Excerpt from History of St. Vincent De Paul: Founder of the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians) And of the Sisters of Charity The seventeenth century no doubt differed vastly from our own, but not to the extent that may be supposed. It forms part of that modern period of which the present day is the outcome. The problems undergoing study and solution are in large measure the same. Among the many saints and great Christian leaders of the Church in the seventeenth century, Saint Vincent de Paul stands out pre-eminent as an apostle of charity and an educator of the clergy. His long life of devotion to the service of his neighbour is a model for our imitation. The social difficulty with which we are face to face has been created by the substitution of capital as a governing power for Christianity. The working classes, or the hands, as they have been called, have been treated simply as so much wealth -producing power, and the rich and the poor have been banded into two Opposite camps. Luxury, selfishness and power combine and struggle for the mastery. The working classes have silently realised their position. They herd for the most part together they live as tenants on the land or in the tenements of absentee landlords, whom they seldom or never see. The absence among them is not only of the wealthy landlord, but of the civilising, humanising, Christianising influence of those who by education are refined, cultivated, charitable and religious. The working classes are learning to combine, in order to secure for themselves by pressure and threats that which ought to have been spontaneously offered to them by Christian sentiment. In the long - run, it will be found that the power of capital is a miserably inefficient sub stitute for Christianity, and that it will be destroyed by the combination of numbers, and by its own corruption, unless there be a return among all classes to Christian principle. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.