Make It Happen

The possession of wealth gives

 The ghostly parent pours the balm of hope into the fluttering anxious heart of his poor deceived child, talks to her of the old sorrows, and sets her heart bleeding afresh; then he consoles and assures her she must pray to be enlightened; he will endeavour to overcome the obduracy of the superior, whose love of justice he declares to be the only obstacle to her profession. A conference ensues between the dear old simple-hearted priest and the shrewd austere abbess; and the novice hears, with a burning brow and trembling heart, at the next meeting of the community, that a noveno is to be offered up to the Blessed Virgin, for the purpose of petitioning the Almighty to grant the light of His wisdom to direct the choice of a member of the community. Need we add how that noveno ends—how the choice is made? No time is lost, the victim is professed—espoused to the Church; and it is discovered afterwards by her relatives that she has made no will, no assignment of her handsome fortune: it is then too late, she cannot without violation of her oath of implicit obedience make a will after profession; she has no will, she has resigned it for ever; the convent receives a carte blanche paper, with her signature attached, and every fraction of her property belongs to the Church. O what worthy disciples of St. Ignatius, what astute children of the Vatican are our poor nuns, and the good-tempered, simple-hearted priests of the English convents!It may be naturally asked for what purpose do the convents seek to attain possession of such large sums of money, when the prescribed rule of life is such that very little indeed will suffice for the necessary requirements of the community? And it may, moreover, be a matter of wonderment how it is that though one of the vows of the profession is voluntary poverty, many of the convents are in the actual possession of a vast amount of wealth? The answer is very simple and easily explained. power, and though they are not capable of making use of such power, the Catholic Church is. The principle has been adopted in this kingdom for some years past—acquire wealth, build magnificent churches, institute asylums, let the religious become identified with the people, we shall soon make proselytes among the lower orders, and the higher classes will ever respect that which can show wealth, station, and worldly substantiality. So that, though the poor nuns, cooped up within the iron bars of the convent, cannot perceive the effect of their immolation, the religion is sensible of it. Every heiress gained to the convent gives to the world a Gothic church, which becomes the object of eager admiration to the lovers of mediaeval art, and attracts its crowds of wondering citizens; or a capacious range of schools, where the children of the poor receive instruction, and are grounded in a faith they were never born to inherit. So Catholicity spreads, and the Protestants cannot understand how or why. And thus it is that the diplomacy of the secluded superior, in her darkened cloister, is one of the many means of propagating the tenets of the faith, and an institution which, to the ordinary’ observer, appears 13denuded of any purpose of good or evil, is made the means of aiding a certain classof its colours, and the splendour of its imperishable architecture. Mr. Roberts’s second picture is the Interior of the Church of St. Anne, at Bruges. In opposition to common practice, his effects are produced by a broad flood of daylight, which illumines the whole building, with just so much of chiaro oscuro as suffices to keep down certain portions of the subject.