showed His grace to the father, who is now in perfect health."

[ Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 165. Various other cases of the
kind are mentioned in the Relations. ]

That equivocal morality, lashed by the withering satire of Pascal,--a
morality built on the doctrine that all means are permissible for saving
souls from perdition, and that sin itself is no sin when its object is
the "greater glory of God,"--found far less scope in the rude wilderness
of the Hurons than among the interests, ambitions, and passions of
civilized life. Nor were these men, chosen from the purest of their
Order, personally well fitted to illustrate the capabilities of this
elastic system. Yet now and then, by the light of their own writings,
we may observe that the teachings of the school of Loyola had not been
wholly without effect in the formation of their ethics.

But when we see them, in the gloomy February of 1637, and the gloomier
months that followed, toiling on foot from one infected town to another,
wading through the sodden snow, under the bare and dripping forests,
drenched with incessant rains, till they descried at length through the
storm the clustered dwellings of some barbarous hamlet,--when we see them
entering, one after another, these wretched abodes of misery and darkness,
and all for one sole end, the baptism of the sick and dying, we may smile
at the futility of the object, but we must needs admire the self-
sacrificing zeal with which it was pursued.




CHAPTER IX.