Parkman in his "Jesuits," pages 318-320, sums up the success of their missions thus:
"When we look for the results of those missions we soon become aware that the influence of the French and the Jesuits extended far beyond the circle of converts. It eventually modified and softened the manners of many unconverted tribes.
"In the wars of the next century we do not find those examples of diabolical atrocity with which the earlier annals are crowded. The savage burned his enemies alive, it is true, but he rarely ate them; neither did he torment them with the same deliberation and persistency. He was a savage still, but not so often a devil. * * * In this softening of manner, such as it was, and in the obedient Catholicity of a few hundred tamed savages gathered at stationary missions in Canada, we find after a century had elapsed all the results of the heroic toil of the Jesuits. The missions had failed because the Indians had ceased to exist. Of the great tribes on whom rested the hopes of the early Canadian fathers, nearly all were virtually extinct. The missionaries built laboriously and well, but they were doomed to build on a falling foundation. The Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed them, but because their own ferocity and untractable indolence made it impossible that they should exist in its presence. Either the plastic energies of a higher race, or the servile pliancy of a lower one, would each in its way have preserved them; as it was, their extinction was a foregone conclusion. As for the religion which the Jesuits taught them, however Protestants may carp at it, it was the only form of Christianity likely to take root in their crude and barbarous nature."
The following appreciation of the early Jesuits, taken from "The Dominion of Canada—The Brave Days of Old," by a Protestant writer, Professor Grant, of Kingston, may be of interest as coming from a later day pen:
"Eyes and heart alternately glow and fill as we read the endless 'Relations' of their faith and failures, their heaped-up measure of miseries, their boundless wisdom, their heroic martyrdoms. We forget our traditional antipathy to the name of Jesuit. The satire of Pascal, the memories of the Inquisition and the political history of the order, is all forgotten. We dislike to have our sympathies checked by reminders, that in Canada as elsewhere, they were the consistent, formidable foes of liberty; that their love of power not only embroiled them continually with the civil authorities, but made them jealous of the Recollects and Sulpicians, unwilling that any save their own order—or, as we say, sect—should share in the dangers and glory of converting the infidels of New France. How can we, sitting at home in ease, we who have entered into their labours, criticize men before whose spiritual white heat every mountain melted away; who carried the cross in advance of the most adventurous 'coureurs de bois,' or guides, who taught agriculture to the Indian on the Georgian Bay before a dozen farms had been cleared on the St. Lawrence—drove or carried cattle through unbroken forest around the countless rapids and cataracts of the Ottawa and French rivers that they might wean the Hurons from nomadic habits and make of them a nation; who shrank from no hardship and no indignity if by any means they might save some of the miserable savages who heaped indignities upon themselves; who instituted hospitals and convents wherever they went, always (in the spirit of their masters) caring most for the weak, the decrepit, the aged; and submitted themselves, without thinking of escape, to inutterable tortures rather than lose an opportunity of administering the last sacraments to those who had fallen under the hatchets of the Iroquois! Few Protestants have any idea of the extraordinary missionary activity of the Church of Rome in the seventeenth century. Few Englishmen know to what extent French society was inspired then by religious fervour. Few Canadians have any knowledge of the spiritual inheritance of which they are the heirs. It would be well for all of us to read Parkman's 'Jesuits in North America,' if we cannot get hold of the original 'Relations;' for the story, looked at even from a Protestant and republican standpoint, is one to do us all good, revealing as it does the spiritual bonds that link into oneness of faith Protestant and Roman Catholic, and teaching that beneath the long black robe of the dreaded Jesuit is to be found, not so much that disingenuousness and those schemes of worldly ambition usually associated with the name, but a passionate devotion to the Saviour, love for the souls of men and the fixed steadfastness of the martyr's spirit that remains unshaken when heart and flesh faint and fail.
"The prophetic words of the father superior of the Jesuits in 1647 stir the heart of the Christian—by whatsoever name known among men—like the blasts of a trumpet: 'We shall die; we shall be captured, burned, butchered. Be it so. Those who die in their beds do not always die the best death. I see none of our Company cast down.' And truly, in spite of failures, these men did a great work. Seeds of divine truth they sowed broadcast over the wilderness. Gradually they tempered the ferocity of the Indian character, and mitigated the horrors of Indian war. They induced the remnants of many tribes to settle under the shadow of their missions protected by forts. Portions even of the terrible Iroquois settled in Canada and the church has, on the whole, no children more obedient, and Queen Victoria certainly no subjects more loyal."—(Scribner's Magazine, quoted in Canadian Antiquarian and Numismatic Journal, 1879.)
FOOTNOTES:
[76] He discovered the salt springs at Onondaga (Syracuse).
[77] Paul le Jeune in 1632 wrote the first letter of the Relations of the Jesuits.