and her aggrandizement. He was a
believer on conviction, without religious emotions and without the
mystic's zeal; he labored for Catholicism whilst securing for himself
Protestant alliances, and if the independence of his mind caused him to
feel the necessity for a reformation, it was still in the church and by
the church that he would have had it accomplished.

Spirits more fervent and minds more pious than Richelieu's felt the same
need. On emerging from the violent struggles of the religious wars, the
Catholic church had not lost her faith, but she had neglected sweetness
and light. King Henry IV.'s conversion had secured to her the victory in
France, but she was threatened with letting it escape from her hands by
her own fault. God raised up for her some great servents who preserved
her from this danger.

The oratorical and political brilliancy of the Catholic church in the
reign of Louis XIV. has caused men to forget the great religious movement
in the reign of Louis XIII. Learned and mystic in the hands of Cardinal
Berulle, humane and charitable with St. Vincent de Paul, bold and saintly
with M. de Saint Cyran, the church underwent from all quarters quickening
influences which roused her from her dangerous lethargy.

The effort was attempted at all points at once. The priests had sunk
into an ignorance as perilous as their lukewarmness. Mid all the
diplomatic negotiations which he undertook in Richelieu's name, and the
intrigues he, with the queen-mother, often hatched against him, Cardinal
Berulle founded the con gregation of the Oratory, designed to train up
well-informed and pious young priests with a capacity for devoting
themselves to the education of children as well as the edification of the
people. " It is a body," said Bossizet, " in which everybody obeys and
nobody commands." No vow fettered the members of this celebrated
congregation, which gave to the world Malebranche and Massillon. It was,
again, under the inspiration of Cardinal B6rulle, renowned for the pious
direction of souls, that the order of Carmelites, hitherto confined to
Spain, was founded in France. The convent in Rue St. Jacques soon
numbered amongst its penitents women of the highest rank.

The labors of Mgr. de Berulle tended especially to the salvation of
individual souls; those of St. Vincent de Paul embraced a vaster field,
and one offering more scope to Christian humanity. Some time before, in
1610, St. Francis de Sa