MIRACLES IN FRENCH CANADA. 243 



before the manger. She bore a child, which was the image 

 of I'Enfant Jesus, and became a nun of extraordinary piety, 

 on whom the Virgin lavished favors. Marguerite Bourgeois, 

 founder of the Congregation of Our Lady at Montreal, is now 

 undergoing the process of canonization ; numerous miracles were 

 worked by her before and after her death. Probably, in modern 

 opinion, the most splendid miracle of all was the courage dis- 

 played by these well-born women in crossing the ocean and 

 spending their lives amid the rigors of a semiarctic climate, 

 Indian alarms, sieges, pestilence, and all the privations and hard- 

 ships of a new colony for the glory of God. 



When the Island of Montreal was wanted by the Sulpicians, 

 a lay agent, apparently under Jesuit influence, had a vision in 

 which the owner was guaranteed heaven without purgatory. 

 The property, which has made the Sulpicians one of the richest 

 orders in America, was immediately transferred. This, I believe, 

 is the only instance of note in which the supernatural was in- 

 voked for a doubtful purpose. All the other visions and miracles 

 can be accounted for without the hypothesis of conscious deceit. 

 It was essentially a time when, as Dean Milman wrote of another 

 age, " the Christian lived in a supernatural world ; the notion of 

 the divine power the perpetual interference of the Deity, the 

 agency of the countless invisible beings which hovered over 

 mankind was so strongly impressed upon the belief that every 

 extraordinary and almost every ordinary incident became a mir- 

 acle ; . . . a mythic period was thus gradually formed in which 

 reality melted into fable, and invention unconsciously trespassed 

 on the province of history." This is kinder than Gibbon's ver- 

 dict : " If the eyes of the spectators have sometimes been deceived 

 by fraud, the understanding of the readers has much more fre- 

 quently been insulted by fiction." 



The seigniorial tenure, a mitigated feudalism based upon the 

 Custom of Paris (1510), was abolished by the Canadian Parliament 

 in 1854. It was then, a scoffing Parisian said, that the habitant of 

 French Canada discovered that Louis XVI was dead. When he 

 began to migrate to New England he learned other things that are 

 slowly undermining his cradle beliefs, and we may say without a 

 scoff that it will not be long till Good Saint Anne is dead. 



REMARKING on some of the results achieved by the Challenger Expedi- 

 tion in the antarctic seas, Dr. Murray says that the amount of animal life 

 found in the antarctic region south of 40 is very much more abundant 

 than in any other part of the world. One of the great secrets of oceanic 

 circulation may possibly be found by investigation of those regions. Cer- 

 tainly one of the greatest pieces of scientific and oceanographic work yet to 

 be done on the surface of the globe awaits eiforts in these regions. 



