Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/25

Rh influence of the missionary—often, too, his suggestive words—had completed their vision. They felt a ‘vocation’ to the Order of St. Francis: their parents, if they were at all unwilling, were too superstitious to resist; the missionary was communicated with (after an unsuccessful struggle on the part of the parish priest to get the boy for the diocesan seminary), and the boy of thirteen or fourteen was admitted to the monastic college.

Other religious orders are recruited as a rule in a similar fashion. The more important bodies, Jesuits, Benedictines, and Dominicans, have more reliable sources of supply in their large public schools at Stonyhurst, Douai, and Downside: in such institutions the thoughts of the more promising pupils can easily be directed into the higher channels of religious aspiration by the zealous monks, without any undue influence whatever. But the ordinary congregations in England are sorely pressed for recruits—in fact, many of them were glad to accept the small fish that were cast back even from the net of the Franciscans. I have often heard their superiors lamenting England’s barrenness (Ireland furnishes most of the recruits). ‘It is all tea and coffee in this blessed city,’ I heard a Superior of the Servites lamenting, ‘we can get no religious vocations.’

Missionaries are the principal recruiting-sergeants. In fact the duty of the missionary is much more complex than appears at first sight. Besides holding