when the Recollets absolve a penitent he often annuls the absolution. * In one respect this Canadian church militant achieved a complete success. Heresy was scoured out of the colony. When Maintenon and her ghostly prompters overcame the better nature of the king, and wrought on his bigotry and his vanity to launch him into the dragonnades; when violence and lust bore the crucifix into thousands of Huguenot homes, and the land reeked with nameless infamies; when churches rang with _Te Deums_, and the heart of France withered in anguish; when, in short, this hideous triumph of the faith was won, the royal tool of priestly ferocity sent orders that heresy should be treated in Canada as it had been treated in France. ** The orders were needless. The pious Denonville replies, “Praised be God, there is not a heretic here.” He adds that a few abjured last year, and that he should be very glad if the king would make them a present. The Jesuits, he further says, go every day on board the ships in the harbor to look after the new converts from France. *** Now and then at a later day a real or suspected Jansenist found his way to Canada, and sometimes an _esprit fort_, like * Mémoire instructif contenant la conduite des PP. Récollets de Paris en leurs missions de Canada, 1684. This paper, of which only a fragment is preserved, was written in connection with a dispute of the Recolléts with the bishop who opposed their attempt to establish a church in Quebec. ** Mémoire du Roy a Denonville, 31 Mai, 1686. The king here orders the imprisonment of heretics who refuse to abjure, or the quartering of soldiers on them. What this meant the history of the dragonnades will show. *** Denonville au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1686. La Hontan, came over with the troops; but on the whole a community more free from positive heterodoxy perhaps never existed on earth. This exemption cost no bloodshed. What it did cost we may better judge hereafter. If Canada escaped the dragonnades, so also she escaped another infliction from which a neighboring colony suffered deplorably. Her peace was never much troubled by witches. They were held to exist, it is true; but they wrought no panic. Mother Mary of the Incarnation reports on one occasion the discovery of a magician in the person of a converted Huguenot miller who, being refused in marriage by a girl of Quebec, bewitched her, and filled the house where she lived with demons, which the bishop tried in vain to exorcise. The miller was thrown into prison, and the girl sent to the Hôtel-Dieu, where not a demon dared enter. The infernal crew took their revenge by creating a severe influenza among the citizens. *