Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/420

400 supernatural grace. It would be unreasonable in us, using our tests and standards, to affirm that the Jesuit Fathers made no attempt to impart to their wild converts those Christian ideas, sentiments, motives, which go to the roots of one's being, work the great inner conversion, and build up character, renewed and vitalized. The Jesuits attempted what is in our view the utterly futile task of Christianizing without civilizing the savages. The fundamental difference between their aim with what they regarded as their success in it, and those of every Protestant communion in their missions among the Indians, is this: The Jesuits can make their discipleship accord with the habits, the life, the mental range, the moral laxness, the forest license of those who are still barbarians; the Protestant missionaries are primarily teachers, reformers, civilizers, requiring of their disciples industry, toil, humanity, restraint of passion, radical changes in all their views and customs of living.

The champion and eulogist of the members of the Society of Jesus might well find his account, in a polemical or historic essay, in pleading, that, for the purpose of claiming for them a just and kindly estimate, he would isolate one single company of them in one single field of their effort and devotion, and try and test the spirit of their Order in aim and motive and method there. Leaving all the tangled and irritating questions concerning their intermeddlings, intrigues, and complications with court policy and secular ambitions and strifes, he would study them as remote from scenes where these angry feuds and soiling schemes have place, and as engaged simply and purely in their mission work. Such a restricted field and such a selected fellowship of Christian evangelists might well be claimed to present themselves within the range of our present subject. The Jesuit missionaries in New France came as near to such isolation from the reputed motives and methods of their Order, as the organic and vital rule of it would under