From THE AUTHORS PREFACE.
The book here offered to the public was undertaken at a time when the author was busy on other most important and more attractive matter. Several heads of religious orders of women had written to him expressing the wish that he would undertake to prepare lives of their respective founders. Two of them were especially urgent in their request.
Thereupon it was thought that a series of biographies, entitled Modern Apostles of Female Education, might be of no little interest and advantage to our numerous teaching Orders and their pupils, as well as to the general public. At any rate, out of this conception grew St. Angela Merici And The Ursulines. Who knows but, all imperfect as it is, it may inspire other writers, both more zealous and more competent, to continue the series, and show how so many noble rivals and auxiliaries in this glorious apostleship of female education sprung up around the daughters of St. Angela?
In the following narrative the author has taken for his principal guide the Jesuit Salvatori, who, writing in Italy, and having ready at his hand both the local traditions and the most approved histories of St. Angela and her Order, has left us a Life incomparably better than any of those which preceded it.
Even Salvatoris book, however, does not explain at all, or explains but unsatisfactorily, the long delays which occurred between the vision in which Angela was commanded to found in Brescia a society of religious women, and the foundation itself, a few years only before her death. This long interval. in the existing popular biographies of the Saint, is filled up -- if indeed it can be said to be filled at all-with but few interesting incidents. How far the present Life has succeeded, both in explaining these delays and varying the monotony of these intervening years, is left to the reader to judge.
The first half of the manuscript was in the hands of the publisher and printer, when a kind Quebec friend sent the author the first volume of Abbe Postels Histoire de Sainte Angele Merici et de lOrdre des Ursulines. Though this able and interesting book came too late to help the author amid the confused and conflicting dates and statements of St. Angelas historians, it was no small satisfaction to see that Abbe Postel had taken pains, and not without success, to explain the obstacles met with and overcome at length in founding the Company of St . Ursula.
If, in some respects, the arrangement followed in the present Life of St. Angela differs from the Italian or French biographies, it need only be said that the author has consulted principally the best interests of American readers. To them, he firmly trusts, the sketch here submitted of the life and labors of the Holy Maid of Desenzano will prove attractive, edifying, and instructive.
New York, April 2, 1880.