The constitutions of the Congregation of the Passion are framed upon the spirit of the Church. If a man of property joins our poor institute, he cannot bring his possessions with him to enrich the community he enters; for Blessed Paul has not allowed them to have any fixed revenue. He may, indeed, give a donation towards the building of their church, the furnishing of their poor schools, or the paying off the debts they were obliged to contract to secure the ground upon which their monastery is built; but that is left to his own charity. He is supposed by our rule to hand over his property to a relative or a charitable institution, and reserve to himself the right to take it back, in case he may not persevere in his vocation, or abandon the life he has embraced. Thus deprived of stable funds, we are to rely upon the Providence of God; and we can give Him glory by confessing that we never yet found His word to fail, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you." Betimes we may have to send a brother to ask for some assistance from kind benefactors; but, as a rule, God inspires many to befriend us without our asking. The duties of missions and retreats, and the preparation for them, prevent us from digging a livelihood out of the earth; but the sweat of our brow that is thus spent earns our bread by procuring us friends. People crowd to our churches, and leave thank-offerings there to prove the reality of their devotion; and, as an ancient {370} father of ours once said, "our support comes in through the choir-windows." When we have to build a church or a house, we must follow the custom of surrounding priests; but, as our working is not purely local, we send a father or brother to distant countries, and try not to be too burthensome to our neighbours. Charity endureth all things; but the branch of charity which is exercised in the giving of alms is not always content to be too much importuned, or called upon too often. Charity therefore requires that those who plead for the exercise of one arm do not strain the other, and it makes provision against provoking anger or ill-feeling from the weaknesses it tries to cure by stirring to activity. In the year 1848 the fathers at Aston Hall stood in sore need of a church. Hitherto they had turned a room upstairs into a temporary chapel; and, inconvenient as it might be to have people going so far into a religious house, they would have borne up longer, had not a builder told them that anything like a crowd would bring the whole place down about their ears. Father Ignatius mentions this in a letter he wrote to Mrs. Canning. "It will," he says, "be a great addition to us to have a respectable church, instead of our chapel up-stairs; but we should not have had a plea for asking for it, if this chapel had not been so good as to give us notice to quit, by becoming cracky a little."