to them their time, their health, even their hours of rest, in order to procure for their parishioners the aid of religion?  Is it not regrettable that too many among the colonists, who were yet such good Christians in the observance of religious practices, should have opposed an obstinate resistance to so righteous a demand?  Can it be that, by a special dispensation of Heaven, the priests and vicars of Canada are not liable to the same material needs as ordinary mortals, and are they not obliged to pay in good current coin for their food, their medicines and their clothes?

The first seminary, built of stone,[3] rose in 1661 on the site of the present vicarage of the cathedral of Quebec; it cost eight thousand five hundred francs, two thousand of which were given by Mgr. de Laval.  The first priest of Quebec and first superior of the seminary, M. Henri de Bernieres, was able to occupy it in the autumn of the following year, and the Bishop of Petraea abode there from the time of his return from France on September 15th, 1663, until the burning of this house on November 15th, 1701.  The first directors of the seminary were, besides M. de Bernieres, MM. de Lauson-Charny, son of the former governor-general, Jean Dudouyt, Thomas Morel, Ange de Maizerets and Hugues Pommier.  Except the first, who was a Burgundian, they were all born in the two provinces of Brittany and Normandy, the cradles of the majority of our ancestors.

The founder of the seminary had wished the livings to be transferable; later the government decided to the contrary, and the edict of 1679 decreed that the tithes should be payable only to the permanent priests; nevertheless the majority of them remained of their own free will attached to the seminary.  They had learned there to practise a complete abnegation, and to give to the faithful the example of a united and fervent clerical family.  “Our goods were held in common with those of the bishop,” wrote M. de Maizerets, “I have never seen any distinction made among us between poor and rich, or the birth and rank of any one questioned, since we all consider each other as brothers.”

The pious bishop himself set an example of disinterestedness; all that he had, namely an income of two thousand five hundred francs, which the Jesuits paid him as the tithes of the grain harvested upon their property, and a revenue of a thousand francs which he had from his friends in France, went into the seminary.  MM. de Bernieres, de Maizerets and Dudouyt vied in the imitation of their model, and they likewise abandoned to the holy house their goods and their pensions.  The prelate confined himself, like the others, from humility even more than from economy on behalf of the community, to the greatest simplicity in dress as well as in his environment.  Aiming at the highest degree of possible perfection, he was satisfied with the coarsest fare, and incessantly added voluntary privations to the sacrifices demanded of him by his difficult duties.  Does not this apostolic poverty recall the seminary established by the pious founder of St. Sulpice, who wrote:  “Each had at dinner a bowl of soup and a small portion of butcher’s meat, without dessert, and in the evening likewise a little roast mutton”?