- In The
Roman Catholic Church A Deformed Or Mutilated
Priest Cannot Say Mass; He Must Be A Perfect
Man In Body And Mind Before The Lord.
Father
Jogues wished to return to his old missionary
field; so, to restore to him his lost right of saying
mass, the Pope granted his prayer by a special
dispensation.
In the spring of 1643 he returned
to the St. Lawrence country to found a new
mission, to be called the Mission of Martyrs. His
Superior at Montreal ordered him to proceed to
the country of the Mohawks, and in company
with Sieur Bourdon, a government engineer, and
six Indians, he followed the Richelieu and
Champlain, which the savages called "the doorway
of the country," until the little party stood on
the northern end of Lake George, on the
evening of Corpus Christi; and with the catholic
spirit of the Jesuit missionary he christened it
Lac St. Sacrement, and this name it bore for a
whole century. On the 18th of October, 1646,
the tomahawk of the savage ended the life
of Father Jogues, who, after suffering many
tortures and indignities from his Iroquois captors,
died in their midst while working for their
salvation in his field of Christian labor.
The right of a discoverer to name new lakes
and rivers is old and unquestioned. A
missionary of the cross penetrated an unexplored
wilderness and found this noblest gem of the lower
Adirondacks, unknown to civilized man.
Impressed with this sublime work of his Creator,
the martyred priest christened it St. Sacrement.
One hundred years later came troops of soldiers
with mouths filled with strange oaths, cursing
their enemies. What respect had they for the
rights of discoverers or martyred missionaries?
So General Johnson, "an ambitious Irishman,"
discarded the Christian name of the lake and
replaced it with the English one of George.
He did not name it after St. George, the patron
saint of England, of whom history asserts that
he "was identical with a native of either
Cappadocia or Cilicia, who raised himself by flattery
of the great from the meanest circumstances to
be purveyor of bacon for the army, and who was
put to death with two of his ministers by a mob,
for peculations, A. D. 361;" but he took that of
a sensual king, George of England, in order to
advance his own interests with that monarch.
For more than a century Lake George was the
highway between Canada and the Hudson River.
Its pure waters were so much esteemed as to be
taken regularly to Canada to be consecrated and
used in the Roman Catholic churches in
baptismal and other sacred rites. The lake was
frequently occupied by armies, and the forts George
and William Henry, at the southern end, possess
most interesting historical associations. The
novelist Cooper made Lake George a region of
romance. To the young generation of
Americans who yearly visit its shores it is an El
Dorado, and the very air breathes love as they
glide in their light boats over its pellucid waters,
adding to the picturesqueness of the scene, and
supplying that need ever felt, no matter what
the natural beauty, - the presence of man.
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