Till his faith burns intenser Into light evermore. 6. Clothe him with pinions To scale the dominions Of vision unknown; Still higher and nigher, Till he faints with desire At the foot of the throne. FROM AN UNPUBLISHED POEM BY JUDGE ARRINGTON. 108. CHARACTER OF CHAMPLAIN. HAT we esteem most of all other features in the life of WHAT our Founder, is that chief virtue of all eminent menhis indomitable fortitude; and next to that we revere the amazing versatility and resources of the man. Originally a naval officer, he had voyaged to the West Indies and to Mexico, and had written a memoir, lately discovered at Dieppe, and edited both in France and England, advocating among other things the artificial connection of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. From the quarter-deck we trace him to the counting rooms of the merchants of Rouen and Saint Malo, who first intrusted him, in 1603, with the command of a commercial enterprise of which Canada was the field. From the service of the merchants of Rouen, Dieppe, and Saint Malo, we trace him to the service of his sovereign-Henry IV. 2. For several successive years we find his flag glancing at all points along the rock-bound coast on which we are now assembled, from Port Royal to Massachusetts Bay. Whenever we do not find it here, we may be certain it has advanced into the interior, that it is unfurled at Quebec, at Montreal, or towards the sources of the Hudson and the Mohawk. We will find that this versatile sailor has become in time a founder of cities, a negotiator of treaties with barbarous tribes, an author, a discoverer. As a discoverer, he was the first European to ascend the Richelieu, which he named after the patron of his latter years the all-powerful Cardinal. He was the first to traverse that beautiful lake, now altogether your own, which makes his name so familiar to Americans; he was the first to ascend our great central river, the Ottowa, as far north as Lake Nippising, and he was the first to discover what he very justly calls "the fresh-water sea" of Lake Ontario. 3. His place as an American discoverer is, therefore, among the first; while his claims as a colonizer rest on the firm foundations of Montreal and Quebec, and his project-extraordinary for the age-of uniting the Atlantic with the Pacific by an artificial channel of communication. As a legislator, we have not yet recovered, if we ever shall recover, the ordinances he is known to have promulgated; but as an author we have his narrative of transactions in New France, his voyage to Mexico, his treatise on navigation, and some other papers. As a diplomatist, we have the Franco-Indian alliances, which he founded, and which lasted a hundred and fifty years on this continent, and which exercised so powerful an influence, not only on American, but on European affairs. To him also it was mainly owing that Canada, Acadia, and Cape Breton were reclaimed by, and restored to France under the treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye, in 1632. 4. As to the moral qualities, our Founder was brave almost to rashness. He would cast himself with a single European follower in the midst of savage enemies, and more than once his life was endangered by the excess of his confidence and his courage. He was eminently social in his habits-as his order of le bon temps-in which every man of his associates was for one day host to all his comrades, and commanded in turn in those agreeable encounters of which we have just had a slight skirmish here. He was sanguine as became an adventurer, and self-denying as became a hero. He served under De Monts, who for a time succeeded to his honors and office, as cheerfully as he had ever acted for himself, and in the end he made a friend of his rival. He encountered, as Columbus and many others had done, mutiny and impatience in his own followers, but he triumphed over the bad passions of men as completely as he triumphed over the ocean and the wilderness. 5. He touched the extremes of human experience among liverse characters and nations. At one time he sketched plans of civilized aggrandizement for Henry IV. and Richelieu; at another, he planned schemes of wild warfare with Huron chiefs and Algonquin braves. He united, in a most rare degree, the faculties of action and reflection, and like all highly reflective minds, his thoughts, long cherished in secret, ran often into the mould of maxims, and some of them would form the fittest possible inscriptions to be engraven upon his monu ment. 6. When the merchants of Quebec grumbled at the cost of fortifying that place, he said: "It is best not to obey the passions of men; they are but for a season; it is our duty to regard the future." With all his love of good-fellowship and society, he was, what seems to some inconsistent with it, sincerely and enthusiastically religious; among his maxims are these two-that "The salvation of one soul is of more value than the conquest of an empire;" and, that "Kings ought not to think of extending their authority over idolatrous nations, except for the purpose of subjecting them to Jesus Christ." THOMAS D'ARCY MCGEE 109. HEROISM OF THE HOSPITAL AND THE PRISON. HERE is a sort of sanctity about the very idea of a Chris THERE tian hospital, second only to that we associate with a church; and one can well understand that both the proud Templars, and the gallant Knights of Malta, both bound to works of corporal mercy, owed much of their early prestige to their origin upon the very spot where our Lord was believed to have appeared to his Apostles, and where Ananias and Sapphira gave up the ghost, according to the doom denounced on them by the first Apostle. One of the chief glories of every civilized country is in its hospitals. Bishops consecrate them; kings endow them; artists adorn them; science seeks them out; travellers celebrate their praises; Parliaments and Congresses have issued commissions to improve aud enlarge their operations. 2. Unquestionably the greatest organizer of this class of institutions the world has ever seen came out of Gascony, in the first years of the seventeenth century, from a rank of life answering to that of our ordinary habitant—you all know, I am sure, to whom I allude,-St. Vincent de Paul, the founder of the Lazarists, and of the Sisters of Charity. There have been many orders of hospitallers in the Catholic Church in former ages, but none near our own time, at all to compare in efficiency and renown with the daughters of Vincent de Paul. 3. Their extraordinary founder was not what the world would call a man of genius-he was not more than ordinarily learned, as a priest; he was not nobly born; he was at all times poor in this world's wealth. Yet, in the sixty years of his priestly office (1600 to 1660), he became the founder of the General Hospital at Paris; the Foundling Asylum in the same city; the Hospital of St. Reine, the Hospital for Galley Slaves at Marseilles, with the numerous progeny of these institutions all over Christendom, brought into existence during the great organizer's lifetime. 4. In sending the first Sisters of Charity forth on their trying task, to mingle with the world, in all its grossness and all its weaknesses, yet be not of it, the high-hearted Gascon said:"Your Monasteries are the houses of the sick; your cell is a hired room; your cloister the streets of the city or the wards of the hospital. Let obedience be your solitude, and a strict and holy modesty your only veil." 5. I shall not presume to sketch the sixty years passed by St. Vincent in the service of all the heroic charities; we may measure his achievements by the fact that at this day-more than two centuries after his death-more money is paid in alms, in the name of this humbly-born Gascon, more food and clothing are given, more criminals are reformed, more sick are' nursed, more foundlings are adopted, more deserted dead are decently buried, than is done by the governmental expenditure of the greatest prince or government in Christendom. 6. Of the mere monetary value of those gratuitous and un daunted nurses of the sick-the Sisters of his Order-I leave those to form an estimate who have seen them in the military hospitals, after a battle or a siege, who have seen them face to face with pestilence in its most violent forms, or who have had the assistance of their gentle and ever-ready hands in the most trying surgical operations. An order of women, dedicated from girlhood to God, who should consider the daily labor of their lives to be to dress wounds, to serve the fallen and the unfortunate, to harbor the harborless, to heal the bruised spirit; such an Order was a conception possible only for a Christian. 7. Not that I would deny the possession of a spirit of admirable benevolence to those who are not Christians. Among all the Mussulman nations the natural virtue of charity has had many beautiful illustrations, and I remember reading some years ago an account of a magnificent Parsee merchant who built in an interior city of India a hospital open to all strangers, whether Christians, or Moslems, or believers in Bramah or in Buddah-which himself he could never dare to enter. The only joy, but not, let us hope, the only recompense of this good Parsee, was to watch from a distant station the numbers who departed healed, and the numbers who presented themselves to be cured at the gates of the great establishment he had founded-where the founder's name was never spoken, and across whose threshold his footsteps could never pass! That was the disinterestedness inseparable from heroism; that was a degree of spiritual self-denial seldom attained even among Christians. |