Chapter I: Our Impressions (1)

It is probable that most of us have been, at some time in our intellectual and spiritual life, conscious of a divergence between our mental impressions and our received belief respecting the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. Outside the closed-in boundaries of our faith there has been, as it were, a margin of waste land which we seldom explore, but the undefined, uncultivated products of which flit athwart our imagination with something like an uncomfortable misgiving. We do not go far into it, because we have our certain landmarks to stand by; and while the sun of faith shines bright on these, we can say to ourselves that we have nothing really to do with the sort of fog-land which surrounds our own happy enclosure. Our allotment is one of peace within the true fold of the church.

We know where we are; we know what we have got to do; and we refuse to be seriously troubled by the dubious questions which may possibly never disturb us, unless we deliberately turn to them.

To us, as Catholics, this is a safe resolve. We know the Church cannot err. We believe, and are ready, absolutely and unreservedly ready, to believe, all she puts before us as claiming our belief. And this is no childish superstition. It is no unmanly laying down of our inalienable right to know good from evil; it is no wilful deafness or deliberate closing of our eyes. It is the absolutely necessary and perfectly inevitable result of the one primary foundation of all our belief--namely, that the church is the organ of the Holy Ghost, the infallible utterance of an infallible voice, which voice is none other and no less than the voice of God, speaking through and by the divinely-instituted kingdom which comprises the church of God. With this once firmly fixed in our hearts and intellects, nothing, can disturb us. Even supposing something to be defined by the church for which we were unprepared--as was the case with some on the definition of the Infallibility of the Sovereign Pontiff--still these surprises, if surprises they be, can be no otherwise than sweet and welcome. To us there cannot be a jarring note in that voice which is the voice of the Holy Ghost. The trumpet cannot give a false sound. It is our fault--either intellectually our fault (which is rather a misfortune than a fault) or spiritually (which is from our negligence and lukewarmness)--if the blast of that trumpet painfully startle us from our slumbers. To all who are waking and watching the sound can only be cheering and encouraging. The good soldier is ever ready to hear it and prompt to obey. The slumberer is among those to whom our Lord says: “You know how to discern the face of the sky, and can you not know the signs of the times?”[242]

He evidently expects us to know the signs of the times. The Lord is not in the strong wind, nor is he in the earthquake or the fire. He is in the gentle air.[243] But the wind and the earthquake and the fire are his precursors, and those who have experienced, and heard, and witnessed these warnings should be all attention for the softer sound which is the utterance of the divine Voice in the church.

There should be no surprise save the surprise of a great joy, the admiring astonishment of finding out how good our God is, and what marvellous treasures of things new and old our great mother, the church, lays before us from time to time, as the Spirit of God moves over the ocean of divine love, as it were incubating the creations of the world of grace. We lie down in our certainty as the infant lies down in its mother’s lap, and we rise on the wings of hope and faith as the lark rises in the morning light, without the shadow of a doubt that the lambient air will uphold the little fluttering wings with which it carries its joyous song to the gates of heaven. Underneath us are the “everlasting arms,”[244] and therefore we “dwell in safety and alone”--alone as regards those outside the church, who cannot understand our security, because they have never grasped the idea that, the voice of the church being the voice of the third Person of the ever-blessed Trinity to doubt the church is the same as to say that God is a liar.

If we have dwelt thus at length upon our certitude, and upon the intellectual and spiritual repose it gives us, we have done so for the purpose of making it absolutely impossible for our readers to suppose that when we speak of a divergence between some of our mental impressions and our received belief, we are in any degree insinuating that we have not got all we require in the absolute and definite teaching of the church; or that we have any cause to feel troubled about any question which the church has left as an open question, and respecting which any one of us individually may have been unable to arrive at a conclusion. All we mean is this: that there are certain feelings, impressions, and imaginings which we find it hard to silence and extinguish, difficult to classify in accordance with our substantial belief, and which hang about us like a sail on the mast of a vessel which the unwary crew have left flapping in a dangerous gale.

The points in question may be various as the minds that contemplate them. They may embrace a variety of subjects, and may assume different shapes and aspects, according to the external circumstances under which they present themselves, or to the color of our own thoughts and feelings at the moment they are before us. Their field is so vast and their possible variety so great that it would be vain for us to attempt to give even a glance at them all. Indeed, the doing so is beyond our capacity, and would be beyond the capacity of any one man. For who shall tell what is fermenting in the thoughts of one even of his fellow-beings? He can merely guess blindly at the souls of others from having dwelt in the depths of his own, and knowing, as the one great fact, that all men are brothers.

We are far, therefore, from intending to take up all the possible questions not hedged in and limited and defined by dogmatic teaching, or to try and help others to come to a conclusion on each. We might as well attempt to count the sands of the sea-shore. All we are proposing to ourselves for our own consolation, and, if possible, for that of our readers, is to lay hold of certain facts which will give a clew to other less certain facts, and, in short--if we may be allowed to resort to a chemical term--to indicate certain solvents which will hold in solution the little pebbles that lie in our path, and which might grow into great stumbling-blocks had we not a strong dissolving power always at our command.

It is self-evident that there is one knowledge which contains all other knowledge, and that is the knowledge of God. As all things flow from him, therefore all things are in him; and if we could see or know him, we should know all the rest. That knowledge, that seeing, is the “light of glory.” Its perfection is only compatible with the Beatific Vision, which vision is impossible to mere man in his condition of _viator_, or pilgrim.[245] It is the conclusion of faith just as broad noon is the termination of darkness. But as faith is the leading up to the Beatific Vision, to the light of glory, and to the knowledge of all things, therefore in its degree is it the best substitute for sight--the dawning of a more perfect day, and the beginning of knowledge. Consequently, “faith is the evidence of things that appear not.” And as it is some of the things “that appear not” which are puzzling and bewildering many of us, let us lay hold of our faith and go whither it shall lead us.

We can in this life only know God mediately and obscurely by reason and faith. But as the direct and clear intuition of God in the Beatific Vision will include the knowledge of all else, so even our present imperfect knowledge of him comprises in a certain sense all other and lesser science, and is necessary to the highest knowledge of created things.

To do this thoroughly we will investigate the occasional divergence between our mental impressions, as we sometimes experience them, and our received belief of the Divine Nature and characteristics.

In a burst of holy exultation S. Paul asks, “Who hath known the mind of the Lord?”[246]--not as though regretting his ignorance, but rather with the feelings of one who, having suddenly come upon an evidently priceless treasure, exclaims, Who can tell what wealth now lies before us?

Yes, indeed! we know him well while we know him but imperfectly. There is more to know than we can guess at, but our hearts are too narrow to hold it. And yet sometimes how full to overflowing has that knowledge seemed! Have we not followed him from the cradle to the grave, in that sweet brotherhood which he has established with each one of us? Have we not lost ourselves in far-reaching thoughts of how, and where he was when his brotherhood with us was not an accomplished fact, but only an ever-enduring divine intention co-equal with his own eternal existence--a phase of that very existence, for ever present to the Divine Idea, though not yet subjected to the conditions of time? We have thought of him as in the bosom of the Father in a way in which, wonderful to relate, he never can be again in the bosom of the Father. A something has passed in respect to the existence of God himself, and actually made a difference in the extrinsic relations of the divine Being.

There was an eternity in which the Son of God--he whom we most seem to know of the three Persons of the ever-blessed Trinity--dwelt in the bosom of the Father unconnected with his sacred humanity. There was an eternity when his name was not Jesus, when he was the Son of God only, and not the Son of man.

We are expressing what everybody knows who is a Christian--a platitude almost, and yet so full of wonder that, unless we have thoroughly gone into it and sifted it, we have not ransacked half the riches of what we can and may know of the “mind of the Lord.”

In truth, we are very apt to be repelled by this contemplation. There is something dreary to us in the eternity when the Brother of our race and the Spouse of our souls was only the everlasting Begotten of the Father, dwelling in that inscrutable eternity to which we, as the creatures of time, seem to have no link. Our thoughts and imaginations are shackled by the conditions of our own being. Yesterday we were not. And so all before yesterday seems like a blank to us. To-morrow we know will be--if not for us in this identical state, yet certainly for us in some other state. But that dim yesterday, which never began and of which no history can be written, no details given, only the great, grand, inarticulated statement made that the QUI EST, the “I am,” filled it--this appalls us. Can nothing be done to mitigate this stupendous though beautiful horror? Is there no corner into which our insignificance can creep, that so we may look out upon those unknown depths without feeling that we are plunging into a fathomless ocean, there to sink in blank darkness and inanition? Surely the God of the past (as from our point of view we reckon the past) should not be so appallingly unknown to us who have our beloved Jesus in the present, and who look forward to the Beatific Vision of the whole blessed Trinity with trembling hope in the future. But before we can in any degree overcome the stupor with which we think of the backward-flowing ages of eternity, we must endeavor more fully to realize the nature of time.

We are all apt to speak of time as a period; whereas it is more properly a state.

The generality of persons, in thinking of time in relation to eternity, represent to themselves a long, long ago, blind past, and then an interminable but partially appreciable future, and time lying as a sort of sliced-out period between the two, which slice is attached to the eternity behind and the eternity in front, and about which we have the comfort and satisfaction of being able to write history and chronicle events, either on a large or a small scale. We treat it as we should do a mountain of gold, which we coin into money, and we conveniently cut it up into ages, years, months, days, and hours. It is our nature so to do, and we cannot do otherwise. It is the condition of our being. But as it will not be always the condition of our being, there are few things we are more constantly exhorted to than the attempt to raise our imagination, or rather our faith, as much as possible out of these conventional and arbitrary trammels, and dispose ourselves for that other state which is our ultimate end, and where there are no years and no days.

In point of fact, time is only an imperfection of our being--an absolutely necessary imperfection, because our being is finite, and our state is a probationary state; and probation implies not only that succession which is necessary in every finite being, but change and movement in respect to things which are permanent in a more perfect state. Our condition in time has not inaptly been compared to that of a man looking through the small aperture of a camera-obscura, which only permits him to behold a section of what is passing. The figures appear and vanish. But the window is thrown wide open in eternity, and he sees the whole at once. He is, therefore, under a disadvantage so long as he is in the camera-obscura, viewing the landscape through a small hole. And this is our position, judging of eternity through the aperture of time. Even now we have a wonderful power of adding to our time, or of shortening it, without any reference to clocks or sun-dials, and which, if we think about it, will help to show us that time is a plastic accident of our being.

When we have been very much absorbed, we have taken no note of time, and the hours have flown like minutes. During that interval we have, as it were, made our own time, and modified our condition with reference to time by our own act. Time, therefore, is plastic. Were we by some extraordinary and exceptional power to accomplish in one day all that actually we now take a year to effect, but at the same time intellectually to retain our present perception of the succession of events, our life would not really have been shorter for the want of those three hundred and sixty-four days which we had been able to do without. Life is shorter now than it was in the days of the patriarchs. But possibly the perception of life is not shortened. Nay, rather, from the rapidity with which events are now permitted to succeed each other, partially owing to the progress of science and to man’s increased dominion over material force, the probability is that our lives are not abstractedly much, if at all, more brief than Adam’s nine hundred and thirty years. All things now are hastening to the end. They have always been hastening. But there is the added impetus of the past; and that increases with every age in the world’s history.

Now, let us imagine life, or a portion of life, without thought--that is, without the act of thinking. Immediately we find that it is next door to _no thing_, to no time, and no life. We can only measure life with any accuracy by the amount of thought which has filled it--that is, by the quantity of our intellectual and spiritual power which we have been able to bring to the small aperture in the camera-obscura, by which to contemplate the ever-flowing eternity which lies beyond, and cut it up into the sections we call time.

Another example will show us how plastic is the nature of time. Take the life of an animal. We are inclined to give the largest reasonable and possible importance to the brute creation. It is an open question, in which we see great seeds of future development, all tending to increased glory to the Creator and to further elucidation of creative love. Nevertheless, it is obvious that brutes perceive only or chiefly by moments. There is, as compared with ourselves, little or no sequence in their perceptions. There is no cumulative knowledge. They are without deliberate reflection, even where they are not without perception of relations and circumstances, past or future. Consequently, they are more rigorously subjects to time than ourselves. Therefore, when we deprive an animal of life, we deprive him of a remainder of time that is equal to little more than no time, in proportion to the degree in which his power of filling time with perception is less than our own.[247] All we have said tends to prove that the existence of time is a relative existence; it is the form or phase of our own finite being. It is an aspect of eternity--the aspect which is consistent with our present condition. For time is the measure of successive existence in created and finite beings. As finite spirits we cannot escape from this limit of successive existence, any more than a body can escape from the limit of locality and finite movement in grace. Eternal existence is the entire possession of life, which is illimitable, in such a perfect manner that all succession in duration is excluded. This is possible only in God himself, who is alone most pure and perfect act, and therefore is at once all he can be, without change or movement. But the created spirit must ever live by a perpetual movement of increase in its duration, because it is on every side finite. Time, therefore, will continue to exist while creatures continue to exist.

Having arrived at this conclusion we cannot refuse ourselves the satisfaction of pointing out one obvious deduction--namely, that if time has, in itself, only a relative existence, it is impossible it can ever put an end to the existence of anything else. It is inconceivable that the _non est_ can absorb, exterminate, annihilate, or obliterate any one single thing that has ever had one second of real existence, of permitted being, of sentient, or even of insentient, life. God can annihilate, if he so will (and we do not think he will), but time cannot. Time can hide and put away. It can slip between us and the only reality, which is eternity; that is the condition of God, the QUI EST. Wait awhile, and time will have, as it were, spread or overflowed into eternity. It will hide nothing from our view. It will be “rent in two from the top to the bottom,” from the beginning to the end, like the veil of the Temple, which is its symbol. And then will appear all that it has hitherto seemed, but only seemed, to distinguish. We shall find it all in the inner recesses of eternity. What cause, in point of fact, have we for supposing that anything which _is_ shall cease to exist? Why, because we no longer behold certain objects, do we imagine them to be really lost for ever? Is this a reasonable supposition on the part of beings who are conscious that once they themselves were not, and yet believe that they always shall be? Why should the mere diversity in other existences make us apprehend that the missing is also the lost, and that we have any substantial cause for doubting that all which exists will go on existing? Do we anywhere see symptoms of annihilation? It is true we see endless mutations, but those very mutations are a guarantee to us of the continuousness of being. All material things change: but they only change. They do not ever in any case go out and cease to be. If this be true of merely material things, how absolutely true must it be of the immaterial; and how more than probable of that which is partly one and partly the other, of that far lower nature of the brutes, which have a principle of life in them inferior to ours and superior to the plants, and of which, since we do not believe their sensations to be the result of certain fortuitous atoms that have fashioned themselves blindly after an inexorable law, and independently of an intelligent Lawgiver, we may reasonably predicate that they too will have a future and, in its proper inferior order, an advanced existence. Everywhere there is growth--through the phases of time into the portals of eternity.

The idea in the eternal Mind, of all essences, the least as well as the greatest, was, like the Mind that held it, eternal--that is, exempt from all limit of succession. The past, present, and future are the progressive modes of existence and of our own perceptions rather than the properties of the essences themselves. Those essences had a place in the Eternal Idea; they occupy an actual place as an actual existence in the phases of time, and they go on in all probability--may we not say in all certainty?--in the endlessness of the Creator’s intention. Let no one misunderstand this as implying that matter was eternal in any other sense than its essence being an object of the idea of the eternal God, it was always clearly present to the eternal Mind. Its actuality, as we know it, dates from this creation of the crude, chaotic mass. But once formed, and then fashioned, and finally animated, we can have no pretence for supposing that any part of it will ever cease to be. Nor can we have any solid reason for supposing that what has once been endowed with sentient life will ever be condemned to fall back into the all but infinitely lower form of mere organic matter, any more than we have reason to suppose that at some future period organic matter will be reduced to inorganic matter, and that out of this beautiful creation it will please God to resolve chaos back again, either the whole or in any one the smallest part. We have nothing to do with the difficulties of the question. They are difficulties entirely of detail, and not of principle; and they concern us no more than it concerns us to be able to state how many animalcula it took to heave up the vast sierras of the western hemisphere. The details may well puzzle us, and we cannot venture on the merest suggestion. But the principle is full of hope, joy, and security, which in itself is a presumption in its favor. If we would but believe how God values the work of his own hands; if we would but try to realize how intense is creative love, what much larger and deeper views we should have of the future of all creation, and of the glory that is prepared for us! Even the old heathen religions began by taking larger and more accurate measure of these questions (though they necessarily ended in error) than too many of us do with all the light of the Gospel thrown upon them. The animism of the heathens, which makes no distinction between animate and inanimate existence, but lends a soul to each alike, had in it a sort of loving and hopeful reverence for creation which is often wanting to us who alone truly know the Creator. In their blind groping after faith it led them to fetichism, and further on, as a fuller development of the same notion, to pantheism, and then to the ever-renewed and quite endless incarnations of Buddha. But these errors took their rise originally from a respectful and tender love of that beautiful though awful nature which man found lying all around him; external to himself, yet linked to himself, and beneath the folds of which he hoped to find the hidden deity.

If these reflections have at all enabled us to understand the nature of time, and to shake off some of the unreasonable importance we lend to it in our imaginations--making of it a sort of lesser rival to eternity, fashioning it into an actual, existing thing, as if it were an attribute of God himself, instead of being, what it is, a state or phase imposed upon us, and not in any way affecting him--we shall have done much to facilitate the considerations we wish to enlarge upon. Eternity is “perpetually instantaneous.” It is the _nunc stans_ of theology. Time, on the contrary, is the past, present, and future of our human condition--the _nunc fluens_ of theology.

With this truth well rooted in our minds, we will now turn to the investigation of some of those impressions to which we referred at the beginning of this section, and endeavor to throw light upon them from out of the additional knowledge we acquire of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being through the simple process of clearing away some of our false impressions with respect to time. We had in our modes of thought more or less hemmed in the Eternal, with our human sense of time, and subjected even him to the narrowing process of a past, present, and future. Now we are about to think of ourselves only in that position, and to contemplate him in eternity, dealing with us through the medium of time, but distinctly with a reference to eternity, and only apparently imposing on himself the conditions of time in order to bring himself, as it were, on a level with us in his dealings with us.

Strange as it may appear, out of the depths of our stupidity we have fabricated a difficulty to ourselves in his very condescensions, and, looking back from our present to the past, we find ourselves puzzled at certain divers revelations of God made to mankind in gone-by times; just as, in the weakness of our faith, we are sometimes troubled with doubts about our own condition, and that of those about us, in that future which must come, and which may not be far off to any one of us.

The God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob--is he really quite the same as our own God? our God of the womb of Mary, of the manger, of the wayside places in Palestine, and Mount Calvary, and now, of the silken-curtained Tabernacle, and the Blessed Eucharist, and the dear, ineffable moments of silent prayer--is he the same?

Of course we know that, literally and absolutely, he is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Nevertheless, he appears to us under such different aspects that we find ourselves unintentionally contemplating the Old Testament as a revelation of the divine Being with very different emotions from those with which we contemplate him in the New Testament, and this, again, differing widely from our view of him in the church. It may be a mere matter of feeling, perhaps; but it is nevertheless a feeling which materially influences our form of devotion, the vigor of our faith, and the power of our hope and love.

If we could take in all these different impressions and amalgamate them; if we could group them together, or make them like the several rays of light directed into one focus, we should obtain a more complete and a more influential knowledge of God than we can do while we seem rather to be wandering out of one view of him into another, as if we walked from chamber to chamber and closed each door behind us.

Now, the only way we can arrive at this is by bearing in mind that the acts of God in governing the world are not momentary and solitary facts, but continuous acts, or rather one continuous act.

Our difficulty lies in producing a visibly satisfactory harmony in our own minds as regards the acts of God, and thus (though for our own appreciation of them, they are to us broken up into fragments, or, in other terms, into separate facts) arriving at the same mental attitude towards them as though we saw them as one continuous act.

It will aid us in our search if we, first of all, endeavor to qualify that act.

Its very continuity, its perpetual instantaneousness, must essentially affect its character and make the definition no complex matter. It is an act of love, and it is revealed as such in the whole creation, and in the way God has let himself down to us and is drawing us up unto himself. There have been many apparent modifications, but there have been no actual contradictions, in this characteristic; for even the existence of evil works round to greater good, to a degree sufficiently obvious to us for us to know that where it is less obvious it must nevertheless follow the same law. For law is everywhere; because God is law, though law is not God.

Modern unbelief substitutes law for God, and then thinks it has done away with him. To us who believe it makes no difference how far back in the long continuous line of active forces we may find the original and divine Author of all force. It is nothing but the weakness of our imagination which makes it more difficult to count by millions than by units.

What does it matter to our faith through how many developments the condition of creation, as we now see it all around us, may have passed, when we know that the first idea sprang from the great Source of all law, and that with him the present state is as much one continuous act as the past state and the future state? You may trace back the whole material universe, if you will, to the one first molecule of chaotic matter; but so long as I find that first molecule in the hand of my Creator (and I defy you to put it anywhere else), it is enough for my faith.

You do not make him one whit the less my Creator and my God because an initial law or force, with which he then stamped it, has worked it out to what I now see it. You may increase the apparent distance between the world as it is actually and the divine Fount from whence it sprang; you may seem to remove the creative love which called the universe into existence further off, by thus lengthening the chain of what you call developments; but, after all, these developments are for ever bridged over by the ulterior intentions of the Triune Deity when he said,“Let us make man in our image,” and by the fact that space and time are mere accidents as viewed in relation to the QUI EST. They are, so to speak, divinely-constituted conventionalities, through which the Divinity touches upon our human condition, but which in no way affect the Divine Essence as it is in itself. On the contrary, in the broken-up developments and evolutions which you believe you trace, and which you want to make into a blind law which shall supersede a divine Creator, I see only the pulsations of time breaking up the perpetually instantaneous act of God, just as I see the pulsations of light in the one unbroken ray. The act of God passes through the medium of time before it reaches our ken; and the ray of light passes through the medium of air before it strikes our senses; but both are continuous and instantaneous.

If we have in any degree succeeded in establishing this to our satisfaction, it will become easier for us to estimate the acts of God as they come to us through the pulsations of Time; because we shall be able to bear in mind that they must be in a measure interpreted to us by the time through which they reach us. They were modified by the time in which they were revealed, much as the ray is modified by the substance through which it forces its way to us.

Now, we arrive at the causes of the different impressions we receive of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. They are a consequence of the different epochs in which we contemplate him. They are the pulsations appropriate to that epoch. Other pulsations belong to our portion of time, and to our consequent view of the divine Being; and so on and on, till time shall be swallowed up in Eternity, and the Beatific Vision burst upon us.

TO BE CONTINUED.

MISSIONS IN MAINE FROM 1613 TO 1854.

“THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS IS THE SEED OF THE CHURCH.”

To the historical student the following paper can have but trifling value, as the writer makes no pretension to originality of matter, and seeks but to bring within the grasp of the general reader, in a condensed form, the gist of many books, a large number of which are rare, and almost inaccessible.

It is hoped, however, that there are many persons who will read with interest a paper thus compiled from undoubted authorities, who have neither the time nor the inclination to consult these authorities for themselves. These persons will learn with wonder of the self-abnegation of the French priests who went forth among the savages with their lives in their hands, with but one thought in their brains, one wish in their hearts, one prayer on their lips--the evangelization of the Indians.

As Shea says: “The word Christianity was, in those days, identical with Catholicity. The religion to be offered to the New World was that of the Church of Rome, which church was free from any distinct national feeling, and in extending her boundaries carried her own language and rites, not those of any particular state.”

The Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit bore the heat and burden of the day, and reaped the most bountiful harvest in that part of North America now known as the State of Maine; and the first mission in that neighborhood was planted at Mt. Desert, and called St. Sauveur. A hotel at Bar Harbor is so named, but not one in a hundred of the numerous guests who cross its threshold knows the reason of the French name of their temporary abiding-place.

This reason, and the facts connected therewith, we shall now proceed to give to our readers. In 1610 Marie de Médicis was Regent of France. The king had been assassinated in the streets of Paris in the previous month of May. Sully was dismissed from court. All was confusion and dissension. Twelve years of peace and the judicious rule of the king had paid the national debt and filled the treasury.

The famous Father Cotton, confessor of the late king, was still powerful at court. He laid before the queen the facts that Henri IV. had been deeply interested in the establishment of the Jesuit order in Acadia, and had evinced a tangible proof of that interest in the bestowal of a grant of two thousand livres per annum.

The ambitious queen listened indulgently, with a heart softened, possibly, by recent sorrows, and consented to receive the son of the Baron Poutrincourt, who had just returned from the New World, where he had left his father with Champlain. Father Cotton ushered the handsome stripling into the presence of the stately queen and her attendant ladies. Young Biencourt at first stood silent and abashed, but, as the ladies gathered about him and plied him with questions, soon forgot himself and told wondrous tales of the dusky savages--of their strange customs and of their eagerness for instruction in the true faith. He displayed the baptismal register of the converts of Father Fléche, and implored the sympathy and aid of these glittering dames, and not in vain; for, fired with pious emulation, they tore the flashing jewels from their ears and throats. Among these ladies was one whose history and influence were so remarkable that we must translate for our readers some account of her from the Abbé de Choisy.

Antoinette de Pons, Marquise de Guercheville had been famed throughout France, not only for her grace and beauty, but for qualities more rare at the court where her youth had been passed.

When Antoinette was La Duchesse de Rochefoucauld, the king begged her to accept a position near the queen. “Madame,” he said, as he presented her to Marie de Médicis, “I give you a Lady of Honor who is a lady of honor indeed.”

Twenty years had come and gone. The youthful beauty of the _marquise_ had faded, but she was fair and stately still, and one of the most brilliant ornaments of the brilliant court; and yet she was not altogether worldly. Again a widow and without children, she had become sincerely religious, and threw herself heart and soul into the American missions, and was restrained only by the positive commands of her mistress the queen from herself seeking the New World.

Day and night she thought of these perishing souls. On her knees in her oratory she prayed for the Indians, and contented herself not with this alone. From the queen and from the ladies of the court she obtained money, and jewels that could be converted into money. Charlevoix tells us that the only difficulty was to restrain her ardor within reasonable bounds.

Two French priests, Paul Biard and Enémond Massé, were sent to Dieppe, there to take passage for the colonies. The vessel was engaged by Poutrincourt and his associates, and was partially owned by two Huguenot merchants, who persistently and with indignation refused to permit the embarkation of the priests. No entreaties or representations availed, and finally La Marquise bought out the interest of the two merchants in the vessel and cargo, and transferred it to the priests as a fund for their support.

At last the fathers set sail, on the 26th of January, 1611. Their troubles, however, were by no means over; for Biencourt, a mere lad, clothed in a little brief authority--manly, it is true, beyond his years--hampered them at every turn. They arrived at Port Royal in June, after a hazardous and tempestuous voyage, having seen, as Father Biard writes, icebergs taller and larger than the Church of Notre Dame. The fathers became discouraged by the constant interference of young Biencourt, and determined to return to Europe, unless they could, with Mme. de Guercheville’s aid, found a mission colony in some other spot.

Their zealous protectress obtained from De Monts--who, though a Protestant, had erected six years before the first cross in Maine at the mouth of the Kennebec--a transfer of all his claims to the lands of Acadia, and soon sent out a small vessel with forty colonists, commanded by La Saussaye, a nobleman, and having on board two Jesuit priests, Fathers du Thet and Quentin.

It was on the 1st of March, 1613, that this vessel left Honfleur, laden with supplies, and followed by prayers and benedictions.

On the 16th of May La Saussaye reached Port Royal, and there took on board Fathers Massé and Biard, and then set sail for the Penobscot. A heavy fog arose and encompassed them about; if it lifted for a moment, it was but to show them a white gleam of distant breakers or a dark, overhanging cliff.

“Our prayers were heard,” wrote Biard, “and at night the stars came out, and the morning sun devoured the fogs, and we found ourselves lying in Frenchmans Bay opposite Mt. Desert.”

L’Isle des Monts Déserts had been visited and so named by Champlain in 1604, and Frenchman’s Bay gained its title from a singular incident that had there taken place in the same spring.

De Monts had broken up his winter encampment at St. Croix. Among his company was a young French ecclesiastic, Nicholas d’Aubri, who, to gratify his curiosity in regard to the products of the soil in this new and strange country, insisted on being set ashore for a ramble of a few hours. He lost his way, and the boatmen, after an anxious search, were compelled to leave him. For eighteen days the young student wandered through woods, subsisting on berries and the roots of the plant known as Solomon’s Seal. He, however, kept carefully near the shore, and at the end of this time he distinguished a sail in the distance. Signalling this, he was fortunate enough to be taken off by the same crew that had landed him. On these bleak shores the colonists decided to make their future home, and, with singular infelicity, selected them as the site of the new colony. It is inconceivable how Father Biard, who had already spent some time in the New World, could have failed to suggest to La Saussaye and to their patroness that a colony, to be a success, must be not only in a spot easily accessible to France, but that a small force of armed men was imperative; for, to Biard’s own knowledge, the English had already seized several French vessels in that vicinity.

On these frowning shores La Saussaye landed, and erected a cross, and displayed the escutcheon of Mme. de Guercheville; the fathers offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and gave to the little settlement the name of St. Sauveur.

Four tents--the gift of the queen--shone white in the soft spring sunshine. The largest of these was used as a chapel, the decorations of which, with the silver vessels for the celebration of the Mass and the rich vestments, were presented by Henriette d’Entraigues, Marquise de Verneuil.

The colonists labored night and day to raise their little fort and to land their supplies. Their toil was nearly over, the vessel, ready for sea, rode at anchor, when a sudden and violent storm arose.

This storm had been felt twenty-four hours earlier off the Isles of Shoals by a fishing vessel commanded by one Samuel Argall. Thick fogs bewildered him, and a strong wind drove him to the northeast; and when the weather cleared, Argall found himself off the coast of Maine. Canoes came out like flocks of birds from each small bay. The Indians climbed the ship’s side, and greeted the new-comers with such amazing bows and flourishes that Argall, with his native acuteness, felt certain that they could have learned them only from the French, who could not be far away. Argall plied the Indians with cunning questions, and soon learned of the new settlement. He resolved to investigate farther, and set sail for the wild heights of Mt. Desert. With infinite patience he crept along through the many islands, and, rounding the Porcupines, saw a small ship anchored in the bay. At the same moment the French saw the English ship bearing down upon them “swifter than an arrow,” writes Father Biard, “with every sail set, and the English flags streaming from mast-head and stern.”

La Saussaye was within the fort, Lieut. la Motte on board with Father du Thet, an ensign, and a sergeant. Argall bore down amid a bewildering din of drums and trumpets. “Fire!” cried La Motte. Alas! the gunner was on shore. Father du Thet seized and applied the match.

Another scathing discharge of musketry, and the brave priest lay dead. He had his wish; for the day before he left France he prayed with uplifted hands that he might not return, but perish on that holy enterprise. He was buried the following day at the foot of the rough cross he had helped to erect.

La Motte, clear-sighted enough to see the utter uselessness of any farther attempt at defence, surrendered, and Argall took possession of the vessel and of La Saussaye’s papers, from among which he abstracted the royal commission. On La Saussaye’s return from the woods, where he had retreated with the colonists, he was met by Argall, who informed him that the country belonged to his master, King James, and finally asked to see his commission. In vain did the French nobleman search for it. Argall’s courtesy changed to wrath; he accused the officer of piracy, and ordered the settlement to be given up to pillage, but offered to take any of the settlers who had a trade back to Virginia with him, promising them protection. Argall counted, however, without his host; for on reaching Jamestown the governor swore that the French priests should be hung. Useless were Argall’s remonstrances, and finally, seeing no other way to save the lives of the fathers, he produced the commission and acknowledged his stratagem.

The wrath of Sir Thomas Dale was unappeased, but the lives of the priests were, of course, safe. He despatched Argall with two additional ships back to Mt. Desert, with orders to cut down the cross and level the defences.

Father Biard was on board, as well as Father Massé; they, with refined cruelty, being sent to witness the destruction of their hopes.

This work of destruction completed, Argall set sail for Virginia. Again a storm arose, and the vessel on which were the ecclesiastics was driven to the Azores. Here the Jesuits, who had been so grossly ill-treated, had but a few words to say to be avenged. The captain of the vessel was not without uneasiness, and entreated the priests to remain in concealment when the vessel was visited by the authorities. This visit over, the English purchased all they needed, and weighed anchor for England. Arrived there, a new difficulty occurred; for there was no commission to show. The captain was treated as a pirate, thrown into prison, and released only on the testimony of the Jesuit Fathers, who thus returned good for evil.

Father Biard hastened to France, where he became professor of theology at Lyons, and died at Avignon on the 17th of November, 1622. Father Massé returned to Canada, where he labored without ceasing until his death, in 1646.

With the destruction of St. Sauveur, the pious designs of Mme. de Guercheville seem to have perished. At any rate, the most diligent research fails to find her name again in the annals of that time. Probably the troubled state of France made it impossible for her to provide the sinews of war, or of evangelization. Nevertheless, the good seed was planted, and zeal for the mission cause again revived in Europe, particularly in the Society of Jesus. Young men left court and camp to share the privations and life of self-denial of the missionaries. Even the convents partook of the general enthusiasm, and Ursuline Nuns came to show the Indians Christianity in daily life, ministering to the sick and instructing the young.

Many years after the melancholy failure of the mission at Mt. Desert, an apparent accident recalled the Jesuit Fathers to the coast of Maine.

In 1642 there was a mission at Sillery, on the St. Lawrence, where had been gathered together a large number of Indian converts, who lived, with their families about them, in peace and harmony under the watchful care of the kind fathers. Among these converts was a chief who, to rescue some of his tribe who had been taken prisoners, started off through the pathless wilderness, and finally reached the English at Coussinoe, now known as Augusta, on the Kennebec.

There the Indian convert so extolled the Christian faith and its mighty promises that he took back with him several of the tribe. These were baptized at Sillery, and became faithful servants of our Lord Jesus Christ. In consequence of the entreaties of these converts, Father Gabriel Drouillettes was sent to the lonely Kennebec.

Here he built a chapel of fir-trees in a place now known as Norridgewock, a lovely, secluded spot. Some years before Father Biard had been there for a few weeks, so that the Indians were not totally unprepared to receive religious instruction. Father Drouillettes was greatly blessed in his teaching, and converted a large number, inspiring them with a profound love for the Catholic faith, which the English, twenty years before, had failed to do for the Protestant religion. He taught them simple prayers, and translated for their use, into their own dialect, several hymns. The savages even learned to sing, and it was not long before the solemn strains of the _Dies Iræ_ awakened strange echoes in the primeval forests.

Even the English, biassed as they were against the Catholics, watched the good accomplished by the faithful servant of the great Master, and learned to regard his coming as a great blessing, though at this very time the stern Puritans at Plymouth were enacting cruel laws against his order.

When the Indians went to Moosehead Lake to hunt and fish, Father Drouillettes went with them, watching over his flock with unswerving solicitude. But the day of his summons to Quebec came, and a general feeling of despair overwhelmed his converts. He went, and the Assumption Mission was deserted; for by that name, as it was asked for on that day, was this mission always designated.

Year after year the Abnakis--for so were called the aborigines of Maine--sent deputations to Quebec to entreat the return of their beloved priest, but in vain; for the number of missionaries was at that time very limited. Finally, in 1650, Father Drouillettes set out with a party on the last day of August for the tiresome eight days’ march through the wilderness; the party lost their way, their provisions were gone, and it was not until twenty-four days afterwards that they reached Norridgewock.

From a letter written at this time by Father Drouillettes we transcribe the following: “In spite of all that is painful and crucifying to nature in these missions, there are also great joys and consolations. More plenteous than I can describe are those I feel, to see that the seed of the Gospel I scattered here four years ago, in land which for so many centuries has lain fallow, or produced only thorns and brambles, already bears fruit so worthy of the Lord.” Nothing could exceed the veneration and affection of the Indians for their missionary; and when an Englishman vehemently accused the French priest of slandering his nation, the chiefs hurried to Augusta, and warned the authorities to take heed and not attack their father even in words.

The following spring Father Drouillettes was sent to a far-distant station, and years elapsed before he returned to Quebec, where he died in 1681, at the age of eighty-eight.

About this time two brothers, Vincent and Jacques Bigot, men of rank and fortune, left their homes in sunny France to share the toil and privations of life in the New World. They placed themselves and their fortunes in the hands of the superior at Quebec, and were sent to labor in the footprints of Father Drouillettes. During their faithful ministrations at Norridgewock, the chapel built by their predecessor was burned by the English, but was rebuilt in 1687 by English workmen sent from Boston, according to treaty stipulations. And now appears upon the scene the stately form of one of the greatest men of that age; but before we attempt to bring before our readers the character and acts of Sebastian Râle, we must beg them to turn from Norridgewock, the scene of his labors and martyrdom, to the little village of Castine. For in 1688 Father Thury, a priest of the diocese of Quebec, a man of tact and ability, had gathered about him a band of converts at Panawauski, on the Penobscot. This settlement was protected by the Baron Saint-Castine. This Saint-Castine was a French nobleman and a soldier who originally went to Canada in command of a regiment. The regiment was disbanded, and Saint-Castine’s disappointed ambition and a heart sore from domestic trials decided him, rather than return to France, to plunge into the wilderness, and there, far from kindred and nation, create for himself a new home.

After a while the baron married a daughter of one of the sachems of the Penobscot Indians, and became himself a sagamore of the tribe. The descendants of this marriage hold at the present day some portion of the Saint-Castine lands in Normandy.