before the manger. She bore a child, which was the image of l'Enfant Jésus, and became a nun of extraordinary piety, on whom the Virgin lavished favors. Marguerite Bourgeois, founder of the Congregation of Our Lady at Montreal, is now undergoing the process of canonization; numerous miracles were worked by her before and after her death. Probably, in modern opinion, the most splendid miracle of all was the courage displayed by these well-born women in crossing the ocean and spending their lives amid the rigors of a semiarctic climate, Indian alarms, sieges, pestilence, and all the privations and hardships of a new colony for the glory of God.
When the Island of Montreal was wanted by the Sulpicians, a lay agent, apparently under Jesuit influence, had a vision in which the owner was guaranteed heaven without purgatory. The property, which has made the Sulpicians one of the richest orders in America, was immediately transferred. This, I believe, is the only instance of note in which the supernatural was invoked for a doubtful purpose. All the other visions and miracles can be accounted for without the hypothesis of conscious deceit. It was essentially a time when, as Dean Milman wrote of another age, "the Christian lived in a supernatural world; the notion of the divine power—the perpetual interference of the Deity, the agency of the countless invisible beings which hovered over mankind—was so strongly impressed upon the belief that every extraordinary and almost every ordinary incident became a miracle; . . . a mythic period was thus gradually formed in which reality melted into fable, and invention unconsciously trespassed on the province of history." This is kinder than Gibbon's verdict: "If the eyes of the spectators have sometimes been deceived by fraud, the understanding of the readers has much more frequently been insulted by fiction."
The seigniorial tenure, a mitigated feudalism based upon the Custom of Paris (1510), was abolished by the Canadian Parliament in 1854. It was then, a scoffing Parisian said, that the habitant of French Canada discovered that Louis XVI was dead. When he began to migrate to New England he learned other things that are slowly undermining his cradle beliefs, and we may say without a scoff that it will not be long till Good Saint Anne is dead.
