^ I fear that unworldliness is almost conspicuous by its absence from our Church members to-day. The world and the Church are so interlocked in unholy wedlock that it is scarcely possible to say where the Church ends and where the world begins. There was a time when the world and the Church were widely separated, in the days when the early Christians carried their cross for Jesus; but now the world has become religious, or which amounts to the same thing, the Church has become worldly and the power of God has almost left us.^
(4) The whole man is changed. " Old things are passed away ; behold, all things are become new." There are new sorrows, new joys, new motives, new hopes, and new principles. All things are now seen under a new light, and so appear in a new colour ; for " all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ." That great reconciliation changes everything.
^ It is inevitable that in such a moment there shall come into a man's mind a disgust for the past life, — the life of selfish- ness, the life of low ideals, the life of contentment with self and with selfish surroundings. There will come a disgust in the man's soul, and he will say, Is it possible that I was made for this, that this is the end and object of my life ? — to go down town every morning and back again at night, to see more beautiful things year by year in my house, to gather my books about me, to learn a little more, to make myself more comfortable ? Is it possible that this is the last expression of life, the outcome of all the Divine power that has been moving in the universe since the fiery clouds first filled the firmament ? Is this the outcome of it ? An animal, comfortable, respecting himself, respected of
* G. C. Grubb, Unsearchable EicJies, 33.
ST. JOHN III. 5 169
his fellow-men ? Is this the end ? Is there no higher term of existence ? ^
^ In a former chapter, we followed Father Paul Le Jeune on his winter roamings, with a band of Montagnais, among the forests on the northern boundary of Maine. Now Father Grabriel Druilletes sets forth on a similar excursion, but with one essential difference. Le Jeune's companions were heathen, who persecuted him day and night with their gibes and sarcasms. Those of Druilletes were all converts, who looked on him as a friend and a father. There were prayers, confessions, masses, and invocations of St. Joseph. They built their bark chapel at every camp, and no festival of the Church passed unobserved. On Good Friday they laid their best robe of beaver-skin on the snow, placed on it a crucifix, and knelt around it in prayer. What was their prayer ? It was a petition for the forgiveness and the conversion of their enemies, the Iroquois. Those who know the intensity and tenacity of an Indian's hatred will see in this something more than a change from one superstition to another. An idea had been presented to the mind of the savage to which he had previously been an utter stranger. This is the most remarkable record of success in the whole body of the Jesuit Belations?
^ That noble old soul, Abraham, stood by me as an angel of God in sickness and in danger ; he went at my side wherever I had to go ; he helped me willingly to the last inch of strength in all that I had to do ; and it was perfectly manifest that he was doing all this, not from mere human love, but for the sake of Jesus. That man had been a Cannibal in his heathen days, but by the grace of God there he stood verily a new creature in Christ Jesus. Any trust, however sacred or valuable, could be absolutely reposed in him ; and in trial or danger, I was often refreshed by that old Teacher's prayers, as I used to be by the prayers of my saintly father in my childhood's home. No white man could have been a more valuable helper to me in my perilous circum- stances, and no person, white or black, could have shown more fearless and chivalrous devotion.^
III.
A New Attitude to the Future.
We have seen that two things are essential to a member of the Kingdom — an outward act of allegiance, signifying repentance
1 L. Parks, The Winning of the Smil, 182.
2 Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, ii. 138. ^ John G. Paion, i. 173.
I70 A NEW BEGINNING
and the acceptance of pardon, and an inward infusion of a new nature, which is indicated generally in chap. i. 12 by the words, " As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name."
If The Christianity of Clovis does not indeed produce any fruits of the kind usually looked for in a modern convert. We do not hear of his repenting ever so little of any of his sins, nor resolving to lead a new life in any the smallest particular. He had not been impressed with convictions of sin at the battle of Tolbiac ; nor, in asking for the help of the God of Clotilde, had he felt or professed the remotest intention of changing his character, or abandoning his projects. What he was, before he believed in his queen's God, he only more intensely afterwards became, in the confidence of that before unknown God's super- natural help. His natural gratitude to the Delivering Power, and pride in its protection, added only fierceness to his soldier- ship, and deepened his political enmities with the rancour of religious indignation. No more dangerous snare is set by the fiends for human frailty than the belief that our own enemies are also the enemies of God ; and it is perfectly conceivable to me that the conduct of Clovis might have been the more unscrupulous, precisely in the measure that his faith was more sincere.^