Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/401

Rh and officers held a council to consider if they might substitute the meal of Indian corn for wheat flour for the Mass. It was decided that they could not. The vestments and ornaments having all been destroyed, some dressed skin-robes and rude altar-trappings were provided. On Sundays and holy days the introductory prayers were offered; but the consecration was omitted. This was called the “dry Mass.” Yet simple as was the rite of baptism, we frequently read in the frank relations of the Jesuits that the savages refused to have it performed on themselves and their children, regarding it as an evil charm. Captain Bossu, of the French Marines, in his Travels through Louisiana (1759), says: —

There were embarrassments also occasionally met by the priests when they attempted to explain their mysteries to an acute-minded savage. We have a graphic account of an interview of Cortes and his priest with Montezuma, in the effort to attempt his conversion. The barbarian emperor accepted Cortes's account of the creation, as conformed to his people's traditions; but the abstruse doctrines and mysteries of the Christian faith announced to him baffled him. Especially was his mind exercised when Cortes, after a sharp reproach upon him for human sacrifices and the cannibal eating of human flesh, undertook to explain to him the doctrine of transubstantiation in the holy wafer at the Mass. That, said the emperor, was eating God, — a far more monstrous act than the eating of a human being.

A Jesuit Father, writing of a famous chief, Therouet, who died at Montreal, says he was a true Christian, and as