Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/411

Rh of our own; no conclusions or convictions, however intelligently and dispassionately drawn from the fullest and most candid study of the distracted pages of controversy and rivalry among those who are called Christians, — can bid us deny or grudge to those intrepid soldiers of the cross of Christ (the Jesuit Fathers) the meed of our reverential homage and admiration. Their vows were the sternest in their severity and exactions, and those who took them intensified that severity in the self-testing of their own fidelity to them. Their pupilage and training in discipleship decided the constancy of their apostleship. The appalling contrast between the scenes and the spheres to which many of the most devoted of them were born — in palace and chateau, and for the life of court gayety and intrigue — and the scenes and companionship of their solitary toil in dreary wildernesses of savages and peril, is a symbol of their characters and their work.

Trained in the rigid discipline of the seminary, under the keen, soul-penetrating search of his spiritual director, to an entire self-disclosure and an absolute self-surrender in abnegation and obedience, the pupil yielded his whole being, thought, purpose, will, and inclination to the control of his superior. No searching tests or methods of the alembic or crucible so thoroughly expose the elemental constituents of the ore or the vapor as did that soul-search open to all the secrets of the inner being of the novitiate. And on the knowledge thus reached was planted the authority of the superior or director. This absolute authority was not exercised by caprice or wilfulness, nor with any partiality or favoritism, but it was conscientious and discriminating; for the director was under the same constraint of subjection in vow as was imposed upon his scholar. By that knowledge of the make and fibre of the soul of his pupil, his aptitude, his strength or feebleness of tone, and his special fitness for a special work, the director assigned his place and service. Sometimes these