Canada and the Canadians | Page 5

never existed. The highest and the lowest alike loved him.
I saw him bending under the weight of years, passed in his ministry and in the defence of his adopted country, just before he left Canada, to lay his bones in his natal soil, preside over the ceremony of placing the first stone of the Catholic seminary, for which he had given the ground and funds to the utmost of his ability.
He was a large, venerable-looking man, unwieldy from the infirmities of age and a life of toil and trouble; and the affecting and touching portion of the scene before us was to see him supported on his right and left by the arms of a Presbyterian colonel and a colonel of the Church of England.
This is true Christianity, true charity--peace be to his soul!--
His successor was a Canadian, equally free from pretension and bigotry; and he was succeeded by an Irishman, whose mission is to heal the wounds of party and strife. He is living and in office; I cannot, therefore, speak of him; but, differing as an Englishman so widely as I do in religious tenets from his, I can freely assert that, if clergymen of every denomination pursued the same course of brotherly love that he does, we should hear no more of the fierce and undying contention about subjects which should be covered with the veil of benevolence and humility.
You cannot force a man to think as you do, to draw him into what you conceive to be the true path; mildness and conciliation are much more likely to effect your object than the Emperor of China's yellow stick. The days of the Inquisition, of Judge Jefferies, and of Claverhouse, are happily gone by; and the artillery of man's wrath now vents its harmless thunders much in the same way as the thunders of the Vatican, or the recent fulmination of the Archbishop of Paris against the author of the Wandering Jew; that is to say, with a great deal of noise, but without much damnifying any one, as the public soon formed a true judgment of M. Sue and of the tendency of his works.
On the other hand, how horrible it is, and what a fearful view of frail human nature is opened for a searching mind to observe that a man, who professes to have abandoned the pleasures of existence, to have broken through the very first law of nature, to have separated himself from his kind, and to have assumed perfection and infallibility, the attributes of his Creator, devoting the altar at which he serves to the wicked purposes of arraying man against man, and of embruing the hands held up before him at prayer in the blood of his fellow-mortals!
But such is the inevitable tendency of the system of "I am better than thou," whether it be practised by a Catholic priest of the hedge-school, by a fanatic bawler about new light, or by a fierce and uncompromising churchman. Faith, hope, and charity, are alike misinterpreted and misunderstood. Faith with these consists in blind or hypocritical devotion to their peculiar opinions and dogmas; hope is limited to the narrowest circle of ideas; and charity, Divine charity, exists not; for even the very relics, the mouldering bones of the defunct, are not allowed to rest side by side; and as to those differing in the slightest degree from them, to them charity extends not, however pious, however sincere, or however excellent they may be.
The people of England are very little aware how widely Roman Catholicism extends in the United States and in Canada. From accurate returns, it has been ascertained that in the United States there were last year 1,500,000, with 21 bishops, 675 churches, 592 mission stations, and 572 priests otherwise employed in teaching and travelling; 22 colleges or ecclesiastical establishments, 23 literary institutions, 53 female schools or convents for instruction, 84 charitable hospitals and institutions, and 220 young students, preparing for the ministry; whilst we learn, from the Annals of the Propaganda, that 1,130,000 francs were appropriated, in May 1845, to the missions of America, or about ￡47,000 annually, of which the share for the United States, including Texas, was 771,164 francs, or about ￡32,000 in round numbers.
Then again, the greater portion of the Indian tribes in the north-west and west, excepting near the Rocky Mountains or beyond them, are Roman Catholics; and their numbers are very great, and all in deep hatred, dislike, and enmity, to the Big Knives.
More than half a million of the Lower Canadians are also of the same persuasion, and their church in Upper Canada is large and increasing by every shipload from Ireland. Even in Oregon, a Catholic bishop has just been appointed.
It is more than probable, that in and around the United States three millions