practice of the religious life, are found in the earliest days of Christian antiquity. Many eminent theologians hold that the clerks regular were founded by Christ Himself. In this opinion the Apostles were the first regular clerks, being constituted by Christ ministers par excellence of His Church and called by Him personally to the practice of the counsels of the religious life (cf. Suarez). From the fact that Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century established in his house a community of priests, leading a religious life, for whom he drew up a rule, he has ordinarily been styled the founder of the regular clerics and canons, and upon his Rule have been built the constitutions of the Canons Regular and an immense number of the religious communities of the Middle Ages, besides those of the clerks regular established in the sixteenth century. During the whole medieval period the clerics regular were represented by the regular canons who under the name of the Canons Regular or Black Canons of St. Augustine, the Premonstratensians, (known also as the White Canons or Norbertines), etc., shared with the monks the possession of large abbeys and monasteries all over Europe. It was not until the 16th century that clerics regular in the modern and strictest sense of the word came into being. Just as the conditions obtaining in the 13th century brought about a change in the monastic ideal, so in the sixteenth the altered circumstances of the times called for a fresh development of the religious spirit in the Church. This development, adapted to the needs of the times, was had in the various bodies of simple clerics, who, desirous of devoting themselves more perfectly to the exercise of their priestly ministry under the safeguards of the religious life, instituted the several bodies which, under the names of the various orders or regular clerics, constitute in themselves and in their imitators one of the most efficient instruments for good in the Church militant to-day. So successful and popular and well adapted to all modern needs were the clerks regular, that their mode of life was chosen as the pattern for all the various communities of men, whether religious or secular, living under rule, in which the Church has in recent times been so prolific. The first order of cleric regular to be founded was the Congregation of Clerks Regular of the Divine Providence,