130 ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 



Though a teacher of others, Vincent did not neglect the 

 discipline of himself;/ and his struggles with his own infirmi- 

 ties have not been left unrecorded. Finding that in his inter- 

 course with the great, there was a certain roughness in his 

 manners, he felt the necessity of correcting them. He directly, 

 as he states, addressed himself to the Most High, and prayed 

 Him to change his harsh and forbidding manners and give 

 him a gentle and benignant heart. One would imagine that 

 his prayer was heard, for his gentleness and affability became 

 afterwards proverbial. 



During the three years which he passed in the family of 

 the Marquis de Gondi, Vincent regular visited the galley 

 slaves, among whom he appears to have been thrown by 

 Providence, the more to place them under his special protec- 

 tion. The change which he worked in the minds of these 

 unhappy men was incredible; he succeeded in making the 

 galleys, these dens of wickedness, temples to the living God, 

 whose praises now issued from mouths which before were 

 filled with blasphemy and execration. 



The year 1622 is remarkable for an act of self-devotion, of 

 which none but a Christian could be capable. Being anxious 

 to form a just opinion of the , actual state of the galleys, 

 Vincent set out for Marseilles alone and unknown. As he 

 went from one malefactor to another, and heard their different 

 tales of crime and woe, there was one man who appeared 

 more despairing than the rest, and whose miserable counte- 

 nance excited his warmest sympathy. Vincent inquired into 

 the cause of his despair, and learned that he had been unjustly 

 condemned for some trivial offence to the galleys, and that he 

 had a mother, a wife, and children, who were all reduced to 

 the most abject misery by his slavery. Touched by his 

 misfortunes, and knowing no other way of remedying them, 

 Vincent took the generous resolution of changing places with 

 the criminal. Like St. Paulinus,* who sold himself to 

 redeem from captivity the son of a poor widow, Vincent (by 

 permission of the officers) placed himself in the stead of the 



* Bishop of Nola born 353. 



