Page:The poor sisters of Nazareth, Meynell, 1889.djvu/46

40 need never leave. If her incurable life is long, she grows up and passes into old age and dies there.

Besides this infirmary, there is another important department—the school in which girls are educated in lofty rooms and pure air, and in the moral atmosphere of order, duty, and busy kindness, for life in domestic service. After the usual education, they are taught to make themselves useful in the many offices of Nazareth House, and at sixteen or seventeen they are placed as servants. "We never lose sight of one of them," says the Mother-General; "we keep up a correspondence with them, and when they have holidays they come and see us." In times of illness during their subsequent lives, too, the Nazareth girls are received again and nursed back to health.

As with the old people, so with the children, there is no religious test whatever for admission into Nazareth House. The wishes of parents—when there are parents and when they have wishes—are carefully respected. But children are not kept within the Home after the age of First Communion unless they are Catholics, or unless their parents are willing that they should become such. The Nuns find that it is not possible for them to take the responsibilities of consciences more than twelve or fourteen years old, and unguided by the rules of definite religious order. The difficulty is intelligible. With the old people, who have none outside in the world to decide for them, the