In former days, when Canada was not yet transformed from a mission to a colony, the Jesuits entered with a high hand on the work of reform. * “Ce commerce est absolument nécessaire pour attirer les sauvages dans les colonies françoises, et par ce moyen leur donner les premières teintures de la foy.” Mémoire de Colbert, joint à sa lettre à Duchesneau du 24 Mai, 1678. It fared hard with the culprit caught in the act of selling brandy to Indians. They led him, after the sermon, to the door of the church; where, kneeling on the pavement, partially stript and bearing in his hand the penitential torch, he underwent a vigorous flagellation, laid on by Father Le Mercier himself, after the fashion formerly practised in the case of refractory school-boys. * Bishop Laval not only discharged against the offenders volleys of wholesale excommunication, but he made of the offence a “reserved case;” that is, a case in which the power of granting absolution was reserved to himself alone. This produced great commotion, and a violent conflict between religious scruples and a passion for gain. The bishop and the Jesuits stood inflexible; while their opponents added bitterness to the quarrel by charging them with permitting certain favored persons to sell brandy, unpunished, and even covertly selling it themselves. ** * Mémoire de Dumesnil, 1671. ** Lettre de Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye, 24 Oct., 1693. After speaking of the excessive rigor of the bishop, he adds: “L’on dit, et il est vrai, que dans ces temps si fâcheux, sous prétexte de pauvreté dans les familles, certaines gens avoient permission d’en traiter, je crois toujours avec la réserve de ne pas enivrer.” Dumesnil, Mémoire de 1671, says that Laval excommunicated all brandy- sellers, “à l’exception, néanmoins, de quelques particuliers qu’il voulait favoriser.” He says further that the bishop and the Jesuit Ragueneau had a clerk whom they employed at 500 francs a year to trade with the Indians, paying them in liquors for their furs; and that for a time the ecclesiastics had this trade to themselves, their severities having deterred most others from venturing into it. La Salle, Mémoire de 1678, declares that, “Ils (les Jésuites) refusent l’absolution a ceux qui ne veulent pas promettre de n’en plus vendre, et s’ils meurent en cet état, ils les privent de la sépulture ecclésiastique: au contraire, ils so permettent à eux mesmes sans aucune difficulté ce mesme trafic, quoyque toute sorte de trafic soit interdite à tous les ecclésiastiques par les ordonnances du Roy et par une bulle expresse du Pape.” I give these assertions as I find them, and for what they are worth.