Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/317

Rh which we visit upon the New England colonists. No candid student of our history, however, can fail to allow and affirm that the founders of New France in America, in their zeal and heroic toil and endurance for the conversion of the savages, present us on the records examples of nobleness and devotion which Puritan history cannot parallel. True, the words “religion” and “conversion” signified very different things — in substance, in processes, in methods, in tests, and results — to the Puritan and the Jesuit; and it is no breach of charity to say that the Jesuit was fully satisfied with tokens of success which the Puritan regarded as utterly insignificant, and even mockingly futile and false. We may but incidentally anticipate here a subject which will later engage a chapter in this volume, in an examination of the priestly and Protestant aims, methods, and results in the attempts for Christianizing the Indians. The Jesuits present themselves for brief notice at this point as one of the three first representatives of France in the New World. The Jesuit's method was by ritual, with an altar, however rude, with scenic demonstrations, a procession in the woods following the cross, if but just cut from the forest, and graced by a flock of naked savages bearing their bayberry torches. The Puritan's method was by doctrine, — a body of divinity, didactic teaching, and experimental cases of conscience. The good Apostle Eliot put the Indian vocabulary to a severe strain in opening to them high Calvinism, — with adoption, election, reprobation, justification, etc. But the Jesuits were not the first of the Roman priesthood in New France.

The measures for the introduction into New France of religion and its missionaries, to secure the avowed object of the conversion of the savages, were at first wholly lacking in zeal, and were soon sadly complicated by the mixture of Catholics and Huguenots, alike worldly in their enterprises, and by rivalries between the Franciscan and Jesuit orders. Father Gabriel Sagard, a Récollet, of the