in the morning,” a cure once said to me.  My comment was that most of us are only beginning the serious duties of the day at that hour.  “But I am tired by that time,” he said, rather sadly, “for already, so early in the day, I have heard much of human sin.”  The people come early in the morning to confess and by nine o’clock the cure was weary of the tale of man’s frailty.  Thursday is his day of recreation.  Only on that day usually does he leave his parish and then he always arranges that a neighbouring priest shall be within call.  This oversight is not spasmodic; it is persistent, alert, universal, and hardly varies with the individual cure.  In human society there is no institution more perfectly organized than the Roman Catholic Church and in Quebec her traditions have a vitality and vigour lost perhaps in communities more initiated.  Of course not every one accepts or heeds the cure’s ministry.  Many a mauvais sujet is careless or even defiant but, when his last moments come, at his bedside stands the priest to show to the repentant sinner the path of blessedness, and, when he is gone, his wayward course will give ground to call the living to earlier obedience.

In the Canadian parishes faith is simple, with a pronounced taste for the supernatural.  In the year 1907 a Jesuit priest, M. Hudon, published at Montreal the life of Marie Catherine de Saint Augustin, 1632-1668, a Quebec nun.  This devout lady lived in an atmosphere charged always with the supernatural.  She knew of events before they happened; with demons who tempted her she had terrific combats; she read the thoughts of others with divine insight.  Perhaps the climax of her experiences is found when she has regularly, as confessor and mentor, the Jesuit father and martyr Breboeuf, dead for some years.  M. Hudon declared that he had submitted the evidence for these wonders to all the tests that modern scientific canons could require and that they were undoubtedly true.  The Archbishop of Quebec, Mgr.  Begin, wrote a prefatory note approving of the teaching of the book, and adding that Mother Marie Catherine’s life could not fail to be an inspiration to young girls to live nobly.  This simple belief in the constant occurrence of the supernatural is not found only in the remoter parishes of the Province of Quebec as a French Canadian writer seems to indicate;[31] it appears everywhere.  All Christians believe in a God who shapes human events and hears and answers prayer.  But many, Catholic and Protestant alike, believe that the energy of God, in response to man’s appeal, is applied through the ordinary machinery of nature’s laws.  Modern thought is pervaded with the conception of nature’s rigour.  I have seen good Catholics shrug their shoulders at the wonders narrated by Marie Catherine de Saint Augustin.  But others, and these not only the ignorant, think that this attitude shows the lack of a deeper faith.  Must God and his saints, they ask, be confined within the narrow framework of nature’s laws?  Cannot He do all things?