But if the reverend prelate was modest and simple in his personal tastes, he became inflexible when he thought it his duty to maintain the rights of the Church. And he watched over these rights with the more circumspection since he was the first bishop installed in the colony, and was unwilling to allow abuses to be planted there, which later it would be very difficult, not to say impossible, to uproot. Hence the continual friction between him and the governor-general, d'Argenson, on questions of precedence and etiquette. Some of these disputes would seem to us childish to-day if even such a writer as Parkman did not put us on our guard against a premature judgment.[1] "The disputes in question," writes Parkman, "though of a nature to provoke a smile on irreverent lips, were by no means so puerile as they appear. It is difficult in a modern democratic society to conceive the substantial importance of the signs and symbols of dignity and authority, at a time and among a people where they were adjusted with the most scrupulous precision, and accepted by all classes as exponents of relative degrees in the social and political scale. Whether the bishop or the governor should sit in the higher seat at table thus became a political question, for it defined to the popular understanding the position of Church and State in their relations to government." In his zeal for making his episcopal authority respected, could not the prelate, however, have made some concessions to the temporal power? It is allowable to think so, when his panegyrist, the Abbe Gosselin, acknowledges it in these terms: "Did he sometimes show too much ardour in the settlement of a question or in the assertion of his rights? It is possible. As the Abbe Ferland rightly observes, 'no virtue is perfect upon earth.' But he was too pious and too disinterested for us to suspect for a moment the purity of his intentions." In certain passages in his journal Father Lalemant seems to be of the same opinion. All men are fallible; even the greatest saints have erred. In this connection the remark of St. Bernardin of Siena presents itself naturally to the religious mind: "Each time," says he, "that God grants to a creature a marked and particular favour, and when divine grace summons him to a special task and to some sublime position, it is a rule of Providence to furnish that creature with all the means necessary to fulfil the mission which is entrusted to him, and to bring it to a happy conclusion. Providence prepares his birth, directs his education, produces the environment in which he is to live; even his faults Providence will use in the accomplishment of its purposes."