The canonized and beatified in Spanish America thus represent all states and ages: the episcopate, the priesthood, the religious state, and secular life.
Spanish America, in the wild rush of the restless and adventurous to its rich and luxuriant soil, resembled California and Australia as we have seen them in our days, could we imagine the tide of emigration Catholic, with some of the knightly graces of chivalry still powerful, and devoted clergy and religious striving manfully to recall the wild horde from their temporary forgetfulness of religion, morality, and civilization.
When we turn from this picture to that of Canada, we find a contrast as striking as the difference of the climes. In Canada labor, hardship, the deepest religious feeling prevailed from the outset and left their impress on the colony. The world has rarely witnessed a community so completely guided by religion and morality as the first Canadian settlers, and so deeply imbued with them as to elevate to its own standard the repeated emigrations of more than half a century. The austere virtue of Canada was gay and cheerful; it had none of the ferocious Puritanism of New England, which enforced religious tyranny, and pursued with unrelenting hate alike dissenting whites and unbelieving natives. While New England, narrow and restrictive in character and territory, hugged the bleak coast of the Atlantic, Canada, under the broader, higher impulse of Catholicity, won the friendship of countless native tribes and pushed her conquest thousands of miles into the heart of the continent. “Peaceful, benign, beneficent were the weapons of this conquest. France aimed to subdue not by the sword but by the cross; not to overwhelm and crush the nations she invaded, but to convert, to civilize, and to embrace them among her children,” is the testimony of one to whom Catholic piety seems only a wild dream.
Time has shown on what a solid foundation they built who laid the corner-stones of the Canadian colony. At a critical moment, when the court of France, yielding to the spirit of licentiousness and infidelity which had leperized the higher classes, was forging a rod of iron wherewith in the hands of the neglected and demoralized masses to chastise the monarchy and the aristocracy, God in his providence saved Canada by what seemed a death-blow, by allowing it to pass under the sway of England, the bitter enemy of Catholicity and France. But though the French spirit in the colony died out, her teeming population is intensely Catholic, well trained, well guided, holding their own against Protestant and infidel influence.
With such results we may look to the founders of the Canadian commonwealth for examples of high and exemplary virtue. The history of the Canadian Church has not been written even in French, and does not exist in English; it has seemed scarcely necessary to write separately the history of a church when the history of the colony is so imbued with the religious element that, deprived of it, her annals would be almost a blank.
In every history of Canada we trace the life of the church; we see governors whose lives were models of Christian piety, of strict administration, of skill and courage; priests and missionaries whose austerity, zeal, and piety shrank from no hardship, no peril, no torture; religious devoting their lives to education and works of mercy; colonists, the whole tenor of whose career recalls us to the days of the primitive church, influenced by the highest motives of faith.
Among all the founders of Canada the eye rests especially on her martyred missionaries; on Mother Mary of the Incarnation, foundress of the Ursuline Convent, Quebec; on Margaret Bourgeoys; on Bishop Laval; on Catharine Tehgahkwita, the Mohawk maiden, who rose to such sanctity. To them devotion has been constant though private, fervent, and not unrewarded.
The time has come when the Head of the church has been solicited to sanction and confirm the devotion so long entertained for one of these heroic souls—Mary Guyard Martin, known in religion as Mother Mary of the Incarnation.
She was born at Tours, in one of the loveliest provinces of France—one that gave that kingdom some of its master-minds and American colonization some of its most energetic and manly pioneers. Her father, Florence Guyard, was a wealthy silk manufacturer, and her mother belonged to the noble house of Babou de la Bourdaisiere, one of her ancestors having been deputed by Louis XI. to escort St. Francis of Paula to his states. The hereditary piety of the family was marked by a special devotion to this servant of God.
Mary was born on the 18th day of October, in the year 1599, and showed from her cradle marks of God’s predilection. Her childish soul had no greater passion than a lively charity and most tender compassion for the poor and the sick, viewing in them the beloved of Jesus and Mary, whose names were the first she learned from a pious mother’s lips. On one of her little errands of mercy she was caught by the shaft of a cart and thrown so violently to the ground that bystanders rushed to raise the child, whom they supposed terribly injured, only to find that she had escaped unharmed, protected, as she always believed, by the influence of the prayers of the poor and afflicted.