It was not, however, with the conversion of the Indians or with the service of French secular interests among the savages that the work of the Jesuits was wholly, or even chiefly, concerned.  During the middle years of the seventeenth century, these services at the outposts of French territory may have been most significant, for the French population along the shores of the St. Lawrence remained small, the settlements were closely huddled together, and a few priests could serve their spiritual needs.  The popular impression of Jesuit enterprises in the New World is connected almost wholly with work among the Indians.  This pioneer phase of the Jesuit’s work was picturesque, and historians have had a great deal to say about it.  It was likewise of this service in the depths of the interior that the missionary himself wrote most frequently.  But as the colony grew and broadened its bounds until its settlements stretched all the way from the Saguenay to Montreal and beyond, a far larger number of cures was needed.  Before the old regime came to a close there were far more Frenchmen than Indians within the French sphere of influence in America, and they required by far the greater share of Jesuit ministration, and, long before the old dominion ended, the Indian missions had to take a subordinate place in the general program of Jesuit undertakings.  The outposts in the Indian country were the chief scene of Jesuit labors from 1615 to about 1700, when the emphasis shifted to the St. Lawrence valley.  Some of the mission fields held their own to the end, but in general they failed to make much headway during the last half-century of French rule.  The Church in the settled portions of the colony, however, kept on with its steady progress in achievement and power.

New France was the child of missionary fervor.  Even from the outset, in the scattered settlements along the St. Lawrence, the interests of religion were placed on a strictly missionary basis.  There were so-called parishes in the colony almost from its beginning, but not until 1722 was the entire colony set off into recognized ecclesiastical parishes, each with a fixed cure in charge.  Through all the preceding years each village or cote had been served by a missionary, by a movable cure, or by a priest sent out from the Seminary at Quebec.  No priest was tied to any parish but was absolutely at the immediate beck and call of the bishop.  Some reason for this unsettled arrangement might be found in the conditions under which the colony developed in its early years; with its sparse population ranging far and wide, with its lack of churches and of presbyteres in which the priest might reside.  But the real explanation of its long continuance lies in the fact that, if regular cures were appointed, the seigneurs would lay claim to various rights of nomination or patronage, whereas the bishop could control absolutely the selection of missionary priests and could thus more easily carry through his policy of ecclesiastical centralization.