108 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



mons to the other side of the Atlantic. He thus parried thrusts 

 which might have hit his conscience more effectually, and yet 

 more covertly, than the German duke can whose cathedral pew is 

 hedged about with sliding windows, so that, when he pleases, he 

 can shut out unpalatable doctrines. Again, the French mon- 

 arch was as liberal in land-grants to Canadian priests as our con- 

 gress has been to railroads. 



Many of his courtiers too, whose idea of Lent was a month 

 when they hired their servants to fast for them, paid roundly for 

 sending so much gospel to the heathen as to leave very little of 

 it for themselves. Others too who would not give a sou of their 

 own money importuned their neighbors till they forced them to 

 contribute, as the fox while sparing his own fur tore skin off the 

 bear's back to make a plaster for the sick lion. Such beggary 

 they thought was a means of grace. 



While in lower Canada the Jesuits were to some extent subject 

 to the secular arm, and occasionally were forced to beg the gov- 

 ernors pardon. The powers that were said to them : " Show us 

 the way to heaven, but we will show you yours on the earth." 

 When a Jesuit in a Quebec pulpit declared the King had ex- 

 ceeded his powers by licensing the trade in brandy in spite of the 

 bishop's interdict, the governor, Frontenac, threatened to put him 

 in a place where he would learn to hold his peace. 



The same magistrate sent another priest — brother of the author 

 of Telemachus — to France for trial owing to some disrespect, and 

 wrote to the king : " The ecclesiastics want to join to their spirit- 

 nal authority an absolute power over things temporal. They aim 

 to establish an inquisition worse than that of Spain." 



Amid this conflict of authorities the government was glad to 

 transport the missionaries, and they were equally glad to be trans- 

 ported deep into the wilderness ; for there all power in heaven and 

 on earth, temporal and spiritual alike, and each doubling the 

 other, was theirs, theirs alone, without rival. Every whisper 

 against them was admitted to be " injurious to the glory of God." 

 They held it better to reign monarchs of all they surveyed among 

 Menomonies than to hold divided empire in Montreal. 



When once the Jesuits were planted in the far west they suf- 



