Moreover, the discipline of the religious orders is very rigorous on the chapter of economies, and there are not by any means the same opportunities or temptations for an officer to divert funds from public to private uses. The inspectors themselves will often be Protestants.
It behoves us to examine the use of hospitals in the general system of humanitary functions. The hospital is a corollary of the city. The city is a gland or glandular system of elaboration for the social and intellectual secretions of humanity—arts, sciences, and refinements. But the advantages of the city are obtained only by great sacrifices; among which is the separation of great numbers of persons from their local and family attachments, obliging them to derive their subsistence from industries more precarious than those of rural life. More wisdom being required to direct one's course in the complex relations of the city, more are bewildered, misled, overwhelmed; vast and powerful currents of crime and of waste are generated, and restorative measures are needed to counteract them. Now, the necessity of cities and that of hospitals being admitted, how, let us ask, can this kind of help be rendered, this sort of duty performed, so as most worthily to attest the principle of human solidarity, so as to benefit most the recipients of charity, to honor most the organs by which charity is rendered, and so secure the best kind of service in this arduous function; finally, how best to economize the resources of collective society in the adaptation of means to ends?
First, let us consider the expediences of public charity, especially in reference to the persons or characters of its organs.
The best interest of society demands that there shall be a place for every one, and every one in his place; or, in other words, that as specific vocations are inherent to each type of character, so that use should be allotted to each for which nature supplies the aptitudes, and which it embraces with ardor.
The attractiveness of certain functions< or the aversion occasioned by them, has very little to do with the impression they make on the senses of a party indifferent. The cares required by an infant, for example, which excite maternal zeal in all its plenitude, appear simply tedious and disgusting to most men. So it is with the care of the sick, in which science and affection find powerful attachments insensible to others, who, good in other ways, feel no vocation for it. Finally, and beyond all special vocations, there is the enthusiasm of devotion, the religious instinct to which Christianity appeals, which it awakens in many souls, and which it justifies in affording to it the highest spheres of use. The contemplative idealist may try to escape the normal limitations of his nature in vague aspiration; but Jesus has provided against this Brahminic perversion by the culture of charity, in identifying the love of God with the love of the neighbor, and himself with the least of mankind. "As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me." (St. Matthew xxv. 40.)
We do not suppose that Christianity endowed human nature with philanthropy as a new passion; it gave this aspect, this evolution, this modality, to what had been patriotism for the heroic states of Rome, of Greece, and other nations, which had always sought, and sometimes found, a social channel, but which Christianity more fully satisfied in the theory and practice of unity.
There have always been developed, in proportion with the industrial progress of civilization, wants extraordinary without being fantastic. Such are the cares of illness. The wisdom of Christian charity has adapted to these extreme wants vocations equally extreme, in the devotion of religious orders; and this duty has devolved especially upon the female sex, because it is better gifted than the male for the ministry of compassion.
It is feasible, moreover, for religious orders to accept as well the penitent as the virgin; and shaming the world's intolerance, to rescue from sin and disgrace a lower world of souls, whom passion or imprudence had otherwise ruined.
There is no depth of crime, indeed, from which its subjects may not be rescued by charitable labors; and in proportion as their organization is extended and perfected, legal as well as simply moral offences may find here at once their prevention and their expiation. The brothel and the penitentiary, those two institutions of hell on earth, may thus be countermined, and the means of redemption afforded to their victims. The salutary influence which the discipline of charitable works exerts over mental and moral aberrations, may even reclaim not a few of the insane, or those who, under ordinary circumstances, are drifting fatally toward the lunatic asylum.
That extraordinary virtue which the impulse and exercise of active benevolence has in developing the soul and awakening its latent powers from torpor, may appear from the following incident lately observed at Mr. Bost's, in Laforce, Dordogne: