hand, here is an authentic story of a boy delivered through St. Aloysius from the calamity of being pushed forward to the priesthood against his will. In a clerical seminary in Italy, about the year 1850, on St. Aloysius' day, the boys used to write letters to the saint, which lay before his statue all day, and then were burned or given back unread. The bishop of the diocese insisted on taking up one of these letters and reading it, to see, as he said, that the boys did not write nonsense. No representations of the Jesuit rector, from whom this story comes direct, could stop him. The letter he happened to get hold of ran to this effect: "Dear Aloysius, my parents will have me here, because they want me to be a priest: I have no vocation: can you get me out of it?' The thing was settled that day. Furthermore, it is plain to any one who will study his life, that Luigi Gonzaga was a high-spirited, energetic, and courageous boy, with the makings of a soldier or a statesman in him, one quite capable of filling the high position he was born to. The efforts of the Marquis, his father, to retain him, though he had two younger brothers, Rudolf and Francis, are a testimony to his fitness for being the head of a noble house. People useless in the world are seldom much good in the Church. Heroic sanctity requires high courage. One reason why sanctity is so rare is because high courage is rare. A muff will never make a canonizable saint. A boy's instinct soon discovers that there was nothing of the 'muff' in Luigi Gonzaga."
