[3] Tibièrge, Mémoire sur l'Acadie, 1695.
[4] "Les témoignages qu'on a rendu à Sa Majesté de l'affection et du zêle du Sr. de Thury, missionaire chez les Canibas (Abenakis), pour son service, et particulièrement dans l'engagement où il a mis les Sauvages de recommencer la guerre contre les Anglois, m'oblige de vous prier de luy faire une plus forte part sur les 1,500 livres de gratification que Sa Majesté accorde pour les ecclésiastiques de l'Acadie." Le Ministre à l'Évesque de Québec, 16 Avril, 1695.
"Je suis bien aise de me servir de cette occasion pour vous dire que j'ay esté informé, non seulement de vostre zêle et de vostre application pour vostre mission, et du progrès qu'elle fait pour l'avancement de la religion avec les sauvages, mais encore de vos soins pour les maintenir dans le service de Sa Majesté et pour les encourager aux expeditions de guerre." Le Ministre à Thury, 23 Avril, 1697. The other letter to Thury, written two years before, is of the same tenor.
The French missionaries are said to have made use of singular methods to excite their flocks against the heretics. The Abenaki chief Bomaseen, when a prisoner at Boston in 1696, declared that they told the Indians that Jesus Christ was a Frenchman, and his mother, the Virgin, a French lady; that the English had murdered him, and that the best way to gain his favor was to revenge his death. [5]
[5] Mather, Magnalia, II. 629. Compare Dummer, Memorial, 1709, in Mass. Hist. Coll., 3 Ser., I., and the same writer's Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the Late Expedition to Canada, 1712. Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the geologist, when engaged in the survey of Maine in 1836, mentions, as an example of the simplicity of the Acadians of Madawaska, that one of them asked him "if Bethlehem, where Christ was born, was not a town in France." First Report on the Geology of Maine, 72. Here, perhaps, is a tradition from early missionary teaching.
Whether or not these articles of faith formed a part of the teachings of Thury and his fellow-apostles, there is no doubt that it was a recognized part of their functions to keep their converts in hostility to the English, and that their credit with the civil powers depended on their success in doing so. The same holds true of the priests of the mission villages in Canada. They avoided all that might impair the warlike spirit of the neophyte, and they were well aware that in savages the warlike spirit is mainly dependent on native ferocity. They taught temperance, conjugal fidelity, devotion to the rites of their religion, and submission to the priest; but they left the savage a savage still. In spite of the remonstrances of the civil authorities, the mission Indian was separated as far as possible from intercourse with the French, and discouraged from learning the French tongue. He wore a crucifix, hung wampum on the shrine of the Virgin, told his beads, prayed three times a day, knelt for hours before the Host, invoked the saints, and confessed to the priest; but, with rare exceptions, he murdered, scalped, and tortured like his heathen countrymen. [6]