of lives of
painstaking labor. The Beguines, who founded hospitals and schools,
were the best educated women of their day--the eleventh century. They
read Tacitus and Virgil in the original, and were skilled in medicine.
Disease often took loathsome forms, and only women whose lives were
consecrated to self-denying labor could have been the patient
ministers to the diseased poor.

This is all the more noteworthy because the idea of vocation was not
the early incentive to monastic life. It was sought as a refuge; it
developed into a vocation; and it is a matter of interest to women
to-day that these spontaneous vocations, growing out of an enforced
life, were inspired by love of well-doing, desire for study, the
acquisition of knowledge, its distribution, and the ever-ready spirit
of helpfulness at the sacrifice of every personal indulgence.

Naturally the monastic life of women was controlled by the Church, and
could have continued to exist only by permission. A Spanish lady of
rank who had befriended Ignatius Loyola as a young student of
Barcelona, attracted by the odor of sanctity and scholarship which
attached itself to the Order which he founded, gained reluctant
permission to establish (1545) an Order of Jesuitesses, subject to the
same strict rules and discipline. This was the beginning of a strictly
woman's Jesuit "college," which flourished notwithstanding all the
efforts Loyola himself made to get rid of it, and the restrictions put
upon it. Many noble ladies joined it, and it became the foundation of
a number of houses of the same name and character, extending into
Flanders and England, when, without cause, except fear perhaps of
their extent and influence, they were finally suppressed by a bull of
Pope Urban VIII, bearing date, January 13, 1630. This Order of
Jesuitesses existed for nearly a century. Their colleges were
scholastic, and had given rise to preparatory schools, when they were
summarily suppressed because of their independent life.

Had this Order continued to exist it might have gained an educational
ascendency throughout Europe which even the strong wave of the
Reformation would have found it hard to overcome. But the convents and
monasteries generally suffered at this time from the abuses which had
crept into the Church, and the rage for power which possessed its
prelates.

The influence was mischievous also from a social and domestic point
of view; from the sanctity and superiority attach