gations of men possessing 224 establishments with 2,418
members, and 23 associations of men with 20,341 members and supplying
3,086 schools; next, 259 congregations of women and 644 communities
which possess 3,196 establishments, supplying 16,478 schools and
counting 113,750 members. In the second group, comprising unauthorized
societies, we find 384 establishments of men with 7,444 members, and 602
establishments of women with 14,003 members,--in all, in both groups,
30,287 brethren and 127,753 sisters. Considering the total population,
the proportion of brethren in 1789 and in our day is about the same;
it is their spirit which has changed; at the present day, all desire to
remain in their profession, while in 1789 two-thirds wanted to withdraw
from it. As to the proportion of Sisters, it has increased beyond all
calculation.[5312] Out of 10,000 women in the population, there were, in
1789, 28 Sisters; in 1866, 45; in 1878, 67.[5313]

Carmelites, Clarisses, Filles du Coeur de Jesus, Reparatrices, Soeurs du
Saint-Sacrament, Visitandines, Franciscaines, Benedictines and others
like these, about 4000 nuns or sisters, are contemplatists. The
Carthusians, Cistercians, Trappists, and some others, about 1800 monks
and brethren who, for the most part, till the ground, do not impose
labor on themselves other than as an accessory exercise; their first and
principal object is prayer, meditation and worship; they, too, devote
their lives to contemplation on the other world and not to the service
of this one. But all the others, more than 28,000 men and more than
123,000 women, are benefactors by institution and voluntary laborers,
choosing to devote themselves to dangerous, revolting, and at least
ungrateful services--missions among savages and barbarians, care of the
sick, of idiots, of the insane, of the infirm, of the incurable, the
support of poor old men or of abandoned children; countless charitable
and educational works, primary schools, orphan asylums, houses of refuge
and prisons, and all gratuitously or at the lowest wages through a
reduction of bodily necessities to the lowest point, and of the personal
expenditure of each brother or sister.[5314] Evidently, with these
men and with these women, the ordinary balance of motives which prompt
people is reversed; in the inward balance of the scale it is no longer
selfishness which prevails against altruism, but the love of others
which prevails against selfishness.--Let us l