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: Chapter III St. Mabt's Seminary, 1791-1810 Administration Of M. Francis Charles Nagot The essential purpose of the Society of St. Sulpice, as conceived by M. Olier, which was the education of the secular clergy, and the management of clerical seminaries, had been constantly kept in view during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this was the chief end, as M. Emery often emphasized in his letters, for which he sent his Sulpician colony to the United States. We have seen how this scheme originated, how it was favored, nay, almost dictated, by a variety of circumstances in France and in the United States. We have accompanied the Sulpicians on their voyage to Baltimore, seen them land, and with prompt action establish themselves on the very spot which has been the scene of their devoted labors to this day. We have seen M. Emery's original colony increased in numbers by new arrivals, we have seen most of these accessions scattered northward and westward to work as missionaries in the Lord's vineyard. But though necessity knows no law, and though M. Emery, as a practical man, was ready to give way to necessity, still he always clung with unwavering firmness to his original plan and to the ideals of his Society. It is time for us to revert to the story of Bishop Carroll's and M. Emery's initial scheme and to trace the annals of St. Mary's Seminary, as the new institution was called. We shall not conceal from our readers thefact that the early records of this institution, destined to be in the truest sense the nursery of the American Church, are far from full. Its beginnings were very small, and its childhood necessarily modest and quiet. Its growth, like that of all organisms destined to thrive, was slow, and its development stormy. But childhood is in many ways the m...