La Salle and the discovery of the great West - North Central ...

;1675.] PURPOSES OF THE JESUITS. 103plished,and their missions and their converts wereswept away in an avalanche of ruin. Still, theywould not despair. From the lakes they turnedtheir eyes to the Valley of the Mississippi, in thehope to see it one day the seat of their new empire ofthe Faith. But what did this new Paraguay mean ?It meant a little nation of converted and domesticatedsavages, docile as children, under the paternal and v/absolute rule of Jesuit fathers, and trained by themin industrial pursuits, the results of which were toinure, not to the profit of the producers, but to thebuilding of churches, the founding of colleges, the establishmentof warehouses and magazines, and theconstruction of works of defence, — all controlled byJesuits, and forming a part ofthe Order. Such was the old Paraguaythe vast possessions of1and such,we may suppose, would have been the new, had theplans of those who designed it been realized.I have said that since the middle of the centurythe religious exaltation of the early missions hadsensibly declined. In the nature of things, thatgrand enthusiasm was too intenselong sustained.and fervent to beBut the vital force of Jesuitism hadsuffered no diminution. That marvellous esprit decorps, that extinction of self and absorption of theindividual in the Order which has marked the Jesuitsfrom their first existence as a body, was no whitchanged or lessened, — a principle, which, though1Compare Charlevoix, Histoire de Paraguay, with Robertion,Letters on Paraguay.