disputes also came as the inevitable result of his dominant and dominating will. Like his humbler predecessors in the Society of Jesus, neither distance, danger nor privation had any terrors for him. From the missions of Acadie to the far valley of Lake Champlain and the wild regions of the Upper Lakes, he travelled and organized and inspired his priests and adherents with new energy and enthusiasm. At Quebec he founded the Grand Seminary in 1663 and the Minor Seminary five years later, and from those institutions there soon flowed a fresh stream of devoted priests. By this time a number of strong and growing religious institutions were strengthening the cords of the Church in Montreal and Quebec. They included the Sulpicians at the former place, the Jesuits and Recollets at the latter; the Ursuline Convent in Quebec, which had braved so many pioneer perils under charge of the venerated Md'lle de la Peltric and Marie de l' Incarnation; the Congregation of the Ladies of Notre Dame, at Montreal under the control of Marguerite Bourgeois; the Hotel Dieu, built at Quebec, as a gift from the Duchess D'Aguillon, and the similar institution in Montreal created by Md'lle de la Mance and Madame de Bouillon. These institutions under the Bishop's fostering care, or through the intense militant spirit of the heroic women in charge, had prospered greatly and been of untold service to the oft-times weary, sick and despairing colonists.

Such in brief was the work and character of the Father of his Church in New France. A long line of more or less able and earnest men succeeded him. Mgr. Jean Baptiste de St. Vallier, who spent immense sums founding and helping religious institutions; Mgr. de Pontbriand, who established the Hospital of the Grey Nuns in Montreal, with the assistance of Mde. d'Youville, and died just after seeing the smoking ruins of his Cathedral in Quebec as a result of the siege of 1759; Mgr. Jean Oliver Briand, who had to face the new conditions following the English conquest and to make his office one

of diplomacy and racial conciliation, as well as of religious oversight; Mgr. Joseph Octave Plessis, the greatest of French Catholic ecclesiastics after the founder of the Church in Canada, and the most loyal and successful of administrators.

He understood and studied, as no man had previously done, the causes of the French overthrow in Canada, and he was clear-headed enough to appreciate the freedom of development accorded under the new régime. He founded colleges and schools, and took a place in the Legislative Council and an active part in its work, visited England and Rome in 1819, and finally succeeded in establishing Quebec as a sort of a central See with Suffragans or Vicars-Apostolic at Kingston in Upper Canada, on the Red River in the far North, at Montreal, and in Nova Scotia. He died in 1825, after nineteen years of an administration which had revived the fruits of Mgr. de Laval's labours, and had extended his Church in an organized sense over much of the vast region originally covered by the Jesuit Fathers.

The Church, meanwhile, did not prove ungrateful to England for the favours of toleration and freedom which had been conferred at

the Conquest. In 1775 Bishop Briand issued a Mandement denouncing the "pernicious design" of the invaders under Montgomery and Arnold, praising the magnanimity and kindness of the King toward his French subjects, and urging the defence of homes and frontiers and religious interests against the Continental troops. During the troubles preceding the War of 1812 Mgr. Plessis took still stronger ground and, in a long and eloquent Mandement, issued on September 16th, 1807, and based on the principle of "Fear God and honour the King," he urged loyalty to Great Britain and denounced as unworthy the name of Catholic or Canadian any individual who was not ready to take up arms in opposing a possible American invasion. A little later, when American missionaries began to stir up the people with promises of what republican liberty would do for them, he issued a

letter of concise and stringent instructions to all the Curés of his Diocese, regarding the necessity of inculcating loyalty. And, in the result, the influence and power of the Church was very plainly shown in 1775 and 1812.

POWER AND PROGRESS

Meantime, in the part of Canada now called Ontario, and which had been watered by the blood of the Jesuits in the Huron Missions, French settlements had gradually appeared and, toward the end of the eighteenth century, a number of Scotch and Loyalist colonists. At Sandwich, not far from the future city of Detroit, a number of the French had settled at the time of the Conquest and to the banks of the St. Lawrence, in the County of Glengarry, there came forty years later a number of Catholic Highlanders. In 1803 they were joined by Alexander Macdonell, the Father of the Church in Upper Canada. Like his prototype, Mgr. de Laval, and his colleague Mgr. Edmund Burke, who went to Nova Scotia after a brief stay at Sandwich, Father Macdonell feared neither pain, nor privation, nor labour, in the missionary work of the Church. Consecrated Bishop of Upper Canada in 1820 he lived for nineteen years to preside over the progress of the Church in that Province as he had already done in strenuous and unselfish fashion over its birth and early years. Writing in 1836 to Sir Francis Bond Head, Governor of the Colony, he pointed with pride to the erection during his pioneer episcopate of thirty-three churches and chapels, to the education and training-largely at his own expenseof twenty-two clergymen, and to the expenditure of £13,000 of his own private means, as well as the collection of much more from friends. abroad. The following extract is illustrative of these early conditions and was written in reply to attacks made upon him in the Assembly:

"Upon entering my pastoral duties I had the whole Province in charge, and was without any assistance for ten years. During that period I had to travel over the country from Lake Superior to the Province line of Lower Canada, carrying the sacred

vestments sometimes on my back and sometimes in Indian birch canoes; living with savages without any other shelter or comfort but their fires and their furs and the branches of the trees afforded; crossing the great lakes and rivers, and even descending the rapids of the St. Lawrence, in their dangerous and wretched craft. Nor were

the hardships which I endured among the settlers and immigrants less than those I had to encounter among the savages themselves, in their miserable shanties exposed on all sides to the weather and destitute of every comfort.''

During the 160 years covered by the arrival of Mgr. de Laval and the death of Bishop Macdonell in 1839, much progress had been made by the Church of Rome elsewhere in the country. Far away in the North-West, wandering priests had ministered from time to time to the Indians, but it was not until the consecration of Father N. B. Provencher in 1818 as a Bishop and his appearance on the banks of the Red River, that organized work commenced there. From that time on steady and successful missionary labours were maintained, amid the most severe hardships, intense cold and every form of privation. In the Maritime Provinces, or "Acadie the Fair," the Jesuits early appeared on the scene-the first to arrive being the Rev. Nicholas Aubrey, who had landed fifty years before Laval arrived at Quebec. Fathers Quentin and Du Thet, Biard and Massé were later pioneers. Then came the Recollets and the Franciscan Fathers and, in 1676, Father Petit became the first Vicar-General of Acadie. Under British rule, Father Edmund Burke, who had been labouring with enthusiasm for a number of years, was in 1818 made a Bishop and Vicar-Apostolic of Nova Scotia. During the early years of the century, owing to large accessions of Catholic Scotchmen to this population, the Church grew rapidly in numbers and influence. Thus the seed sown by the Jesuits in the soil of North America began to fructify after they had passed away and produced in the course of a century and a half a strong Church, planted in Quebec amongst a large and growing population and elsewhere placed in a position suited for great future development.