Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/419

Rh the Mass was a profound mystery in its show and emblems to the lookers-on. Then there were occasions of prevailing disease among children, the parents dismayed as to the cause. The Jesuits asking permission to baptize a dying infant, and being sternly forbidden as if it were an evil charm, were occasionally observed performing the rite by stealth. The savages having no answering conception in their minds as to the meaning of the act would be infuriated, and would regard the priest as a sorcerer of the most malicious kind.

All the more should we hold ourselves to the loftiest appreciation of the sincerity, the devotion, the heroic fidelity of those Jesuit Fathers, because, whether it be from our Protestant prejudices or perverseness, or with good reasons for our judgment, we put so slight an estimate upon the results reached by all this holy endeavor. Those who did that work felt that it was blessed and rewarded. Buffeted and thwarted as they were, they kept their serenity of spirit, and reported with modest assurance, that had no quality of boasting, a success which made them happy at heart. They tell by thousands the number of their converts, and do not hesitate to call them Christians here, and to claim for them the heaven of the redeemed. There is something of an almost languishing tenderness, of even a maudlin sentiment, in the fond relations of the docility and the simple reliance of their converts as creatures of an Arcadian paradise. Shrewder and keener observers of the Indian character have told us with what facility and responsiveness an astute savage will assent to any abstract proposition or any assertion beyond the scope of his thinking; that this assent was all the readier and more beaming, the less the proposition made was understood. Very hospitable is the savage to the incomprehensible in words and ideas. He is a natural transcendentalist.

But this assent of his wild catechumen was to the good Father conviction and faith, at times even the effect of