been deceived; but, sooner or later, this society will be founded." His friend used to say that the impression left by these words, and the manner in which they were spoken, never faded from his mind. They impressed him with the same conviction; and he added, that when he repeated them to his brethren, it took possession of all their minds.
"In truth," said Fr. Varin, "God had not chosen for the commencement of this work instruments great in this world. That the glory might be his alone, he was pleased that the foundation of the building should be simplicity, littleness, nothingness."
Fr. Tournely died soon afterward, [{857}] in the flower of his age. Fr. Varin succeeded him, and the conclusion of the revolution enabled him and his brethren to return to Paris. To Paris they went in the year 1800. It was exactly the moment when to human eyes the night seemed darkest, but when the morning was ready to spring. Pius VI. died a prisoner in the hands of the infidel French revolutionists, August 29, 1799. "At this moment," says Macaulay, "it is not strange that even sagacious observers should have thought that at length the hour of the Church of Rome was come. An infidel power in the ascendant, the pope dying in captivity, the most illustrious prelates of France living in a foreign country on Protestant alms, the noblest edifices which the munificence of former ages had consecrated to the worship of God turned into temples of victory, or into banqueting-houses for political societies, or into theophilanthropic chapels; such signs might well be supposed to indicate the approaching end of that long domination. But the end was not yet. Again doomed to death, the milk-white hind was still fated not to die. Even before the funeral rites had been performed over the ashes of Pius VI., a great reaction had commenced, which after the lapse of [sixty-five] years appears to be still in progress." As yet, however, no human foresight would have observed the tokens of that reaction. Paris was no longer the city where the eldest son of the Church was enthroned, and where the great of this world were rejoiced to heap their wealth upon any new plan which promised to promote the glory of God. Still, Napoleon Bonaparte had just seized the reins as first consul, and there was at least toleration to priests. The community lived in a single mean room, which served them as dormitory, refectory, kitchen, and study. Here Fr. Varin was sitting upon the edge of a very shabby bed, and by his side sat one of his community, Fr. Barat. "I asked him what relations he had. He said, one little sister. The words made a strong impression upon me. I asked how old she was, and what were her powers. He said she was eighteen or nineteen; that she had learned Latin and Greek, and translated Virgil and Homer with ease; that she had qualities to make a good teacher; but that for the present she had gone to pass some time in her family." Father Barat, good man as he was, was not above human infirmity, and like other elder brothers, however proud he might be of his younger sister, could never fancy that she was really grown up; for when he said she was about eighteen or nineteen, she was one-and-twenty. Two months later she came to Paris. "I went to see her, and found a young person of very delicate appearance, extremely retiring, and very timid. What a foundation-stone! said I to myself, in reply to the feeling I had had within me when her brother had mentioned her to me for the first time. And yet it was upon her that it was the will of God to raise the building of the Society of His Divine Heart. This was the grain of mustard-seed which was to produce the tree whose branches have already spread so wide."
On November 21, 1800, she dedicated herself to the Sacred Heart, under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin, together with an intimate friend, Mlle. Octavia Bailly, who shared her aspirations. It was the first streak on the sky which told of the coming day. The day the society was formed, in 1802, she became superioress of the first house, which was at Amiens. In 1806, a second was founded at Grenoble; that year the first general congregation elected her superioress-general. In 1826 there were seventeen houses, and the rules were approved by Leo XII. Before her death she had under her rule ninety-seven houses and 3,500 nuns. She had been superioress of the congregation for sixty-three years; and it is probable that the majority of the French ladies now living who have received a religious [{858}] education at all have received it at the hands of herself or of her children in religion.