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Angela, but, as already noticed, she had then been called to her reward. After her death, the institute spread rapidly through many towns of Italy. Among the first to adopt it was Dezenzano, the scene of her early labours. In Milan, especially, it found an efficacious patron and protector in the great St. Charles Borromeo, to whose zeal it is immensely indebted.
It was about her twenty-first year that she began her labour of zeal and love, by assembling the little children of Dezenzano for catechism, and instructing a vast number of adults in the Christian doctrine. Her assistants were four in number, and like herself members of the Third Order of St. Francis.
It happened that this pious couple had some years before become acquainted with Saint Angela, in one of their annual visits to their large estates near Dezenzano, and finding the intimacy highly conducive to their spiritual interests, they had cultivated it assiduously.
To that there might be still, as there had already been, a long delay, but she believed that in His own time, the Almighty would provide for its accomplishment, and for that time she waited tranquilly, devoting herself meanwhile to her humble labours at Dezenzano as entirely as if she had not known full well that Dezenzano was not her ultimate destination. And in His own time God did interpose.
Dezenzano, her birth-place, stands on the south-west bank of the picturesque Lago di Garda in the Venetian States, about seventeen miles from Brescia. It is ever the saints whom God employs to do His work, and in the present instance, neither the work nor the instrument was to be an exception to the rule.
Looking on the decision as a manifestation of the Divine will, she accordingly left Dezenzano where for twenty years she had pursued her mission of love, and proceeded to Brescia, the city of the promise, having first secured that the work at Dezenzano should be continued by her sisters whom she intended to rejoin as soon as possible.
Though she did not live to witness the full realization of that promise, she was permitted to foresee its accomplishment in a celestial vision granted her much about the period of the opening of her apostolate at Dezenzano. One day, while praying with great earnestness for Divine guidance, a high ladder, like that shown to Jacob, suddenly appeared before her.
But holy and profitable as was the work at Dezenzano, she knew all along that it was only preparatory to the greater work at Brescia. "Take courage, Angela," said the prophecy, "for thou shall found a company of virgins such as these at Brescia." The prediction was explicit as to her future destiny, but vague as to the period of fulfilment.
Her original intention had been, as we have seen, to return to Dezenzano, as soon as her work of charity in Brescia was completed; she had not however been long in the latter city, when she became convinced that God willed her to remain there.
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