SISTERHOODS, in the Roman Catholic church, began in the 4th century. Slowly at first, but with great and rapid increase in the 17th and 18th centuries, they became the right arms of charity, and at last organized bulwarks for the preservation and propagation of the church faith by assuming the education of children, and girls especially, of the poor. French authorities classify them into contemplative and active: the former devoted to religious routines, partly of study, of worship of saints, and of such penances and mord fieations of the flesh as the barbarous ideas of the times required; the latter, though less beneficent than they have since become, were to some extent devoted to useful works in narrow spheres. The organizations called active, occupied with good works rather than devotions, served In the hospitals which were established in the middle ages by the church. Every convent had its hospital for the poor, and the superior devotedness and good influence of women as nurses led to the establishment of orders of women who devoted themselves to the work. Convent life during many centuries was a fashionable refuge for maidens and matrons, especially in France, whose misfortunes had deprived life of its common hopes, and to whom religious seclusion offered peace, quiet, the satis faction of doing good, the hope of future reward, and, to a few, headship and authority. The sisterhood devoted to outside beneficence were but it small part of these vast con vent establishments, but have continued to multiply, while the purely devotional orders awe becoming extinct Down to 1840 the church had conferred its sanction upon 104 distinct organizations of sisters. Previous to A.D. 1500 there were 34 orders founded on the contemplative system .and 17 active; 1500-1600, 10 contemplative to 13 active; 1600-1700, 54 active and 12 contemplative; and 1700-1840, 40 active and not one other. Since 1840 a con siderable number of the most efficient of these active orders have originated, outside of the church or its convents, which have received sanction and ordination after their use fulness has been well established. The following chronological list is only of those institutions of sisters whose mission was in part of beneficence outside of convent Persons who have not been through the great hospitals of Europe are unaware of the extent of the work of the sisterhoods. When these hospitals were under the government of the church instead of the state, the mothers-superior of the sisters of one order or another were supreme managers of the work and attendance on the patients. The Ursa lines have been longest and most widely known in this labor; established in 1537 by Angela de 13rescia, both in Milan and in Paris, with the intention that the sisters should not be recluses, but live in their own homes and go out to do the work which the superior of the order should point out.. But it was found that greater efficiency could be attained by associating in a community, and the order merged into the convent system. The founder inserted in the rules of the order that its should be free to act accord ing to the need of the age, and that the sisters should he free to so far live among others as to enable them openly to seek out the a-filleted and to perform any act of charity which they could find to do. They now labor in nearly every civilized country in the world, but are subject to the government of the Roman Catholic church. The Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, less ancient. equally renowned for their devotion and self-abnegation, were organized by a priest of that name and fortned their first community in Paris in 1633, and systematized the education of their number to specific labors according to individual fitness. No external signs of devotees were required. and no vows for more than a year.
Though organized by a priest, lie seemed to guard it against absorption into church con trol, and abolished the system of requiring applicants to hospitals to confess before being admitted. Throughout Europe, but far more in _France than elsewhere, the ladies per fected the means of utilizing the latent henevoltnee around them, and educated to the work poor girls desirous of devoting themselves to it. Christ's hospital, in London. was committed to their charge in 1643, ;Ind in 1652 they went in numbers from Paris to War saw during a plague in that city. All the operations of housekeeping, as well as nurs ing and light surgical work, were practiced, in order to perfect their members for every service that could be rendered. In 1789 the order had 426 houses in France. They were seriously crippled and interfered with by the turbulent reforms of the French revolu tion, which, in suppressing all monastic and conventual establishments and confiscating their property, deprived the sisters of their communal homes, notwithstanding their communities were excepted in the decrees of suppression. In 1801 Napoleon gave a new civil legal character to the order by a decree of the minister of the interior; since which time there has been no check to their extension. Like members of similar orders they are now known simply as Sisters of Charity. The order was introduced into the United, States in 1808 at Emmittsburg, Md., by Mrs. Seton, of New York, but seems to have" been more devotional than active in its work there. In 1814 a branch opened in Phila delphia to conduct an orphan asylum for children orphaned by the yellow-fever pesti lence. They may be found in nearly all our cities. North France seems a perennial spring of similar organizations, nearly always originating with poor girls or women whose zeal and will to do good attract a cluster of similar spirits to form new organi zations with sonic feature peculiar to the needs around them. The Sisters of the Good Saviour, founded by two poor girls at Caen, Normandy, in 1720, while similar in their first work to the preceding, took also a special interest in the insane, and in 1817-18 were charged by the French government with the care of insane women and afterward of men. They have become specialists in that charity, and in the care and education of the deaf and dumb in France. In 1874 the Caen house of 300 sisters had charge of 1000 insane persons. In Montreal and Quebec a similar work has been committed to the Sis ters of Providence. The most remarkable recent organization of Sisters of Charity is the one called "The Little Sisters of the Poor," originated at St. Servan, a village on the n. coast of Brittany, under the guidance of a village priest, Le Pailleur, Marie Augus tine, and a few poorest-of-the poor sewing-girls and old women. They formed prac tically a baud of beggars, but so thorough in their self-abnegation to help others, so quiet and unobtrusively beat on doing good, that by 1842 they had attracted to their work the full sympathy of the community around them, and a wide fame. They were then organ ized into an order under the church, with the above name, and their organization in many cities has become the almoner of the people always willing to give of their abundance rather than of their time when sure that the gift will reach the needy. Their specialty is rather among the aged and suffering poor than in hospital service, and they make their homes in the midst of the want and squalor which they alleviate. Thcy now have branch houses in time United States, but it is an alien soil to the women who have been so useful in France, and a field less needing them.