Weak and timid soldier that I was once; frightened by the ruins spread everywhere on the battle-field, I looked around to find a shelter against the impending danger; I thought that the monastery of the oblates of Mary Immaculate was one of those strong towers, built by my God, where the arrows of the enemy could not reach me, and I threw myself into it.
But, hardly beginning to hope that I was out of danger, behind those dark and high walls, when I saw them shaking like a drunken man; and the voice of God passed like a hurricane over me.
Suddenly, the high towers and walls around me fell to the ground, and were turned into dust. Not one stone remained on another.
And I heard a voice saying to me: “Soldier! come out and get in the light of the sun; trust no more in the walls built by the hand of man; they are nothing but dust. Come and fight in the open day, under the eyes of God, protected only by the gospel banners of Christ! Come out from behind those walls, they are a diabolical deception, a snare, a fraud!”
I listened to the voice, and I bade adieu to the inmates of the monastery of the oblates of Mary Immaculate.
When, on the first of October, 1847, I pressed them on my heart for the last time, I felt the burning tears of many of them falling on my cheeks, and my tears moistened their faces: for they loved me, and I loved them. I had met there several noble hearts and precious souls, worthy of a better fate. Oh! if I could have, at the price of my life, given them the light and liberty which my merciful God had given me! But they were in the dark; and there was no power in me to change their darkness into light.
The hand of God brought me back to my dear Canada, that I might again offer it the sweat and labors, the love and life of the least of its sons.
Chapter XLIII.
I ACCEPT THE HOSPITALITY OF THE REV. MR. BRASSARD, OF LONGUEUIL—I GIVE MY REASONS FOR LEAVING THE OBLATES TO BISHOP BOURGET—HE PRESENTS ME WITH A MEDALLION, PORTRAIT OF THE POPE AND A SPLENDID CRUCIFIX BLESSED BY HIS HOLINESS FOR ME, AND ACCEPTS MY SERVICES IN THE CAUSE OF TEMPERANCE IN THE DIOCESE OF MONTREAL.
The eleven months spent in the monastery of the oblates of Mary Immaculate, were among the greatest favors God has granted me. What I had read of the monastic orders, and what my honest, though deluded imagination had painted of the holiness, purity and happiness of the monastic life, could not be blotted out of my mind, except by a kind of miraculous interposition. No testimony whatever could have convinced me that the monastic institutions were not one of the most blessed of the gospel. Their existence, in the bosom of the Church of Rome, was, for me, an infallible token of her divine institution, and one of the strongest proofs that those heretics were entirely separated from Christ. Without religious orders, the Protestant denominations were to me, as dead and decayed branches cut from the true vine, which are doomed to perish.