and officers held a council to consider if they might substitute the meal of Indian corn for wheat flour for the Mass. It was decided that they could not. The vestments and ornaments having all been destroyed, some dressed skin-robes and rude altar-trappings were provided. On Sundays and holy days the introductory prayers were offered; but the consecration was omitted. This was called the “dry Mass.” Yet simple as was the rite of baptism, we frequently read in the frank relations of the Jesuits that the savages refused to have it performed on themselves and their children, regarding it as an evil charm. Captain Bossu, of the French Marines, in his Travels through Louisiana (1759), says: —
“I saw a Choctaw Indian recently baptized, and, because he
afterwards had no luck in hunting, supposed himself bewitched,
and made complaint to Father Lefèvre, who had converted and
initiated him. With angry excitement, he demanded release from
the enchantment by the annulling of the ceremony. The priest
made some show of complying with the demand. The Indian soon
after killed a deer, which made him very happy.”
There were embarrassments also occasionally met by the
priests when they attempted to explain their mysteries to
an acute-minded savage. We have a graphic account of an
interview of Cortes and his priest with Montezuma, in the
effort to attempt his conversion. The barbarian emperor
accepted Cortes's account of the creation, as conformed to
his people's traditions; but the abstruse doctrines and
mysteries of the Christian faith announced to him baffled
him. Especially was his mind exercised when Cortes, after
a sharp reproach upon him for human sacrifices and the
cannibal eating of human flesh, undertook to explain to
him the doctrine of transubstantiation in the holy wafer at
the Mass. That, said the emperor, was eating God, — a
far more monstrous act than the eating of a human being.
A Jesuit Father, writing of a famous chief, Therouet, who died at Montreal, says he was a true Christian, and as
