When alone, the stranger said: “Do you not know me?”
“How can I know you, sir,” I answered. “I do not even remember ever having seen you.”
“You have not only seen me, but you have heard the confession of my sins, many times; and you have spent many hours in the same room with me,” replied the old gentleman.
“Please tell me where and when I have seen you, and also be kind enough to give your name: for all those things have escaped from my memory.”
“Do you remember the murderer and thief, Chambers, who was condemned to death in Quebec, in 1837, with eight of his accomplices?” asked the stranger.
“Yes, sir; I remember well Chambers, and the unfortunate men he was leading in the ways of iniquity,” I replied.
“Well, dear Father Chiniquy, I am one of the criminals who filled Canada with terror, for several years, and who were caught and rightly condemned to death. When condemned, we selected you for our father confessor, with the hope that through your influence we might escape the gallows; and we were not disappointed. You obtained our pardon; the sentence of death was commuted into a life of exile to Botany Bay. My name in Canada was A——, but here they call me B——. God has blessed me since in many ways; but it is to you I owe my life, and all the privileges of my present existence. After God, you are my saviour. I come to thank and bless you for what you have done for me.”
In saying that, he threw himself into my arms, pressed me to his heart, and bathed my face and my hands with tears of joy and gratitude.
But his joy did not exceed mine, and my surprise was equal to my joy to find him apparently in such good circumstances. After I had knelt with him to thank and bless God for what I had heard, I asked him to relate to me the details of his strange and marvellous story. Here is a short resume of his answer:
“After you had given us your last benediction, when on board the ship which was to take us from Quebec to Botany Bay, the first thing I did was to open the New Testament you had given me and the other culprits, with the advice to read it with a praying heart. It was the first time in my life I had that book in my hand. You were the only priest in Canada who would put such a book in the hands of common people. But I must confess that its first reading did not do me much good, for I read it more to amuse myself and satisfy my curiosity, than through any good and Christian motive. The only good I received from that first reading, was that I clearly understood, for the first time, why the priests of Rome fear and hate that book, and why they take it out of the hands of their parishioners when they hear that they have it. It was in vain that I looked for mass, indulgence, chaplets, purgatory, auricular confession, Lent, holy waters, the worship of Mary, or prayers in an unknown tongue. I concluded from my first reading of the Gospel that our priests were very wise to prevent us from reading a book which was really demolishing our Roman Catholic Church, and felt surprised that you had put in our hands a book which seemed to me so opposed to the belief and practice of our religion as you taught it to us when in gaol, and my confidence in your good judgment was much shaken. To tell you the truth, the first reading of the Gospel went far to demolish my Roman Catholic faith, and to make a wreck of the religion taught me by my parents, and at the college, and even by you. For a few weeks, I became more of a skeptic than anything else. The only good that first reading of the Holy Book did me was to give me more serious thoughts and prevent me from uniting myself to Chambers and his conspirators in their foolish plot for taking possession of the ship and escaping to some unknown and distant shore. He had been shrewd enough to conceal a very small, but exceedingly sharp saw, between his toes before coming to the ship, with which he had already cut the chains of eighteen of the prisoners, when he was betrayed and hanged on his arrival at Liverpool.