"Eyes and heart alternately glow and fill as we read the endless 'Relations' of their faith and failures, their heaped-up measure of miseries, their boundless wisdom, their heroic martyrdoms. We forget our traditional antipathy to the name of Jesuit. The satire of Pascal, the memories of the Inquisition and the political history of the order, is all forgotten. We dislike to have our sympathies checked by reminders, that in Canada as elsewhere, they were the consistent, formidable foes of liberty; that their love of power not only embroiled them continually with the civil authorities, but made them jealous of the Recollects and Sulpicians, unwilling that any save their own order--or, as we say, sect--should share in the dangers and glory of converting the infidels of New France. How can we, sitting at home in ease, we who have entered into their labours, criticize men before whose spiritual white heat every mountain melted away; who carried the cross in advance of the most adventurous 'coureurs de bois,' or guides, who taught agriculture to the Indian on the Georgian Bay before a dozen farms had been cleared on the St. Lawrence--drove or carried cattle through unbroken forest around the countless rapids and cataracts of the Ottawa and French rivers that they might wean the Hurons from nomadic habits and make of them a nation; who shrank from no hardship and no indignity if by any means they might save some of the miserable savages who heaped indignities upon themselves; who instituted hospitals and convents wherever they went, always (in the spirit of their masters) caring most for the weak, the decrepit, the aged; and submitted themselves, without thinking of escape, to inutterable tortures rather than lose an opportunity of administering the last sacraments to those who had fallen under the hatchets of the Iroquois! Few Protestants have any idea of the extraordinary missionary activity of the Church of Rome in the seventeenth century. Few Englishmen know to what extent French society was inspired then by religious fervour. Few Canadians have any knowledge of the spiritual inheritance of which they are the heirs. It would be well for all of us to read Parkman's 'Jesuits in North America,' if we cannot get hold of the original 'Relations;' for the story, looked at even from a Protestant and republican standpoint, is one to do us all good, revealing as it does the spiritual bonds that link into oneness of faith Protestant and Roman Catholic, and teaching that beneath the long black robe of the dreaded Jesuit is to be found, not so much that disingenuousness and those schemes of worldly ambition usually associated with the name, but a passionate devotion to the Saviour, love for the souls of men and the fixed steadfastness of the martyr's spirit that remains unshaken when heart and flesh faint and fail.