The Story of the Mormons, from the Date of Their Origin to the Year 1901Linn, William Alexander
History
The Story of the Mormons, from the Date of Their Origin to the Year 1901
Linn, William Alexander
Latter Day Saints -- History; Utah -- History
Savagery and civilization meet on this plane of religious credulity. The
Indians of Canada believed not more implicitly in the demons who howled
all over the Isles of Demons, than did the early French sailors and the
priests whose protection the latter asked. The Jesuit priests of the
seventeenth century accepted, and impressed upon their white followers
in New France, belief in miracles which made a greater demand on
credulity than did any of the exactions of the Indian medicine man. That
the head of a white man, which the Iroquois carried to their village,
spoke to them and scolded them for their perfidy, "found believers among
the most intelligent men of the colony," just as did the story of the
conversion of a sick Huguenot immigrant, with whose gruel a Mother
secretly mixed a little of the powdered bone of a Jesuit martyr.* And
French Canada is to-day as "orthodox" in its belief in miracles as
was the Canada of the seventeenth century. The church of St. Anne de
Beaupre, below Quebec, attracts thousands annually, and is piled with
the crutches which the miraculously cured have cast aside. Masses were
said in 1899 in the church of Notre Dame de Bonsecours at Montreal,
at the expense of a pilots' association, to ward off wrecks in the
treacherous St. Lawrence; and in the near-by provinces there were
religious processions to check the attacks of caterpillars in the
orchards.
* Parkman's "Old Regime in Canada."
Nor need we go to Catholic Quebec for modern illustrations of this kind
of faith. "Bareheaded people stood out upon the corner in East 113th
Street yesterday afternoon," said a New York City newspaper of December
18, 1898, "because they were unable to get into the church of Our Lady
Queen of Angels, where a relic of St. Anthony of Padua was exposed for
veneration." Describing a service in the church of St. Jean Baptiste
in East 77th Street, New York, where a relic alleged to be a piece of a
bone of the mother of the Virgin was exposed, a newspaper of that city,
on July 24th, 1901, said: "There were five hundred persons, by actual
count, in and around the crypt chapel of St. Anne when afternoon service
stopped the rush of the sick and crippled at 4.30 o'clock yesterday.
There were many more at the 8 o'clock evening Mass." What did these
people seek at the shrine? Only the favor of St. Anne and a kiss and
touch of the casket that, by church authority, contains bone of
her body. "France has to-day its Grotto of Lourdes, Wales its St.
Winefride's Well, Mexico its wonder-working doll" that makes the sick
well and the childless mothers, and Moscow its "wonder-working picture
of the Mother of God," before which the Czar prostrates himself."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account