successfully carried out. After having formed a society of merchants to
take the material affairs of the colony in hand, Champlain tried to get
some religious orders to assume the direction of spiritual matters. He
had previously made known his plan to Louis Houeel, king's councillor,
and comptroller of the salt works at Brouage, and sieur of Petit-Pre.
Houeel was an honourable and pious man, and a friend of Champlain. He
told him that he was acquainted with some Recollets who would readily
agree to proceed to New France. Houeel met Father du Verger, a man of
great virtue and ability, and principal of the order of the Immaculate
Conception. Father du Verger made an appeal to his confreres, all of
whom offered their services, and were ready to cross the ocean.

The cardinals and bishops who were then gathered at St. Denis for their
great chapter, were in favour of the idea of sending the Recollets to
their foreign missions, and promised to raise a fund for the maintenance
of four monks, and the merchants of Rouen promised to maintain and
convey at least six Recollets gratuitously. The king issued letters for
the future church of Canada. The pope's nuncio, Guido Bentivoglio,
granted the requisite permission, in conformity with the pope's wishes,
but the bull establishing the church was only forwarded on May 20th,
1615. The brief of Paul V granted to the Recollets the following
privileges:

"To receive all children born of believing and unbelieving parents, and
all others of what condition soever they may be, who, after promising to
keep and observe all that should be kept and observed by the faithful,
will embrace the truth of the Christian and Catholic faith; to baptize
even outside of the churches in case of necessity; to hear confessions
of penitents, and after diligently hearing them, to impose a salutary
penance according to their faults, and enjoin what should be enjoined in
conscience, to loose and absolve them from all sentences of
excommunication and other ecclesiastical pains and censures, as also
from all sorts of crimes, excesses, and delicts; to administer the
sacraments of the eucharist, marriage and extreme unction; to bless all
kinds of vestments, vessels and ornaments when holy unction is not
necessary; to dispense gratuitously new converts who have contracted or
would contract marriage in any degree of consanguinity, or affinity
whatever, except the first or second, or between ascending and
descending,