their souls. There could be no yielding, no compromise with
error.

Rightly, therefore, did the Jansenists see in Vincent de Paul the most
dangerous of their enemies, and it was not surprising that both during
his life and after his death they hated him and assailed him with
abuse. He was "insincere, treacherous, a coward," they declared. They
spoke of the "great betrayal"; they held him up to ridicule as an
ignorant peasant; but Vincent went quietly on his way. The question
"What will people say?" did not exist for him. He simply did his duty
as it was made clear to him by God and his own conscience. It was hard
to fight against such uncompromising honesty as his, and more than
once the man whose ignorance the Jansenists had ridiculed tore their
specious arguments to tatters with the weapon of his strong common
sense.

Nevertheless, the dangers of Jansenism were a continual anxiety to
Vincent, and there were other sorrows no less poignant to be borne.
Foreign missions had been established in Africa and Madagascar, and in
the latter station no less than twenty-seven Mission Priests had lost
their lives. Some, it is true, had died the martyr's death; but the
work had not prospered. It was difficult to get news from far
countries in those days, and there were often such long intervals
between the death of one priest and the arrival of another that any
good that had been done was lost.

"There is nothing on earth that I desire so much as to go as your
companion in the place of M. Gondree," wrote Vincent to one who was
just about to set forth on this dangerous mission; but the darker side
of the picture is not left untouched. "You will need the strongest
courage," he writes; "you will need faith as great as that of
Abraham."

The Madagascar Mission was, humanly speaking, a failure; the natives
were hostile, the missionaries not sufficiently numerous; it was
necessary in the end to give up the enterprise.

The Lazarists were at work also in Poland, in Ireland, and in the
Hebrides. Vincent had a gift for rousing zeal and charity in the
hearts of others, and there were always plenty of volunteers for the
most dangerous posts. But there were times when his heart nearly
failed him at the news that came to him of the sufferings of some of
his sons on their far-distant missions. There were times when apparent
failure weighed him down with sorrow, and the death of young Mission
Priests who had given their lives for the salva