he greater glory of God,"--the noble
motto of the Society of Jesus, had inspiration enough in its sublime
simplicity and fulness of aim to consecrate any great enterprise into
which piety and zeal and self-sacrificing toil could throw themselves,
under whatever limitations of ignorance or superstition. All the
perplexing questions, shifting and deepening from age to age, and
finding more adequate answers as to _what consists with the glory of
God_, may help to train a more intelligent and practical judgment in the
estimate of means and ends. But no comparative allowance of this sort
can reduce the tribute due to devotion and heroism in an untried service
for a holy cause, however bewildered and futile the endeavor. Mr. Lecky
confronts us with the perhaps undeniable, but still unwelcome fact, that
ardor and zeal cool proportionately as intelligent and practical aims
direct the humane or the religious activities of men. Enthusiasm has an
affinity, if not with superstition, yet with exaggerated and
ill-adjusted estimates of the relations between the body and the soul,
the visible and the invisible, the temporal and the eternal.

There can be no reasonable doubt that the missionary Jesuits, whose life
was so sore a martyrdom that they must have found relief even in a cruel
death inflicted by the Indians, did balance their view of what would
consist with the glory of God by some equivalent benefit which they
thought to secure for the barbarians. It has become very desirable, for
various good reasons, to concentrate all the efforts of thorough
research and of discriminating judgment upon the actual condition of the
native tribes on the northern part of this continent when European
enterprise or zeal introduced among them new and potent agencies for
good or ill. Is their decay, their extermination, to be ascribed to the
cupidity and heartlessness of the white man, with his skilled and
calculating arts for overmastering the rude children of nature? Were
they a happy, contented race, supported by the forest and the stream,
and sharing among themselves such relations as served for their uses in
the stead of the more elaborate and artificial institutions of
civilization? Did their compensatory advantages balance to any extent
the rude and stern conditions of their existence? Did the white man try,
even with moderate humanity and sympathy, to lift them to an equality
with himself, and to share peacefully and with mutual benefit thei