Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/423

Rh of belief, may seem to us like the weakest credulity and the most puerile superstition. To him it was peace, patience, fortitude, courage, gentleness, and a victory over all physical longings and all mortal dreads. Nothing that we call, in these days, emancipation of the reason, intelligence, strength of mind, scientific vigor, or discernment of truth, has ever wrought with such a potent and unyielding sway over the inward essence and the outward conduct of a human being as has the faith of a Jesuit. The courage of the soldier, the dauntlessness of the hero, are but fragments of the sum of his prowess and self-mastery. Even the miracles which the Jesuit believed were wrought for him by St. Joseph and the Virgin were really less marvellous than the effects produced in himself by his faith in them. His great exemplar in remote and perilous missionary endurance, St. Francis Xavier, rather than his soldier-founder Loyola, was the model and inspirer of the height and fulness and measure of his zeal. His life among the savages was but a series of exhausting hardships, vexations, anxieties, discomfitures, ever-impending fatalities, changing disappointments and ultimate failures; and death came to most of the Fathers in a series of variations of the sombre tragedy of humanity. Father Le Jeune wrote from Quebec to his Provincial: “The chastity of our temperament must be altogether angelic.” Father Brebeuf wrote from St. Joseph to his General, in Rome: “That which above all things is demanded in laborers destined for this mission is an unfailing sweetness and a patience thoroughly tested. It is neither by force nor by authority that one can hope to gain our savages.” Father Jogues, the lamb and the lion of the missions, found in the stroke of the hatchet which ended his work a mild release from all the ingenuities of savage torture. Father de Nonë, at the age of sixty-three, was frozen into ice in the attitude of prayer in February, 1646, on the shore of the St. Lawrence, having lost his way in the snow while on a lonely errand of kindness. A