Canada, the Spellbinder

by Lilian Whiting

But the high ideals these heroes brought did not go down nor become extinguished in the storm-tossed waters.

"Say not the struggle naught availeth!"

The struggle always avails, and leaves humanity better and farther on than the effort finds it. Then, too, came a band of holy women, the Ursuline nuns, and the sacred zeal of the novitiate lent its vital power. What is there not of spiritual nobility, of sublimest self-sacrifice, of thrilling ideals, of a truer life, associated with the early history of Canada? This is all a part of her spellbinding power; it has left its significance on the air, its impress in wave and tree and flower; its exaltation in every heart.

Quebec city is now becoming an attractive winter haunt as well for those who love out-of-door sports in the snowy carnival and who find themselves so comfortably domiciled in the Château Frontenac. The esplanade of Dufferin Terrace commands delightful views across the St. Lawrence as far as the Isle d'Orleans. The Citadel, the Parliament Buildings, the Ursuline Convent, the Basilica, and the palace of the Cardinal; together with the libraries, Laval University, the drives to the old battle-grounds, and the excursion of twenty-one miles to the shrine of Saint Anne de Beaupré, provide the visitor with abundance of interest.

The Ursuline Convent covers seven acres of ground in almost the centre of the city of Quebec. It is the largest convent on the continent, and it dates back to the July of 1639, when Marie Guyart, and three other sisters of the Ursuline order, under the protection of the Archbishop of Toulouse, were led by Divine guidance to the new country of Canada and entered on their work. Marie Guyart, the foundress of the convent, was the daughter of a silk merchant of Tours, France, and her childhood is invested with legends similar to those that are associated with the name of Catherine of Sienna. She married one Joseph Martin, but at the age of twenty-three she was left a widow, and soon became a novitiate of the Ursulines, rising to be the Mother Superior of her convent. At the age of forty, through the instrumentality of the Duchesse D'Aiguillion, a niece of Cardinal Richelieu, she came to "New France," and as recently as the August of 1911 this remarkable woman was canonised by the Sacred College of Rome and named as a saint under the title of Marie de l'Incarnation. For thirty-three years she pursued an exalted life in the convent of her founding, and died at the age of seventy-two, in the May of 1672.

A much-sought shrine is that of Saint Anne de Beaupré, easy access to which is gained by the electric railway, and in the summer it is a pleasant local sail down the St. Lawrence. The legend runs that a group of Breton mariners, in the early years of the seventeenth century, found themselves almost engulfed in the river in the sudden violence of a storm, and that they called upon la bonne Saint Anne for deliverance; earnestly declaring that if she would save them they would erect to her a shrine at whatever point she should bring them to land, and that this shrine should be sanctuary forever. The good saint was merciful to their entreaties, and guided them safely to land. According to their promise they at once built a small wooden chapel, very near a spring whose waters are claimed to possess a miraculous power for healing. Since that remote time three larger churches on this site have successively replaced each other, the latest of which dates only to 1878. The primitive little chapel is still preserved, even as at Assisi the Portiuncula of San Francisco is preserved near the magnificent church of Santa Maria degli Angeli.

That marvellous ministry of San Francisco (who is more familiarly known to us as Saint Francis of Assisi), which was initiated in the thirteenth century, love and sacrifice being the supreme ideals, is recalled to mind by many of the legendary incidents relating to Saint Anne de Beaupré. The mystic pilgrimage to Assisi, the "Seraphic City," is to some extent paralleled by the latter-day pilgrimages to the shrine of Saint Anne. "Any line of truth that leads us above materialism," said Arch-deacon Wilberforce of Westminster Abbey, whose passing on to the life more abundant at the date of this writing is but the larger inflorescence of his beautiful and consecrated life—"any line of truth that forces us to think and to remember that we are enwrapped by the supernatural, is helpful and stimulating. A human life lived only in the seen and felt, with no sense of the invisible, is a fatally impoverished life; a poor, blind, wingless life." Such is the deep, perpetual conviction of mankind. "The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal." The mystic union of the soul with God is the one underlying and all-determining truth of life.

"Oh, beauty of holiness!
Of self-forgetfulness, of lowliness."

The latest church erected here as the shrine of Saint Anne was not completed until 1889, and it was then proclaimed a Basilica by Pio Nono. It is one of colossal space and splendour, a remarkable triumph of the Corinthian architecture, and between the two towers of the front a superb statue of Saint Anne rises above the façade. The interior is rich in paintings, sculpture, and mosaics, and on a column of onyx is another statue of the saint in whose name the church is built. It has also a Scala Santa, as has the vast Basilica of San Giovanni in Rome. Thousands of suppliants annually visit the shrine of Saint Anne. The church has a superb chasuble, the gift of Anne of Austria and Queen of France, the mother of Louis XIV. On either side of the entrance are huge piles of canes and crutches and other discarded appliances left as visible testimonials that the efficacy of prayer at this shrine enabled their possessors to dispense with adventitious aid.