Produced by D. Garcia, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.This file was produced from images generously made availableby the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions.
[Illustration: SISTER MARGARET BOURGEOIS
Foundress of the Congregation of Notre Dame
ESTABLISHED IN MONTREAL. CANADA. 1659.]
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Having read a French edition of the Life of Venerable Sister Bourgeois,published in 1818, the translator of the present work was so charmed byits perusal that she resolved on rendering it into English for thespiritual edification of others.
Many years ago the work of translation was commenced, but from somepreventing cause or other, was as often laid aside. Yet the idea ofpresenting it to the public remained, as no English Version of SisterBourgeois' life exists, at least in the United States.
Therefore determining at last to obey an impulse of long standing, thescattered translation sheets have been prepared for publication, withthe humble hope that the reader may derive as much benefit from theirperusal as did the writer.
In this age of miscellaneous and corrupt literature, when people ofevery condition of life are literally devouring irreligious magazinesand serials, it surely cannot be amiss to add another volume to thealready rich store of our libraries in order to help roll back thetorrent of universal depravity that threatens the rain of our belovedcountry, and also to place before the minds of the young, the gloriousexample of one of God's heroines.
The Second Centennial of Sister Bourgeois' advent to America isalready past, and more than a hundred years before the Declaration ofIndependence, was she laboring in the cause of humanity for the gloryof God in the New World.
If reading the lives of such women as Mrs. Seton—a Protestant Americanlady, who after her conversion to the Catholic Church in Italy so burnedwith the love of God, as to return to her native land in her earlywidowhood to form a flourishing religious sisterhood in New York; ofNano Nagle, an Irish aristocrat, who turned from a useless fashionablelife to the lowly spirit of the gospel on seeing the poor artizans ofParis crowding to early Mass in the Church of Notre Dame beforebeginning their daily toil, while she lolled weariedly in her carriageafter a midnight ball; heroically putting her hand to the plough, shenever turned back, and left behind her another religious Sisterhood inIreland to perpetuate her philanthropic sanctity: of Catharine McAuley,who receiving from her adopted Protestant parents a princely fortune,expended every shilling of it in building up the Order of Mercy, one ofthe latest and most flourishing outposts of the Church of God; of St.Jane de Chantal, who after having been tried in the fire of afflictionfor years—founded in her advanced widowhood the Order of theVisitation, under the direction of St. Francis de Sales—and whoattained such an extraordinary degree of perfection as to be seenascending to heaven like a luminous meteor after her happy death.
If the perusal of the lives of these,