Although “each new muddler” blamed his predecessor for his own misgovernment, the tasks falling to the Governors were not easy. Under Kempt came up the question of giving legal status to Jews and Methodists, the question regarding the former going back some twenty years, when, under the administration of “little king Craig,” there was endless trouble over Mr. Ezekiel Hart’s presence in the House. Expelled and returned alternately, Hart was doubly obnoxious as a Jew and an Englishman. Methodism had an equally hard time since the First Gentleman in Europe had said that that faith was not the faith of a gentleman. The characteristics of the personnel of the House of Assembly in the years of the century prior to the Rebellion could doubtless fill volumes of humours. Most of the members from the Lower St. Lawrence arrived in schooners, sometimes remaining in them as boarders; or they put up at some Lower Town hostelry, content with their cowpacks and scorning Day & Martin. The members from down the Gulf were sure to be of the right political stripe, from a clerical point of view, or their constituents stood a chance of being “locked out of heaven.” One head of a house who dared to be a Liberal in those illiberal times, an educated man, and likely to have possessed weight in character as well as by his appointments in his native village, so locked himself out. His child of seven came home from school in tears one day, and after much coaxing to disburden his woe confided to his mother that in seven years his father, a parent much-beloved, would be a loup-garou. The end of this persecution was a removal over the border. But there were not many who had the courage of their convictions in the face of the Church’s No--they were all too good Catholics then. Stories of their religious life provide material for a picture whose beauty cannot be surpassed. A niche was hollowed in a wall of most Canadian homes to hold a figure of the “Blessed Lord,” or His equally dear Mother; and it is recorded of one of the first of Canadian gentlemen of his time that he never passed a wayside cross without baring his head, saying once in explanation, “One should always bare the head before the sign of our redemption and perform an act of penitence.” The humbler sort began no dangerous work, such as roofing, without a prayer. With heads uncovered, the workers knelt down, while some one of the oldest of the company recited the prayer to which all made response and Amen. Nor was thanksgiving omitted when the harvest firstfruits were sold at the door of the parish church. Close by the housewife’s bedhead hung her chaplet, black temperance cross and bottle of holy water; from the last the floor was sprinkled before every thunderstorm. And nothing was done by natural agency. Even the old, worn-out curé, who met death by the bursting of the powder-magazine on board the ship in which he was returning to France, was “blown into heaven.”