than one public occasion, expressed his conviction that this country can never be in a satisfactory state until the Church of Rome,-in common with all other churches anywhere pretending to exist by law, shall be disestablished, and the French-Canadian population be set free to "elect their own clergymen and pay them as they please."

He

openly expressed his judgment that the time had come to send men to Parliament who would lift up their voices on this question, and by acts, as well as words, tell every Protestant that he had no right to make fetters, in the form of laws, to bind men to the feet of a priest of any sort-Protestant or Catholic-not even as willing slaves, since it was a distinctive duty to prevent suicide.

His own father had left Scottish soil in order to escape an atmosphere murky with ducal oppression, real or imagined; and practically all his life Dr. MacVicar fought to secure for the French-Canadians freedom from ecclesiastical tyranny, under which, only in recent years, they have begun to exhibit hopeful symptoms of restlessness.

Though forced by conviction and the trend of public events to assume at times the rôle of an agitator, there was, underlying his most vehement denunciations of Romanism as a system, a sincere regard for the people who adhered to it, with some of whom he maintained the most cordial personal relations. The desire to communicate to them the fulness of blessing, unfolded in a pure Gospel, reached back to his student days, when he had reproached himself for "unaccountable timidity" in having presented a subscription list for the French-Canadian Mission to fewer persons than conscience impelled him to canvass.

His brief ministry in the Royal City had not been completed without the initiation of a movement

which had for its aim the public discussion of the Romish question: and in the busier pastorate on the shores of the St. Lawrence there was no incident on which, for years, he loved more to dwell than the bold action of a French boy, with glowing cheeks and quick, dark eyes, whom he called down one afternoon from a load of hay on Fletcher's Field, then the property of a Coté Street church-member.

This little fellow, choosing Christ as his only Mediator, and refusing to pray to the Virgin Mary, in whose name, according to "the official standard of prayer-the beads," ten petitions are offered to every one addressed to God, was, at the instigation of his relatives, arrested and thrown into goal by the Mayor of St. Jean Baptiste village.

Challenged the next day to give an account of himself, he created no little horror by his determination to persist in the course which he had adopted.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself," exclaimed the Mayor. "Do you know that Jesus Christ came into the world to set up the Holy Catholic Church?"

"I am not ashamed of myself," replied the garçon, pulling out of his pocket a French Testament. “I am not ashamed of myself. I read here in my Gospel how Jesus said that if anyone is ashamed of Him, He will be ashamed of that one before His Father and the holy angels."

The Testament was snatched from his hand.

The boy was locked up in gaol, threatened with the penitentiary, and then dispatched home in a primitive French cart with his widowed mother, a brother and a sister; but the passion for Christ, which, in the primal days of Christianity separated so many families, had taken full possession of the little fellow's being, and, whilst the party was resting at an inn, he made his escape and hid in the woods till he could find his way back to Montreal, which practically meant back to spiritual liberty.

No amount of apathy, or antipathy, on the part of others toward this work of enlightening the FrenchCanadian could ever convince Dr. MacVicar that he had blundered in giving this youth the evangelical instruction which enabled him in the hour of crisis to assert his freedom and exercise the right of conscience to follow Christ. The bugbear of so-called Proselytism, spelled with the biggest and ugliest capital, could never make him waver in the opinion which, in clear-cut words he had expressed at a public meeting in Montreal, when he had become a member of the old undenominational French-Canadian Missionary Society.

"The position of the Church of Rome in this Province," he said, "viewed in reference to its rich endowments, thorough organization, increasing political influence, growing ultramontanism, and especially in reference to the strong hold which her unscriptural dogmas and idolatrous practices have upon her adherents, should alarm and arouse all to the

serious consequences to us and to our children which history shows to result from such power and influence, as well as to excite deeper sympathy for our beloved fellow-subjects more immediately under her sway."

The superstitions, sedulously fostered by the hierarchy, perhaps as much as anything steeled his determination to do what he could to relieve the pitiable, spiritual destitution of his compatriots; for scarcely a year passed without some fresh extravagance of faith in saints and relics coming under his notice.

In 1885, for instance, the smallpox epidemic, which created so much trouble for an energetic French mayor who had to call out the fire brigade, and, with streams from the water-hose, dampen the fanatical zeal of howling mobs, risen in hot rebellion against the regulations of the health department, also created a brisk trade in a peculiar fetich, printed on thin paper, credited with efficacy not only to stay the plague, but to remedy all the ills that flesh is heir to.

These curative images of the Virgin Mary—some of which fell into Dr. MacVicar's hands-were to be swallowed, according to ecclesiastical prescription, in a little water before each meal. To one variety was attributed power fully as marvellous as that ascribed in the seventeenth century to the powdered bone of Father Brebeuf, of which Parkman tells in his "Old Regime." A Huguenot of that time, who