The Jesuit Missions : A Chronicle of the Cross in the WildernessMarquis, Thomas Guthrie
History
The Jesuit Missions : A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness
Marquis, Thomas Guthrie
Jesuits -- Canada
buildings--a chapel, a hospital, and dwellings for the
missionaries and the engages--although of wood, were
supported on foundations of stone and cement.
The new mission-house they named Ste Marie; and from this
central station the missionaries went forth in pairs to
the farthest parts of Huronia and beyond. The missions
to the Petuns and the Neutrals, however, ended in failure.
The Petuns hailed Garnier and Jogues as the Famine and
the Pest and the priests barely escaped with their lives.
In the following year (1640), when Brebeuf and Chaumonot
went among the Neutrals, they found Huron emissaries
there inciting the Neutrals to kill the priests. These
Hurons, while themselves fearing to murder the powerful
okies of the French, as they regarded the black-robes,
desired that the Neutrals should put them to death. But
no such tragedy found place as yet. After visiting nineteen
towns, meeting everywhere maledictions and threats,
Brebeuf and Chaumonot returned to Ste Marie.
The good work went on, notwithstanding trials and reverses.
The story of the Cross was being carried even to the
Algonquins and Nipissings of the upper Ottawa and Georgian
Bay. At Ste Marie neophytes gathered in numbers, and here
there were no medicine-men, 'satellites of Satan,' to
seduce them from their vows. But, just at the time when
the harvest seemed richest in promise, a cloud appeared
on the horizon--a forerunner of darker clouds, heavy with
calamity, and of the storm which was to bring destruction
to the Huron people.
Meanwhile, how fared the mission at Quebec? Champlain
had died on Christmas Day 1635, and the Jesuits had lost
a staunch friend and never-failing protector. His successor,
however, was Charles Huault de Montmagny, a knight of
Malta, a man of devout character, thoroughly in sympathy
with the missions. Under Montmagny's rule New France
became as austere as Puritan New England.
The Relations of the Jesuits, sent yearly to France and
published and widely read, had roused intense enthusiasm
among wealthy and pious men and women. Thus Noel Brulart,
Chevalier de Sillery, was moved to take an interest in
the Canadian mission and to endow a home for Christian
Indians. Le Jeune chose a site on the bank of the St
Lawrence, four miles above Quebec; and in 1637 the Sillery
establishment was erected there, consisting of a chapel,
a mission-house, and an infirmary, all within strong
palisades.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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