PAUL 175 according to some authorities Feb. 22, 68. The attentive reader of the New Testament will 'notice indications of the opposition, jealousy, and even persecution which Paul encountered at the hands of his fellow Christians of the Judaistic type. This circumstance should be taken into the account in estimating the worth and force of a character which in moral hero- ism has no superior, perhaps no equal, in the world's annals. Of the 21 epistles embraced in the canon of the New Testament, 14 are popularly ascribed to Paul and assigned to him in the current versions. Of these, the Epistle to the Hebrews is pronounced by many crit- ics to be the work of some other hand. The genuineness of the pastoral epistles (the two to Timothy and the one to Titus), and of Co- lossians and Ephesians, has also been called in question; and Baur even doubts the author- ship of Philippians, Philemon, and the two Thessalonians, allowing as indisputably genu- ine only Galatians, Romans, and the two Co- rinthians. In this extravagant judgment few critics will agree with him. Eenan (Saint Paul, Paris, 1869) doubts the authenticity of the Epistle to the Ephesians, and rejects the two to Timothy and the one to Titus. It is impossible to determine the chronological or- der of the epistles. The two to the Thessalo- nians are placed first by most of the critics who admit their genuineness, and after them the Epistle to the Galatians. Then follow, in Wieseler's arrangement, 1 Timothy, 1 Corin- thians, Titus, 2 Corinthians, Romans, Phile- mon, Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, and 2 Timothy. See, besides the works cited above, " The Life and Epistles of St. Paul," by Thom- as Lewin (2 vols. 4to, London, 1874). PAUL, Vincent de, a saint of the Roman Cath- olic church and founder of the congregation of sisters of charity, born at Pouy, Gascony, in 1576, died at St. Lazare, near Paris, Sept. 27, 1660. His father was a peasant, who put him when 12 years old to learn Latin of the Franciscan friars at Acqs (now Dax). He afterward became tutor in the family of a law- yer, who sent him in 1596 to the university of Toulouse, where he passed seven years, was ordained priest in 1600, and received in 1604 the degree of bachelor of divinity. In 1605, on a voyage from Marseilles to Narbonne, he was captured by Turkish pirates, carried to Tunis, and became finally the slave of a rene- gade from Nice. Through the influence of one of his wives, who had heard Vincent singing sacred songs at his labor, this man resolved to return to Christianity, and in June, 1607, fled from the country with his slave and reached France in a skiff. Vincent spent the succeed- ing year in Rome, whence Cardinal d'Ossat sent him to Paris on a secret errand to King Henry IV., and subsequently procured his nom- ination to the abbey of St. Leonard de Chaume in the diocese of Rochelle. About the same time he was appointed chaplain to the ex-queen Margaret of Valois. In 1613 he became tutor 642 VOL. xiii. 12 to the sons of Emmanuel de Gondi, count de Joigny, one of whom was afterward Cardinal de Retz. He also preached to the peasantry of his patron's estates, particularly on the neces- sity of confession ; and the success of this work induced the countess to offer 16,000 livres to any religious community which should under- take to perform it among her tenantry every five years. Being appointed chaplain to the galleys at Marseilles in 1622, Vincent devoted himself to the welfare of the convicts, and, after sensibly ameliorating their mental and bodily condition, went to Paris to extend his reforms to the prisons in which they were con- fined while waiting to be sent to the seaports. He fitted up a separate building for them, and when absent himself caused two priests who had joined in his charitable enterprise to live in the prison. He next appears at M&con, as the apostle of the multitudes of thieves and beggars for whom that city was then notorious. From 1622 till his death he was director of the nuns of the order of the Visitation in Paris. In 1624 the countess de Joigny revived the project of establishing stated missions among the poor, and with the cooperation of her husband and the archbishop of Paris proposed to Vincent to undertake the establishment of a new order, which she promised to endow with 40,000 livres. Accordingly in 1625 Vin- cent, accompanied by two other priests, took up his residence in the college des Ions en- fants, which had been given for the purpose by the archbishop, and founded the congregation of "Priests of the Mission," commonly called Lazarists from the priory of St. Lazarus which they acquired soon afterward. The associates received royal letters patent in May, 1627, at which time they had increased to five, and were erected into a congregation by Pope Ur- ban VIII. in 1632. (See LAZABISTS.) Vincent devoted himself also to the spiritual improve- ment of the clergy. He established religious exercises for candidates for orders, to which the archbishop of Paris afterward obliged all his ecclesiastics to apply themselves for ten days before ordination; he threw open his house to all who wished to spend a few days in prayer and meditation ; and every week he held spiritual conferences, to which the clergy resorted in great numbers. With the assist- ance of Cardinal Richelieu, who used to consult him in making ecclesiastical appointments, he opened in 1642 an institution in which young priests or candidates for the priesthood might fit themselves for the labors of the ministry by two or three years spent in study and pious ex- ercises. The result of these efforts answered his greatest expectations. Wherever he preached it had been his custom to establish "confra- ternities of charity," composed of women who took upon themselves to search out and relieve the distressed, but without forming themselves into a regular order. In 1633 he determined to create a sisterhood which should pursue the same objects under a sufficiently conventual
