§ 186.6. =The Catholic Missions.=--The impulse given to Catholic interests after 1848 was seen in the zeal with which missions in Catholic lands, like the Protestant Methodist revival and camp-meetings (§ 208, 1), began to be prosecuted. An attempt was thus made to gather in the masses, who had been estranged from the church during the storms of the revolution. The Jesuits and Redemptorists were prominent in this work. In bands of six they visited stations, staying for three weeks, hearing confessions, addressing meetings three times a day, and concluding by a general communion. § 186.7. Besides the Propaganda (§ 156, 9), fourteen societies in Rome, three in Paris, thirty in the whole of Catholic Christendom, are devoted to the dissemination of Catholicism among =Heretics= and =Heathens=. The Lyons Association for the spread of the faith, instituted in 1822, has a revenue of from four to six million francs. Specially famous is the =Picpus Society=, so called from the street in Paris where it has its headquarters. Its founder was the deacon Coudrin, a pupil of the seminary for priests at Poictiers [Poitiers] broken up in A.D. 1789. Amid the evils done to the church and the priests by the Revolution, in his hiding-place he heard a divine call to found a society for the purpose of training the youth in Catholic principles, educating priests, and bringing the gospel to the heathen “by atoning for excesses, crimes, and sins of all kinds by an unceasing day and night devotion of the most holy sacrament of the altar.” Such a society he actually founded in A.D. 1805, and Pius VII. confirmed it in A.D. 1817. The founder died in A.D. 1837, after his society had spread over all the five continents. Its chief aim henceforth was missions to the heathen. While the Picpus society, as well as the other seminaries and monkish orders, sent forth crowds of missionaries, other societies devoted themselves to collecting money and engaging in prayer. The most important of these is the =Lyonese Society= for the spread of the faith of A.D. 1822. The member’s weekly contribution is 5 cents, the daily prayer-demand a paternoster, an angel greeting, and a “St. Francis Xavier, pray for us.” The fanatical journal of the society had a yearly circulation of almost 250,000 copies, in ten European languages. The popes had showered upon its members rich indulgences.--After Protestant missions had received such a powerful impulse in the nineteenth century, the Catholic societies were thereby impelled to force in wherever success had been won and seemed likely to be secured, and wrought with all conceivable jesuitical arts and devices, for the most part under the political protection of France. The Catholic missions have been most zealously and successfully prosecuted in North America, China, India, Japan, and among the schismatic churches of the Levant.