This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIX. St. Angela's Constitutions. "we may fitly pause in spirit before the shrine of St. Angela Merici in the Church of St. Afra, and, while kneeling with the pilgrims from every land to look upon her venerable remains, and to adore that God whose glory shines forth so wonderfully in His saints, cast our eyes upon the Constitutions which she has left behind, as upon the worthiest monument which could be placed beside her tomb. These Constitutions divinely given to her, as she herself hints repeatedly in her last instructions to her dear ones, were the mould in which were cast and formed these primitive Ursulines of Brescia, Cremona, and Milan, who so won the admiration and reverence of all Upper Italy during the last half of the sixteenth century, that France, the Low Countries, and all Germany were fain to possess them. What though the outward form changed with the new countries in which they were called to labor, and with the imperious necessities of the altered times and the increased labors they had to assume? The apostolic spirit breathed by St. Angela into the Company of St. Ursula as trained and constituted by her, the mighty educational purpose which lay at the foundation of her institute, and the heroic virtues to which she had formed her daughters and which result necessarily from that formation--all passed into the congregated Ursulines of Milan, and from them into the glorious monasteries of Aix and Lyons, of Bordeaux and Paris. The spirit of St. Angela 60 lived in the hundreds of Ursuline establishments which flourished in France and the Netherlands, in Italy and Germany, before the calamitous events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, that the dry-rot of tepidity or worldliness never touched these...