Lord Primate, Lord Chancellor, Archbishops, noblemen, bishops, judges, gentry, and clergy of our Kingdom of Ireland, that in many parts of the said Kingdom there are great tracts of land almost entirely inhabited by Papists who are kept by their clergy in great ignorance of the true religion, and bred up in great disaffection to the Government; that the erection of English Protestant schools in those places is absolutely necessary for their conversion, etc.

Specifying that the object of the charity must be the children of Papists and other poor natives in Ireland, the Charter proceeds :--

To the intent, therefore, that the children of the Popish and other poor natives in the said Kingdom may be instructed in the English tongue, and the principles of true religion and loyalty; and that so good a design may the more effectually be carried out, the Lord Lieutenant and some of the chief nobility, gentry, and clergy of the said Kingdom are appointed Commissioners to execute the purposes of this Charter.

King George himself subscribed £1,000 towards the project by way of a personal donation besides fixing an annual grant of a like sum on the hereditary revenue of Ireland. That was in 1739, and within the next decade the Irish Parliament created a new fund for the endowment of the scheme, whilst the corporations of Dublin, Waterford, Kilkenny, Cashel and Trim made generous grants in favour of the establishment of Charter schools in their districts. Thus, a century and a half ago not only was Ireland without a single recognized place of Catholic worship, but neither was there to be found within her shores a single Catholic school for the education of a single Catholic child. The race that had resisted so long and so valiantly against the oppressor's onslaughts, found in this latest weapon a device of such diabolical cunning as to make ultimate defeat appear inevitable. Just, however, when the people had sunk into the silence of despair, a Debora arose in the land and grasped the spear that was destined, under God, to turn defeat into victory. Nano Nagle was the woman chosen by Divine Providence to be the mother of that Irish Catholic education which has preserved the faith in Ireland, preserved the glory of the purity of our Irish womanhood, and sent forth missionaries to the ends of the earth to be apostles to nations.

Honoria Nagle was born in Ballygriffin, Co. Cork, in 1728. Her family was closely connected with those of two celebrated Irishmen-Edmund Burke and Father Mathew; her father's sister being the great political

philosopher's mother, while his wife was Miss Mathew, of Thomastown. As a child little Nano was such a tom-boy that her pious mother found it necessary to keep a check on the ardour and liveliness of her disposition by withholding from her those indulgences which she usually granted to her other children. Sometimes, when the mother would express uneasiness regarding the little one's waywardness, the father, whose observing eye discerned in the child's vivacity the early impulse of an elevated soul, would reassure her with the remark that Poor Nano would be a saint yet.' Unable to procure the necessary education for their children at home, owing to circumstances already dwelt upon, the Nagles contrived to evade the laws by sending Nano to a convent school in Paris, to which city they were bound by many family ties for when the cause of the Stuarts was lost at the Boyne, Sir Richard Nagle, the ancestor of Nano, who had been an ardent Jacobite and Catholic, and was, in 1689, Speaker of the Irish Parliament, forfeited his vast estates in Munster to follow the wretched King to France. The girl's education finished, she was taken in hands by her distinguished exiled kinsfolk and plunged into a round of gaiety and dissipation so easily to be found in the brilliant court of Louis XV. So highly delighted was the gay and frivolous Nano with the pleasures of Paris that she soon began to think it impossible she could live elsewhere; but Providence had planned a nobler destiny for her, and in the midst of her enjoyments a seemingly trivial incident occurred which was destined to change the whole course of her future career.

There had been a grand ball in Paris, and the grey dawn had crept over the city ere the more eager of the pleasure-hunters-among them Nano Nagle-could tear themselves away from the scene of the night's amusement. At last her carriage rolled noisily through the empty, silent streets, its fair young occupant weary and jaded, feeling that sad void of heart and general reaction which usually succeed indulgence of the sensual cravings. Suddenly her attention was aroused by a small group of men and women huddled together around a church door. They were poor-drawn, all of them, from a class whom hard work grudgingly permits to snatch the necessary hours for sleep; yet here they were, sacrificing their sweetest hour of repose that they might spend a little time with God. In order

to be in time for first Mass, they had arrived before the church door was opened.

That sight [says one of her biographers] was an arrow of grace shot through the heart of Nano Nagle. She contrasted the position of these poor work-people with her own as they stood relatively in the sight of God. They seeking the one thing necessary, she a slave to the perishable world; they fervent in their piety, she tepid, and all but cold; they cevoting the early morning to the worship of their Creator preparatory to a day of useful labour, she devoting the same hours to indolent repose, to be succeeded by an afternoon of purposeless, if not sinful, frivolities.

The contrast was too striking. Tears welled to her eyes, and she there and then resolved to bid adieu to the pleasure-haunts of Paris and devote the remainder of her life to the service of God-a resolution she faithfully fulfilled.

Returning to stricken Ireland she at once began to occupy herself in such works of charity as lay within her reach. The lamentable state of ignorance in which she found her oppressed co-religionists appalled and disheartened her. She had no private fortune, and what could she, single-handed and without means, do against such terrible odds. Her relatives, staunch Catholics though they were, she knew were not likely to give her much encouragement, for at that date the more well-to-do Irish who had remained true to the faith were thankful for being allowed to breathe in safety and had no inclination to do anything that might tend to jeopardize themselves by stirring up fresh animosities.

Having given the situation long and anxious thought, Nano Nagle at length despaired of being able to render any practical service in the education of her poor co-religionists in Ireland, and, heart-broken, she determined to quit for ever a land she could not serve, and, instead, seek in a foreign nunnery the salvation of her own soul. Forthwith she took leave of all her friends and sailed once more for France, intending to pass the remainder of her days in prayer and penance as a victim for the sorrows and woes of her beloved country. But such was not to be, for Providence had already marked out Nano Nagle to fulfil an even more heroic destiny.

No sooner had she set foot again on the soil of France than a voice began whispering in her heart that the path she was choosing was not the one God intended she should follow. She reasoned the matter over and over again

with herself one day persuading herself she was under a delusion; the next unable by that solution to stifle her doubt. Day and night the thought of poor, suffering Ireland possessed her soul: like Patrick of old, she saw, in her dreams, the little children stretching out their hands to her and calling for succour. Torn with doubt as to the course she should pursue, she at last resolved to turn for guidance to the Fathers of the Society of Jesus in Paris, in whose judgment she had implicit confidence. To them, as she herself has told us, she

laid open the agitation of her mind, her settled disgust for the world, her ardent desire for the religious state, her feeling for the poor of her own land, her strong propensity to contribute to their relief; that from the first mo.nent she discovered their ignorance, she could never divest herself of the thought, but that she attributed all to her heated imagination. As matters stood it was morally impossible for her to be of service to them. The penal laws were an insuperable bar, and she had no pecuniary resources. Her constitution, too, was delicate; yet though the prospect before her if she returned was wretched and hazardous and all but hopeless, she felt inwardly compelled to follow it, she knew not why.

In the depths of her mind the perplexed lady fostered a hope that having poured out her heart to wise and sympathetic advisers her misgivings would vanish and her path to the cloister be rendered smooth and easy. A very different decision, however, awaited her. She was called, said her guides, not to religious life at the moment, but to instruct ignorant children in Ireland. The want of money and the illegality' of such a course did not matter; she must return home again and do what she could. So astonished was Nano Nagle on hearing this command that she ventured to question its wisdom; but the Jesuits were unflinching, their decision irrevocable. Then accepting it as the Divine will she thereupon commenced preparations for the life of toil, anxiety, misrepresentation, danger, and hardship which lay before her. Her father having meanwhile been called to his reward, her mother and sister took up their abode in Dublin, and on her second return to Ireland, Nano joined them at their new home in the Metropolis, where she continued to reside until the deaths of both her sister and her mother, which followed one another with almost tragic suddenness a little while later.

Some doubt seems to exist as to whether it is Dublin or Cork which is entitled to the distinction of having been the scene of Nano Nagle's earliest labours among the poor.

Several authorities-amongst them the Right Rev. Dr. Coppinger, her contemporary, and earliest biographerhold the view that during her brief sojourn in Dublin the brave girl rented a room in a poor district in the city and gathered around her thirty benighted children whom she taught to read and spell, and stealthily instructed in the catechism; others contend that Nano Nagle neither established nor taught a school of any kind in Dublin, that her work on behalf of the poor Catholic children of Cork was confounded with a similar mission carried on by certain pious ladies in Dublin about the same time. This is the view expressed by Dean Murphy in his now very rare Memoirs of Nano Nagle, and also by Canon Hutch in his monumental work Nano Nagle: Her Life, Her Labours, and her Fruits. Nevertheless, the present writer, having discussed the point with others no less interested than he in the career of this noble Irishwoman, is strongly inclined to the belief that the honour of Nano Nagle's first school belongs to Dublin. In support of this theory we have, in addition to the important testimony of her contemporary, Dr. Coppinger, a statement in the short account of Miss Nagle's life compiled from the Annals of the South Presentation Convent, Cork (published by Flynn of Cork, in 1878), which would seem to leave little room for doubt on the point. It is this:

She [Nano Nagle] remained some time with her mother and sister in Dublin, and during her residence there she commenced the work of Gol. She took a small room, assembled about thirty children, whom she instructed in the Christian doctrine, and taught to read and spell. In this good work she was assisted by one of her sisters, who was as charitably disposed as herself. From her having afterwards declared that she was absolutely terrified at their wickedness, we may easily suppose that the vulgar world, in miniature, was delineated in this little assembly.

Remembering the scrupulous care with which such communities preserve and hand down, not alone the annals but the traditions of their houses, the foregoing extract would seem to furnish irrefutable testimony in support of the Dublin theory. Furthermore, Nano Nagle, accepting as a Divine command the advice of the Parisian Jesuits that she was to proceed to Ireland and instruct ignorant children,' returned home at once, and joining her mother and sister in Dublin settled there until the hand of Death broke up their home. When one recalls the ardour of her determination to fulfil the task assigned to her, does it