he
service of God, they have been willing to learn art and subtlety from
the Devil. True, we are told that a generous candor will always enable
and dispose us to honor and reverence self-sacrifice with a sincere
purpose, even when folly, instead of necessity, crowns it with
martyrdom. The plausibility of this plea lies in a vague use of the word
_sincere_. The honors of martyrdom are yielded by a fine discrimination,
as graduated by a scale recognizing a varying proportion of truth and
value in the purpose for which the self-sacrifice is made. Every grain
of superstition, duplicity, or recklessness reduces--every element of
loftiness, high-thinking, and wise-purposing exalts--the honors rendered
to a sufferer and a victim. We think that Mr. Parkman has held a fair
balance in those almost alternate sentences in which, with a terse and
comprehensive way of communicating his judgment, he recognizes the
personal devotion, and compassionates the puerility and aimless toil, of
the Jesuit missionaries. They might be pardoned for believing that the
direction which the soul of a dying Indian child would take, either for
heaven or for hell, was decided by their being able to cross a moistened
finger upon its face. But to turn that saving charm into an act of
jugglery, deceiving or falsifying to the parents, was an act which
reduced the performer of it, either in intelligence or honesty, below
the level of the sorcerer.

Mr. Parkman sets up no plea, positive or comparative, in behalf of that
remarkable--we cannot say engaging--class of all-enduring men whose grim
toils and sufferings he so faithfully narrates. Yet we have been
spellbound, and deeply stirred, as we have slowly read and mused over
his pages. So graphic and skilful is his method, so animated is his
style, so vivid and real does he make the scenes, the surroundings, and
the phenomena of his subject, that, while we might dispense wholly with
the exercise of the imagination, we find that it has actually beguiled
us into its most effective exercise by persuading us that we have seen
and shared in many of the personages and incidents of the narrative.

The rules of the Order required of the missionaries something in the
nature of a diary, or journal, which, passing through the hands of the
local Superior, should reach the Provincial at Paris. From these
official papers, entering into the fullest minuteness of detail,
confidential in their contents, and of the utmost trus