Page:Life and life-work of Mother Theodore Guerin Foundress.djvu/58

46 in a barn by Mgr. Saint Papoul, and said his first Mass in a cellar), he seemed destined to no ordinary end.

Just as a builder will chisel and polish by lengthened labor the stones to be used for a very fine edifice, so when Almighty God has great designs upon a soul He Himself prepares it during a course of trial and suffering even for years in advance. All the wounds and bruises of the warfare, all the spoliation, all the crushing ordeals to which it is subjected are but forms of the refining and tempering process that prepares it to sustain the superstructure which later on shall be raised. M. Dujarié's trials during those years of hardship, want, and persecution greatly strengthened his soul in faith and zeal; and in after years, when the distresses, labors, and dangers attending the priestly office pressed heavily upon the Lord's anointed, the courage of the young ecclesiastic was an edification and an example. Those were days, it must be remembered, when the soutane marked the object of attack and violence. The Concordat of 1801 had restored religious worship, it is true; but passion and pride had well nigh expelled the spirit that would give to religion its invigorating power, and the misery that followed in the wake of the revolution was an indescribable sequence of infidelity, lawlessness, and crime.

Abbé Dujarié had been appointed to the borough of Ruillé-sur-Loir in 1803, with faculties extending over a large district of the surrounding country. Sick at heart, but undaunted, the good cure labored in every possible manner to alleviate the distress of his people, whose moral condition, however, was far more deplorable than the poverty to which they were reduced.