Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m. THE VISITATION ESTABLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES. I. A PREDICTION BY ST. FRANCIS DB SALES. The record of the establishment, in the United States, of the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary like the record of all great institutions rooted in age long faith leads us at once to an interesting chain of circumstances and results, which to the world's eye might seem like a series of curious coincidences or accidents. To the more discerning mind, these circumstances and results form portions of a plan in which the guiding touch of God, the far reaching influence and help of the Holy Spirit, are clearly apparent; working simply, naturally, yet with supernatural power and design, through finite means. The lights of history, and in especial of religious history, resemble those signals of the heliograph which are given by flashes of sunlight reflected from a small mirror. With the heliograph, men standing on high elevations can communicate at enormous distances. Although they may be so far apart as to remain invisible to each other, yet, from points where no other form or motion can be discerned, they send their messages of clear intelligence by a regular system of glancing sun rays, so that, from mountainrange to mountain range, from peak to peak, the word is made to travel on wings of illumination for a hundred miles. In the same way, if we ascend to lofty heights of observation we may catch the lights of history, the signals of faith as they are flashed upon the mind from century to century, across the deep valleys and the heavy mists of time. And so when, in 1893, we contemplate the fact that the Visitation Order in America had its tenta tive beginning here at Georgetown in the District of Columbia in 1793 (though not actually established until 179...
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