After years of patient waiting and thoughtful consideration of the subject of organizing the education of young women and providing for continuance of her work--the delay mainly due to the fact that Angela feared that she might not be capable of accomplishing it properly--she came to the establishment of a religious order that would take up this service. When the constitutions which she had written were presented to Paul III, the Pope, who in spite of his resolve not to increase the number of religious orders, had felt compelled to approve the Jesuits after reading their constitutions because, as he said, he perceived "the finger of God is here"; also found himself forced to approve of those written by Angela Merici, saying to St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, as he did so, "I have given you sisters." What the Jesuits did for the education of young men during the next two centuries, the Ursulines did for the young women. They spread rapidly until they had communities in all the Catholic countries of Europe, and then houses were established beyond the seas in the Latin-American countries and almost wherever missionaries succeeded in founding churches. Mother Incarnation came to Quebec and is one of the most wonderful women in the early history of the continent. That was before the end of the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth (1726) they established a house in New Orleans. When persecutions came the Ursulines were, as a rule, picked out as an object of special enmity by those who sought to injure the Church. During the French Revolution they were the special butt of the intolerance of the French Republic and gave many martyrs to the cause of religion. When the Kulturkampf came in Germany they were as specifically selected for banishment as the Jesuits, and indeed they have nearly always shared the fate of the Jesuits in times of trial. They have not been without special distinction by persecution even here in America. Their convent was burned down at Charlestown in Massachusetts during the bitter wave of feelings against the religious orders that had been aroused among Protestants in 1835. Their house was the very centre of {330} danger in the "Know Nothing" riots in Philadelphia some twenty years later.