l, by men who for
this sublime purpose renounced all that constitutes the charm of life!
Not only did the Jesuits, in the early days of the colony, brave
horrible dangers with invincible steadfastness, but they even consented
to imitate the savages, to live their life, to learn their difficult
idioms. Let us listen to this magnificent testimony of the Protestant
historian Bancroft:--

"The horrors of a Canadian life in the wilderness were resisted by an
invincible, passive courage, and a deep, internal tranquillity. Away
from the amenities of life, away from the opportunities of vain-glory,
they became dead to the world, and possessed their souls in unalterable
peace. The few who lived to grow old, though bowed by the toils of a
long mission, still kindled with the fervour of apostolic zeal. The
history of their labours is connected with the origin of every
celebrated town in the annals of French Canada; not a cape was turned
nor a river entered but a Jesuit led the way."

Must we now recall the edifying deaths of the sons of Loyola, who
brought the glad tidings of the gospel to the Hurons?--Father Jogues,
who returned from the banks of the Niagara with a broken shoulder and
mutilated hands, and went back, with sublime persistence, to his
barbarous persecutors, to pluck from their midst the palm of martyrdom;
Father Daniel, wounded by a spear while he was absolving the dying in
the village of St. Joseph; Father Brebeuf, refusing to escape with the
women and children of the hamlet of St. Louis, and expiring, together
with Father Gabriel Lalemant, in the most frightful tortures that Satan
could suggest to the imagination of a savage; Father Charles Garnier
pierced with three bullets, and giving up the ghost while blessing his
converts; Father de Noue dying on his knees in the snow!

These missions had succumbed in 1648 and 1649 under the attacks of the
Iroquois. The venerable founder of St. Sulpice, M. Olier, had foreseen
this misfortune; he had always doubted the success of missions so
extended and so widely scattered without a centre of support
sufficiently strong to resist a systematic and concerted attack of all
their enemies at once. Without disapproving the despatch of these flying
columns of missionaries which visited tribe after tribe (perhaps the
only possible method in a country governed by pagan chiefs), he believed
that another system of preaching the gospel would produce, perhaps with
less danger, a more d