A much-sought shrine is that of Saint Anne de Beaupré, easy access to which is gained by the electric railway, and in the summer it is a pleasant local sail down the St. Lawrence. The legend runs that a group of Breton mariners, in the early years of the seventeenth century, found themselves almost engulfed in the river in the sudden violence of a storm, and that they called upon _la bonne Saint Anne_ for deliverance; earnestly declaring that if she would save them they would erect to her a shrine at whatever point she should bring them to land, and that this shrine should be sanctuary forever. The good saint was merciful to their entreaties, and guided them safely to land. According to their promise they at once built a small wooden chapel, very near a spring whose waters are claimed to possess a miraculous power for healing. Since that remote time three larger churches on this site have successively replaced each other, the latest of which dates only to 1878. The primitive little chapel is { 51} still preserved, even as at Assisi the Portiuncula of San Francisco is preserved near the magnificent church of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
That marvellous ministry of San Francisco (who is more familiarly known to us as Saint Francis of Assisi), which was initiated in the thirteenth century, love and sacrifice being the supreme ideals, is recalled to mind by many of the legendary incidents relating to Saint Anne de Beaupré. The mystic pilgrimage to Assisi, the "Seraphic City," is to some extent paralleled by the latter-day pilgrimages to the shrine of Saint Anne. "Any line of truth that leads us above materialism," said Arch-deacon Wilberforce of Westminster Abbey, whose passing on to the life more abundant at the date of this writing is but the larger inflorescence of his beautiful and consecrated life--"any line of truth that forces us to think and to remember that we are enwrapped by the supernatural, is helpful and stimulating. A human life lived only in the seen and felt, with no sense of the invisible, is a fatally impoverished life; a poor, blind, wingless life." Such is the deep, perpetual conviction of mankind. "The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal." The mystic union of the soul with God is the one underlying and all-determining truth of life.