[4] "Les témoignages qu'on a rendu à Sa Majesté de l'affection et du zêle du Sr. de Thury, missionaire chez les Canibas (Abenakis), pour son service, et particulièrement dans l'engagement où il a mis les Sauvages de recommencer la guerre contre les Anglois, m'oblige de vous prier de luy faire une plus forte part sur les 1,500 livres de gratification que Sa Majesté accorde pour les ecclésiastiques de l'Acadie." Le Ministre à l'Évesque de Québec, 16 Avril, 1695. "Je suis bien aise de me servir de cette occasion pour vous dire que j'ay esté informé, non seulement de vostre zêle et de vostre application pour vostre mission, et du progrès qu'elle fait pour l'avancement de la religion avec les sauvages, mais encore de vos soins pour les maintenir dans le service de Sa Majesté et pour les encourager aux expeditions de guerre." Le Ministre à Thury, 23 Avril, 1697. The other letter to Thury, written two years before, is of the same tenor. The French missionaries are said to have made use of singular methods to excite their flocks against the heretics. The Abenaki chief Bomaseen, when a prisoner at Boston in 1696, declared that they told the Indians that Jesus Christ was a Frenchman, and his mother, the Virgin, a French lady; that the English had murdered him, and that the best way to gain his favor was to revenge his death. [5] [5] Mather, Magnalia, II. 629. Compare Dummer, Memorial, 1709, in Mass. Hist. Coll., 3 Ser., I., and the same writer's Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the Late Expedition to Canada, 1712. Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the geologist, when engaged in the survey of Maine in 1836, mentions, as an example of the simplicity of the Acadians of Madawaska, that one of them asked him "if Bethlehem, where Christ was born, was not a town in France." First Report on the Geology of Maine, 72. Here, perhaps, is a tradition from early missionary teaching.