e larger sense until he had first been a
soldier. His youth fell in the midst of the Catholic Revival, when the
Church of Rome, having for fifty years been sore beset by Lutherans and
Calvinists, began to display a reserve strength which enabled her to
reclaim from them a large part of the ground she had lost. But this
result was not gained without the bitterest and most envenomed struggle.
If doctrinal divergence had quickened human hatreds before the Council
of Trent, it drove them to fury during the thirty years that followed.
At the time of the Massacre of St Bartholomew Champlain was five years
old. He was seventeen when William the Silent was assassinated; twenty
when Mary Stuart was executed at Fotheringay; twenty-one when the
Spanish Armada sailed against England and when the Guises were murdered
at Blois by order of Henry III; twenty-two when Henry III himself fell
under the dagger of Jacques Clement. The bare enumeration of these
events shows that Champlain was nurtured in an age of blood and iron
rather than amid those humanitarian sentiments which prevail in an age
of religious toleration.

Finding his country a camp, or rather two camps, he became a soldier,
and fought for ten years in the wretched strife to which both Leaguers
and Huguenots so often sacrificed their love of country. With Henry
of Valois, Henry of Navarre, and Henry of Guise as personal foes and
political rivals, it was hard to know where the right line of faith and
loyalty lay; but Champlain was both a Catholic and a king's man,
for whom all things issued well when Henry of Navarre ceased to be a
heretic, giving France peace and a throne. It is unfortunate that the
details of these adventurous years in Champlain's early manhood should
be lost. Unassisted by wealth or rank, he served so well as to
win recognition from the king himself, but beyond the names of his
commanders (D'Aumont, St Luc, and Brissac) there is little to show the
nature of his exploits. [Footnote: He served chiefly in Brittany
against the Spanish allies of the League, and reached the rank of
quartermaster.] In any case, these ten years of campaigning were a good
school for one who afterwards was to look death in the face a thousand
times amidst the icebergs of the North Atlantic, and off the rocky coast
of Acadia, and in the forests of the Iroquois.

With such parentage and early experiences as have been indicated
Champlain entered upon his career in the New World. It i