My people and I, as are all Roman Catholics, were much given to the worship of images and statues. There were fourteen beautiful pictures hung on the walls of our chapel called: “The Way of the Cross,” on which the circumstances of the passion of Jesus Christ were represented, each surmounted with a cross. One of our favorite devotional exercises, was to kneel, three or four times a week, before them, prostrate ourselves and say, with a loud voice: “Oh! holy cross we adore thee.”
We used to address our most fervent prayers to them, as if they could hear us, asking them to change our hearts and purify our souls! Our blind devotions were so sincere that we used to bow our heads to the ground before them. I may say the same of a beautiful statue, or rather idol, of the Virgin Mary, represented as a child learning to read at the feet of her mother, St. Anne.
The group was a masterpiece of art, sent to me by some rich friends from Montreal, not long after I had left that city to form the colony of St. Anne, in 1852. We had frequently addressed our most fervent prayers to those statues, but after the blessed pentecost on which we had broken the yoke of the Pope, I never entered my church without blushing at the sight of those idols on the altar.
I would have given much to have the pictures, crosses and images removed, but dare not lay hands suddenly on them. I was afraid, lest I should do harm to some of my people who, it seemed to me, were yet too weak in their religious views to bear it. I was just then reading how Knox and Calvin had made bonfires of all those relics of old Paganism, and I wished I could do the same; but I felt like Jacob, who could not follow the rapid march of his brother, Esau, towards the land of Seir. “The children were tender and the flocks and herds were young. If men had overdriven them one day, all the flocks would have died.”—Gen. 33:13.
Our merciful God saw the perplexity in which I was, and taught me how to get rid of those idols without harming the weak.
One Sabbath, on which I preached on the 2nd Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image,” etc., I remained in the chapel to pray after the people had left. I looked up to the group of statues on the altar, and said to them: “My good ladies, you must come down from that high position. God Almighty alone is worshipped here now; if you could walk out of this place, I would politely invite you to do it. But you are nothing but mute, deaf, blind and motionless idols. You have eyes, but you cannot see; ears, but you cannot hear; feet, but you cannot walk. What will I do with you now? Your reign has come to an end.”
It suddenly came to my mind that when I had put these statues on their high pedestal, I had tied them with a very slender, but strong silk cord, to prevent them from falling. I said to myself: “If I were to cut that string, the idols would surely fall, the first day the people would shake the floor when entering or going out.” Their fall and destruction would then scandalize no one. I took my knife and scaled the altar, cut the string, and said: “Now, my good ladies, take care of yourself, especially when the chapel is shaken by the wind, or the coming in of the people.”
I never witnessed a more hearty laugh than, at the beginning of the religious services, on the next Sabbath. The chapel, being shaken by the action of the whole people who fell on their knees to pray, the two idols, deprived of their silk support, after a couple of jerks which, in former days, we might have taken for a friendly greeting, fell down with a loud crash, and broke into fragments. Old and young, strong and weak, and even babes in the faith, after laughing to their heart’s content, at the sad end of their idols, said to each other: “How foolish and blind were we, to put our trust in and pray to these idols, that they might protect us when they cannot take care of themselves!”
The last vestige of idol worship among our dear converts, disappeared for ever with the dust and broken fragments of these poor helpless statues. The very next day, the people themselves took away all the images before which they had so often abjectly prostrated themselves, and destroyed them.
From the beginning of this movement, it had been my plan to let the people draw their own conclusions as much as possible from their own study of the Holy Scriptures. I used to direct their steps, in such a way that they might understand that I was myself led with them by the mighty and merciful arm of God, in our new ways.