means to procure the recall of those chosen without their participation; * filled offices with their adherents, and tolerated no secular priests except those of one mind with them.” ** Talon, therefore, under the veil of a reverent courtesy, sharply watched them. They paid courtesy with courtesy, and the intendant wrote home to his master that he saw nothing amiss in them. He quickly changed his mind. “I should have had less trouble and more praise,” he writes in the next year, “if I had been willing to leave the power of the church ¦where I found it.” *** “It is easy,” he says again, “to incur the ill-will of the Jesuits if one does not accept all their opinions and abandon one’s self to their direction even in temporal matters; for their encroachments extend to affairs of police, which concern only the civil magistrate;” and he recommends that one or two of them be sent home as disturbers of the peace. **** They, on their part, changed attitude towards both him and the governor. One of them, Father Bardy, less discreet than the rest, is said to have preached a sermon against them at Quebec, in which he likened them to a pair of toadstools springing up in a night, adding that a good remedy would soon be found, and that Courcelle would have to run home like other governors before him. (v) Tracy escaped clerical attacks. He was * Instruction au Sieur Talon. ** Mémoire pour M. de Tracy. *** Talon au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1666. **** Talon, Mémoire de 1667. (v) La Salle, Mémoire de 1678 This sermon was preached on the 12th of March, 1667. extremely careful not to provoke them; and one of his first acts was to restore to the council the bishop’s adherents, whom Mézy had expelled. * And if, on the one hand, he was too pious to quarrel with the bishop, so, on the other, the bishop was too prudent to invite collision with a man of his rank and influence. After all, the dispute between the civil and ecclesiastical powers was not fundamental. Each had need of the other. Both rested on authority, and they differed only as to the boundary lines of their respective shares in it. Yet the dispute of boundaries was a serious one, and it remained a source of bitterness for many years. The king, though rigidly Catholic, was not yet sunk in the slough of bigotry into which Maintenon and the Jesuits succeeded at last in plunging him. He had conceived a distrust of Laval, and his jealousy of his royal authority disposed him to listen to the anti-clerical counsels of his minister. How needful they both thought it to prune the exuberant growth of clerical power, and how cautiously they set themselves to do so, their letters attest again and again. “The bishop,” writes Colbert, “assumes a domination far beyond that of other bishops throughout the Christian world, and particularly in the kingdom of France.” ** “It is the will of his Majesty that you confine him and the Jesuits within just bounds, and let none of them