the serious, religious life of the
seminary, the surprise, and sometimes the discomfort, may be great. One
must adapt oneself to this atmosphere of prayer, meditation and study.
The rules of prayer are certainly not beyond the limits of an ordinary
mind, but the practice is more difficult than the theory. Not without
effort can a youthful imagination, a mind ardent and consumed by its own
fervour, relinquish all the memories of family and social occupations,
in order to withdraw into silence, inward peace, and the mortification
of the senses. To the devoutly-minded our worldly life may well seem
petty in comparison with the more spiritual existence, and in the
religious life, for the priest especially, lies the sole source and the
indispensable condition of happiness. But one must learn to be thus
happy by humility, study and prayer, as one learns to be a soldier by
obedience, discipline and exercise, and in nothing did Laval more reveal
his discernment than in the recognition of the fact that the transition
from one life to the other must be effected only after careful
instruction and wisely-guided deliberation.

The aim of the smaller seminary is to guide, by insensible gradations
towards the great duties and the great responsibilities of the
priesthood, young men upon whom the spirit of God seems to have rested.
There were in Israel schools of prophets; this does not mean that their
training ended in the diploma of a seer or an oracle, but that this
novitiate was favourable to the action of God upon their souls, and
inclined them thereto. A smaller seminary possesses also the hope of the
harvest. It is there that the minds of the students, by exercises
proportionate to their age, become adapted unconstrainedly to pious
reading, to the meditation and the grave studies in whose cycle the life
of the priest must pass.

We shall not be surprised if the prelate's followers recognized in the
works of faith which sprang up in his footsteps and progressed on all
hands at Ville-Marie and at Quebec shining evidences of the protection
of Mary to whose tutelage they had dedicated their establishments. This
protection indeed has never been withheld, since to-day the fame of the
university which sprang from the seminary, as a fruit develops from a
bud, has crossed the seas. Father Monsabre, the eloquent preacher of
Notre-Dame in Paris, speaking of the union of science and faith,
exclaimed: "There exists, in the field of the New