In the mean time he had entered, imperceptibly, so to speak, upon the great work of his life. He had preached many retreats at different times to his own brethren, and to other religious communities, but had rarely been heard in a public pulpit until, during the Lent of 1835, while he was living at Saint Acheul, he was selected to preach a series of conferences in the cathedral of Amiens. He was forty years of age when he began this apostleship, and he had been withdrawn from the world ever since he was twenty-seven; yet he had not been forgotten. There was a lively curiosity among his old friends to hear him; the members of the bar in particular were constant in their attendance; and the impression produced in Amiens was not only deep, but rich in spiritual fruit. In Advent, he was appointed to preach a similar course at the same place; and in Lent of the next year, we find him preaching in the church of St. Thomas Aquinas, in Paris. Nothing exactly like these conferences and courses of sermons, so common in France, has ever been known to our country, and some of our readers may find it difficult to appreciate the magnitude and importance of the labor in which Father de Ravignan was now engaged. {116} The audiences whom he had to address were not only poor, unlettered sinners, whose consciences needed arousing; to these of course he must speak, but with them came hundreds of the most cultivated and critical listeners, who studied the speaker's language and manner as they would a literary essay or an exercise in elocution. The court, the army, the learned professions, and the leaders of fashionable society crowded around the Lent and Advent pulpits. The appearance of a new preacher was the sensation of the metropolis. The newspapers criticised the performance as they would criticise a play at the theatre. To satisfy the exactions of such an audience as this, and yet to preserve that unction without which preaching is a waste of breath--to please the critical ear, and yet to move the callous heart, required qualifications which few men combined. The most famous of all the series of conferences had been those in the great cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Father Lacordaire had there roused an extraordinary enthusiasm, and at the height of his fame had abandoned the pulpit and gone to Rome for the purpose of restoring the Dominican order to France. He earnestly desired that Father de Ravignan should be his successor at Notre Dame, and it is interesting to know that it was partly through Lacordaire's agency, that the Jesuit was obliged in 1837 to begin that grand series of discourses, extending over ten years, by which he will be chiefly remembered. "No one could claim to be the apostle of such an assembly as met in Notre Dame," says Father de Ponlevoy,