suitable to his rank and dignity he had not even a horse of his own.  And when, towards the end of his days, his great age and his infirmities did not allow him to walk, if he wished to go out he had to borrow a carriage.  Why this economy?  In order to have a storehouse full of garments, shoes and blankets, which he distributed gratuitously, with paternal kindness and prudence.  This was a business which he never ceased to ply, in which he trusted only to himself, and with which he concerned himself up to his death.”

The charity of the prelate was boundless.  Not only at the hospital of Quebec did he visit the poor and console them, but he even rendered them services the most repugnant to nature.  “He has been seen,” says M. de la Colombiere, “on a ship where he behaved like St. Francois-Xavier, where, ministering to the sailors and the passengers, he breathed the bad air and the infection which they exhaled; he has been seen to abandon in their favour all his refreshments, and to give them even his bed, sheets and blankets.  To administer the sacraments to them he did not fear to expose his life and the lives of the persons who were most dear to him.”  When he thus attended the sick who were attacked by contagious fever, he did his duty, even more than his duty; but when he went, without absolute need, and shared in the repugnant cares which the most devoted servants of Christ in the hospitals undertake only after struggles and heroic victory over revolted nature he rose to sublimity.  It was because he saw in the poor the suffering members of the Saviour; to love the poor man, it is not enough to wish him well, we must respect him, and we cannot respect him as much as any child of God deserves without seeing in him the image of Jesus Christ himself.  No one acquires love for God without being soon wholly enkindled by it; thus it was no longer sufficient for Mgr. de Laval to instruct and console the poor and the sick, he served them also in the most abject duties, going as far as to wash with his own hands their sores and ulcers.  A madman, the world will say; why not content one’s self with attending those people without indulging in the luxury of heroism so repugnant?  This would have sufficed indeed to relieve nature, but would it have taught those incurable and desperate cases that they were the first friends of Jesus Christ, that the Church looked upon them as its jewels, and that their fate from the point of view of eternity was enviable to all?  It would have relieved without consoling and raising the poor man to the height which belongs to him in Christian society.  Official assistance, with the best intentions in the world, the most ingenious organization and the most perfect working, can, however, never be charity in the perfectly Christian sense of this word.  If it could allay all needs and heal all sores it would still have accomplished only half of the task:  relieving the body without reaching the soul.  And man does not live by bread