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 is strength, wisdom is strength, love is strength, health is strength. What a happy thing it is that the higher education of women tends to make them physically even superior to their sisters who are content with idleness and ignorance! To live in the mind, to walk in the light of high ideals, to cherish a noble purpose, to strive in a worthy cause, gives freshness and vigor to the body even, whereas it is weakened and wasted by a frivolous, aimless, self-indulgent kind of existence.

It was Madam Barat's desire to form valiant women,—women able to do and suffer, to counsel and rule. She believed that woman, when her soul bathes in the fountains of divine love, may have the spirit and fortitude of men. Nay, at times she is tempted to think that the men of her day had become weaklings, and that God was calling women to do the work which requires heroic hearts and boundless devotion. It gives her delight when she finds her nuns filled with courage and energy; when their reliance on God banishes all disquietude, even in the midst of revolution and pestilence. "How seldom," she exclaims, "are valiant women to be found! The Bible says they are more precious than pearls and diamonds, and what praise it goes on to bestow upon them! Let us, then, labor with all our might to train such women, at whatever cost to ourselves. They in turn will train others, and the good work will proceed; for in this century we cannot rely upon men for the preservation of the faith. It is to the weaker sex that this task is entrusted. O Altitudo! How God's thoughts differ from our thoughts! But He is almighty."

Her first aim was holiness through the love of the Lord, and after this it was her most ardent desire to form valiant women who, clothed with chastity and comeliness, filled with faith and zeal, should bend all the energies of cultivated minds and generous hearts, in whatever sphere of life they might be thrown, to the apostolic work of the salvation of souls. And in doing this she seems to have had a special gift, and to have succeeded beyond all others who have founded religious communities in our century. This at least is the testimony which Americans who are acquainted with what the Ladies of the Sacred Heart have accomplished in our 42