As for the Church revenues, these came from several sources.  The royal treasury contributed large sums, but, as it was not full to overflowing, the King preferred to give his benefactions in generous grants of land.  Yet the royal subsidies amounted to many thousand livres each year.  The diocese of Quebec was endowed with the revenues of three French abbeys.  Wealthy laymen in France followed the royal example and sent contributions from time to time, frequently of large amount.  While the Company of One Hundred Associates controlled the trade of the colony, it made from its treasury some provisions for the support of the missionaries.  After 1663, a substantial source of ecclesiastical income was the tithe, an ecclesiastical tax levied annually upon all produce of the land, and fixed in 1663 at one-thirteenth.  Four years later it was reduced to one-twenty-sixth, and Bishop Laval’s strenuous efforts to have the old rate restored were never successful.

In education, yet another field of colonial life, the Church rendered some service.  Here the civil authorities did nothing at all, and had it not been for the Church the whole colony would have grown up in absolute illiteracy.  A school for boys was established at Quebec in Champlain’s day, and during the next hundred and fifty years it was followed by about thirty others.  More than a dozen elementary schools for girls were also established under ecclesiastical auspices.  Yet the amount of secular education imparted by all these seminaries was astoundingly small, and they did but little to leaven the general illiteracy of the population.  Only the children of the towns attended the schools, and the program of study was of the most elementary character.  Religious instruction was given the first place and received so much attention that there was little time in school hours for anything else.  The girls fared better than the boys on the whole, for the nuns taught them to sew and to knit as well as to read and to write.

So far as secular education was concerned, therefore, the English conquest found the colony in almost utter stagnation.  Not one in five hundred among the habitants, it was said, could read or write.  Outside the immediate circle of clergy, officials, and notaries, ignorance of even the rudiments of education was almost universal.  There were no newspapers in the colony and very few books save those used in the services of worship.  Greysolon Du Lhut, the king of the voyageurs, for example, was a man of means and education, but his entire library, as disclosed by his will, consisted of a world atlas and a set of Josephus.  The priests did not encourage the reading of secular books, and La Hontan recounts the troubles which he had in keeping one militant cure from tearing his precious volumes to pieces.  New France was at that period not a land where freedom dwelt with knowledge.