ad an immense development, were the Visitandines and the
Ursulines. The former had, in the reign of Louis XIV., about a hundred
and fifty monasteries, and the latter from three to four hundred.

The Visitandines were, as is well known, the most gentle of these
orders: they awaited the coming of their divine Bridegroom in a state
of inaction; and their sluggish life was well calculated to make them
visionaries. We know the astonishing success of Marie Alocoque, and
how it was turned to account by the Jesuits.

The Ursulines, a more useful body, devoted themselves to education. In
the three hundred and fifty convents which belonged to them in this
century, they educated, at the smallest computation, thirty-five
thousand young girls. This vast establishment for education, directed
by skilful hands, might, indeed, become a political engine of enormous
power.

The Ursulines and the Visitandines were governed by bishops, who
appointed their confessors. St. Francois de Sales, so excellent a
friend to the Jesuits and friars in general, had showed himself
distrustful of them in the subject that was dearest to his heart, that
of the Visitation:--"My opinion is (says he) that these good girls do
not know what they want, if they wish to submit themselves to the
superiority of the friars, who, indeed, are excellent servants of God;
but it always goes hard for girls to be governed by the orders, _who
are accustomed to take from them the holy liberty of the mind_."[3]

It is but too easy to perceive how the orders of women servilely
reproduced the minds of the men who directed them. Thus, the devotion
of those who were governed by monks was characterised by every species
of caprice, eccentricity, and violence; whilst they who were under the
direction of secular priests, such as the Oratorians and the
Doctrinaires, show some faint traces of reason, together with a sort of
narrow-minded, common-place, and unproductive wisdom.

The nuns, who received from the bishops their ordinary confessors,
chose for themselves an extraordinary one besides, who, as being
extraordinary, did not fail to supplant and annul the former: the
latter was, in most cases, a Jesuit. Thus the new orders of the
Ursulines and Visitandines, created by priests, who had endeavoured to
keep friars out of them, fell, nevertheless, under the influence of the
latter: the priests sowed, but the Jesuits reaped the harvest.

Nothing did greater service to the ca