When He Appeared Before Queen Anne Of
Austria, The Woman Who Wore A Diadem Thought
It A Privilege To Kiss His Mutilated Hands.
- 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.
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