Nor were the bishops in the two countries any better. Bishop Lefevere, of Detroit, was a man capable of taking the teetotal pledge publicly in face of his assembled flock, and that same evening coolly disregarding it at his own private table; and his predecessor, Bishop Reese, "during the last years he had spent in the diocese, had passed very few weeks without being picked up beastly drunk in the lowest taverns" (p. 347). Bishop Quarter, of Chicago, is fortunate in not himself coming under Chiniquy's lash, but the latter assures us that he died poisoned by his Grand Vicar, who desired thus to prevent the exposure of his own licentious conduct (p. 352). Bishop Vandevelde, who succeeded Bishop Quarter, is on the whole more leniently dealt with, but "though he was most moderate in his drink at table" we are assured that "at night when nobody could see him he gave himself up to the detestable habit of intoxication" (p. 382). Bishop O'Regan, the succesor of Bishop Vandevelde, and the prelate who, by force of circumstances, was brought into the sharpest conflict with Chiniquy, pays for it by being represented as the incarnation of all that can be odious in human character; and Archbishop Kendrick is represented as having agreed with Chiniquy that "the rapacity of Bishop O'Regan, his thefts, his lies, his acts of simony, were public and intolerable," and "that unprincipled dignitary is the cause that our holy religion is not only losing her prestige in the United States, but is becoming an object of contempt wherever these public crimes are known" (p. 434). Bishop Bourget, of Montreal, is another prelate whose character is aspersed by this man's allegations. In one place we are assured that this bishop, when a young priest staying with his Bishop at the Hotel Dieu in Montreal, was one of two or three priests who so shocked the nuns that the latter said, "unless the bishop went away and took his priests away with him, it would be far better that they themselves should leave the convent and get married" (p. 307). Also, this ecclesiastic, we are told, when Bishop of Montreal, bade Chiniquy to allure into a convent a lady who confessedly had no vocation, solely in order that he might transfer her large fortune into his episcopal coffers (p. 358); and that for refusing to co-operate in this iniquitous scheme he determined to ruin him, put up an abandoned girl to make a false charge against his honour, and then suspend him without allowing him to defend himself.

This is the substance of Chiniquy's indictment against the bishops and clergy of the two countries of which he had experience, and in support of it he brings together numerous facts, or what purport to be such, full of detail and of long conversations, all so conceived as to suggest that the greatest part of the iniquities of these people were either too palpable to need proof, or were attested by the acknowledgements of the accused persons themselves. That a book of this kind should deeply impress readers of the Protestant Alliance type is not surprising. But more prudent minds will note:

(1) that this mass of denunciation was not published till after 1885 -- that is, after a quarter of a century from the date when, with his apostasy, his experiences of Catholic life from the inside must have ceased;

(2) that all rests on this unsupported testimony of Chiniquy himself; and

(3) that the whole tone of the book is that of a man absolutely egotistic and impracticable, absolutely incapable of seeing any other side but his own, absolutely reckless in his charges against any one who should venture to oppose him, and absolutely exaggerated at all times in his language;

(4) in short, that the author of a story which makes out the Catholic Church of Canada and the United States, at the date of which he writes, to be so essentially different from what unbiased witnesses find it to be within the scope of their own direct observation, is one who paints himself in his own book as destitute of all those qualities which predispose a discerning reader to repose confidence in an author's statements.

To this general motive for distrust others accede as soon as we begin to carry our examination into the details of the book. Thus in his fourth chapter he tells us of a secret meeting in the house of one of his uncles, which was attended by several of the leading inhabitants of Kamouraska. Its object was to discuss the conduct of the clergy in the confessional, and the narrator fills six closely printed pages with a detailed report of the speeches then delivered. He was not invited to the meeting, but was present at it in the character of an eavesdropper, hiding in some unobserved corner, his age at the time being ten. We must suppose, then, that this youthful scribe, with an itelligence beyond his years, took down the speeches in shorthand, for future use; or rather, since we are not credulous enough to believe this, we must suppose that all this account of the meeting was pure invention of his after-years, and must conclude that the man was capable of such amplifications and inventions, and of palming them off as truths when it happened to suit his purpose. And this point about his method being established, we may surely suspect him of employing it in the similarly detailed stories with which the book abounds, and in which priests and bishops speak just as fierce a anti-Catholic might wish them to speak, but quite unlike the way in which they are found to speak all the world over.

Nor is it a question here of their speaking as bad men rather than as good men, but of the specific style of the explanations and vindications of their own doctrines and practices which they are made to give. For instance, it is known perfectly well from their theological books what replies priests and other Catholics are taught to give to those who take objection to their Church's doctrine on the lawfulness of Bible reading and of interpreting Scripture inconsistently with the "unanimous consent of the Fathers", on the veneration of our Blessed Lady and the Saints and of its accord with Holy Scripture, on the practice of asking and refraining from asking questions in the confessional, and so on.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that what these Catholic theological books say on these subjects is altogether unsound and indefensible, at least the clergy of Canada might be expected to answer in the language laid down for them in their books, and not in the language which makes Catholics laugh when some composer of Protestant fictions puts it in the mouths of his characters. Yet the priestly characters in Chiniquy's Fifty Years speak invariably like the latter, not the former. And, just as if we came across a traveller's account of a country in which the lions brayed and the donkeys roared, the nightingale cawed and the rooks sang sweetly in the night-time, we should say that our traveller was either joking or lying; so will any intelligent possessor of a historic sense say of Chiniquy's paradoxical account of the sayings and doings of the Canadian and American clergy.

It may be well to give an illustration of what we refer to under this head, and the following is an apposite one (p. 334). Chiniquy had preached a sermon on devotion to our Blessed Lady, and had been congratulated on it by Bishop Prince, then Auxiliary Bishop of Montreal. During the night he professes to have seen how unscriptural had been his preaching, and how opposed to the teaching of the Evangelist, who, when our Lord's mother and brethren stood without, refused to recognize them as having any claims upon Him. It is a well-known passage, and any Catholic commentary would, if referred to, have explained that our Lord wished to teach a lesson to the apostles and their successors in the ministry, of the devotedness with which they must be prepared to subordinate all earthly ties to the service of their ministry. Yet neither to Chiniquy nor to the bishop does it even occur to consider this explanation, and they talk just as if they were two Protestants.

"How", asks Chiniquy, "can we say that Jesus always granted the requests of His mother, when this evangelist tells us He never granted her petitions when acting in His capacity of Saviour of the world?" At which simple, easy question the bishop is represented as seeming "absolutely confused", so that Chiniquy has to help him out by further asking "Who came into the world to save you and me?" to which the bishop replies sheepishly, "It is Jesus"; and "Who is the sinner's best friend, Jesus or Mary?" to which the bishop replies, "It is Jesus ... Jesus said to all sinners, 'Come unto me', He never said 'Go to Mary'" -- the bishop finally extricating himself from his embarassment by saying feebly, "You will find an answer to your questions in the Holy Fathers." Is it likely that a Catholic bishop talked like that? Is it not more likely that the writer who fabricated what he supposes himself to have overheard at the age of ten, fabricated this conversation too, and others like it throughout the book which are similarly destitute of probability?

Nor is the test of self-contradiction wanting to complete our distrust of Chiniquy's allegations. He is continually telling his readers that the Church of Rome forbids the reading of Scripture to the laity, and even to her ecclesiastical students. Thus when he was a young seminarian at St. Nicolet he tells us it was the rule of the Collège to keep the Bible apart in the library, among the forbidden books. But one day, having obtained access to a copy and surreptitiously spent and hour or so in perusing it, he afterwards felt bound to tell the director, his great friend M. Leprohon. The latter, he assures us, was sad, and while acknowledging his inability to answer his pupil's argumentation, said, "I have something better than my own weak thoughts. I have the thoughts of the Church and of our Holy Father the Pope. They forbid us to put the Bible in the hands of our students." Yet in the story of his boyhood -- in which he tells us how he used as a child to read aloud to the neighboring farmers out of a Bible belonging to his family, and how the priest, hearing of this, came one day to take the forbidden book away -- he has to acknowledge that this copy had been given to his father as a seminary prize in his early days.

And -- to pass over such insights as he gives us into clerical life in the order of the day observed in the presbytery of his first Curé, where a daily hour was assigned to Bible reading -- we may be content to set against his later allegations the statements he made on the occasion of his controversy with Roussy, a Protestant minister, on January 7, 1851.

This date, indeed, should be noted, for it means that this controversy took place shortly before his departure from Canada to Illinois, and therefore after the many occasions when, according to his Fifty Years, he had felt and expressed to personal friends his concern at finding that the Church feared the Bible and sought to hide it from her children. And yet on the platform, on January 7, 1851, he talks just as a Catholic priest would talk, except, indeed, for the repulsive egotism and browbeating which is all his own. Take, for instance, the following passage:

"Certain Protestants will repeat that the Church forbids the reading of the Bible by the people. This is a cowardly and absurd lie, and it is only the ignorant or the silly amongst Protestants who at present believe this ancient fabrication of heresy. Some unscrupulous ministers, however, are constantly bringing it up before the eyes of their dupes to impose upon them and keep them in a holy horror of what they call Popery. Let Protestants make the tour of Europe and America; let them go into the numerous book-stores they will come across at every step: let them, for instance, go to Montreal, to Mr. Fabre's or to Mr. Sadler's; and everywhere they will find on their shelves thousands of Bibles in all modern languages, printed with the permission of the ecclesiastical authorities. I hold in my hand a New Testament, printed less than five years ago, at Quebec. On the first page I read the following approbation of the Archbishop of Quebec: 'We approve and recommend to the faithful of our diocese this translation of the New Testament, with commentaries on the texts and notes at the foot of the pages. Joseph, Archbishop of Quebec.' Every one of those Catholic Bibles, to be found on sale at every bookseller in Europe and America in like manner, bears irrefutable witness to the fact that Protestantism is fed on lies, when day by day it listens with complacency to its ministers and its newspapers, telling it in various strains that we Catholics are enemies of the Bible."

This and much more to the same effect may be found in the report of the discussion between Chiniquy and Roussy which was republished in 1893, under the title of The Two Chiniquys at the office of the True Witness.

Again, as regards the question of clerical morality, from time to time we get from him, as it were through rifts in the clouds of his inventions, little gimpses into the real life of the Canadian clergy, which reveal them to us in a by no means unpleasant light. What could be more edifying than the account given of M. Perras's priestly life (p. 133), or of M. Bedard's (p. 157)? True, he tries to cast some flies into their ointment, but there is M. Têtu, the Curé of St. Roch, who was evidently a truly good man, and of whom Chiniquy is contrained to say that he "never saw him in a bad humor a single time during the four years that it was his fortune to work under him in that parish" and "from whose lips an unkind word never proceeded" (p. 169). And there is the young priest, M. Estimanville, who in the cholera time at Quebec was introduced by Chiniquy for the first time to the hospital he was to serve.

"The young priest turned pale, and said, 'Is it possible that such a deadly epidemic is raging where you are taking me? I answered, 'Yes, my dear young brother, it is a fact, and I consider it my duty to tell you not to enter that house, if you are afraid to die.' A few minutes of silence followed ... he then took his handkerchief and wiped away some big drops of sweat which were rolling from his forehead on his cheeks, and said, 'Is there a more holy and desirable way of dying than by ministering to the spiritual and temporal wants of my brethren? No. If it is the will of God that I should fail when fighting at this post of danger, I am ready.' ... He died a few months afterwards" (p. 224).

Nor was this a single case.

"We must be honest" (he writes in another place), "and true towards the Roman Catholic priests of Canada. Few men, if any, have shown more courage and self-denial in the hour of danger than they did. I have seen them at work during the two memorable years 1832 and 1834, with a courage and self-denial worthy of the admiration of heaven and earth. Though they knew that the most horrible tortures and death might be the price of their devotedness, I have not known a single one of them who ever shrank before the danger. At the first appeal, in the midst of the darkest and stormiest nights, as well as in the light of the brightest days, they were always ready to leave their warm and comfortable beds to run to the rescue of the sick and dying" (p. 166).

These admissions, wrung as it were from the traducer of his brethren, may serve to show that the clergy of Canada were not so unlike the clergy elsewhere. That there should be tares among the wheat is always to be expected, and Chiniquy, as we shall see, was his own greatest argument to prove that they were not both wanting in Canada and the United States. But in the first generation of Christian clergy, who received their Master Himself, the proportion of tares to wheat was one in twelve. We may trust that it has never been anything like as high since, nor is there any reason to suppose it was anything like as high among the clergy in whose ranks Chiniquy lived and worked.

But what about the bishops whom Chiniquy represents as such utter monsters? We must refer the reader to Mr. Gilmary Shea's History of the Catholic Church in the United States for an account of the two bishops of Detroit, Bishops Rese and Lefevre, who were evidently quite unlike what we might gather from Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.

Nor, as Chiniquy has little to tell against Bishop Vandevelde, need we say more than that, as we have ascertained from well-informed correspondents, he was a little weak in his government, perhaps, but was a thoroughly good and conscientious man, and by no means likely to have had a habit of secret tippling. Bishop Bourget of Montreal and Bishop O'Regan of Chicago were the prelates who had to do most of the unpleasant work in restraining Chiniquy, and were, therefore, his pet aversions. What is to be said of them? Bishop Bourget, so far being a harsh, inconsiderate, unscrupulous and mendacious character, was a prelate who left a deep and lasting impression on the Canadians by reason of his very remarkable holiness of life. He was a man of the most delicate charity and tenderness, quite incapable of doing the smallest injustice even to the most guilty, and when compelled to punish ever anxious to make the way of penitence and restoration easy for the offender. Indeed, so eminent was Bishop Bourget for his virtues that his contemporaries looked forward to the possibility of his being beatified some day. And we may add that the letters written by him in this Chiniquy case, of which we have copies now lying before us, all bear out this estimate of his character. They breathe throughout a spirit of the most exquisite conscientiousness and charity.

About Bishop O'Reagan, Mr. Gilmary Shea gives us the following facts. He was born at Lavelloc, in County Mayo [in Ireland], and was educated at Maynooth. Archbishop McHale made him Professor of Holy Scripture at St. Jarlath's College. He came to St. Louis in 1849 at the request of Archbishop Kendrick, to be head of the Seminary at Carondelet. When he received the Bulls (appointing him to the see of Chicago) he sent them back, saying that he was a college man without missionary experience; and when he was ordered to accept, he said: "I accept only in the spirit of obedience." He began his administration with energy, and feeling the want of good priests, made ernest efforts to obtain them for his English-speaking, German and French congregations. He introduced system, and did much to restore discipline, but his methods caused discontent, which was fostered by many. Bishop O'Regan had entered heartily into works for the good of the diocese, and expended large sums of his own means for it. But, tired out by the opposition of Chiniquy and some others, he resolved to visit Rome and plead in person for his release from a burden which he felt to be beyond his strength to bear. His resignation was eventually accepted, and he was transferred to the titular see of Dora on June 25, 1858. He then returned to Europe, and spent the remainder of his life in retirement in Ireland and England. He died in London, at Brompton, on November 13, 1866, aged 57, and his remains were carried to his native parish of Confert. Mr. Gilmary Shea adds: "It may be said of Bishop O'Regan that he was a man in the truest sense, single-minded, firm as a rock, and honest as gold, a lover of truth and justice, whom no self-interest could mislead and no corruption could contaminate. He held fast the affection of many and won the esteem of all."

So far we have been occupied with the general character of Chiniquy's accusations, the truth or falsehood of which we have sought to estimate by applying tests furnished chiefly by his own writings. Probably our readers will agree with us that the result has been to show that this person is not exactly the kind of witness who can claim to be taken on his own valuation, and, apart from an external confirmation which is not available, can be trusted implicitly. We must now go through the stages of his life up to the time of his apostasy, to see how far his own account of it agrees with that of others.

To help us in our task we have for the one side his Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, which is the fullest presentation he has given us of his story; and for the other side we have some documents which have been procured for us by the kindness of a Canadian friend. These are:

(1) Biographical Notes Concerning the Apostate Chiniquy, a paper which has been published quite recently: this was drawn up by Monsignor Têtu, of Quebec Cathedral, a grandson of the Hon. Amable Dionne, who married one of Chiniquy's maternal aunts (Document A).

(2) A copy of a manuscript belonging to the Archives of the Collège St. Marie, at Montreal, entitled Manuscrit trouvé dans les papiers de M. le Chanoine Lamarche après sa mort. This paper is an account and a criticism of Chiniquy's life, but is defective, the first twenty pages being missing as well as all that followed the forty-four pages preserved. From internal evidence the writer is M. Mailloux, a Grand Vicar of Quebec, who knew Chiniquy very well in his Canadian days, and was afterwards sent to Illinois to undo the evil lie he had wrought there (Document B).

(3) A copy of a letter dated March 19, 1857, and addressed by Bishop Bourget of Montreal to the "Canadian Catholics of Bourbonnais." It has been transcribed for us from the Courrier de Canada, a Montreal paper, in which it appeared on April 7, 1857 (Document C).

(4) A paper entitled Explanations of certain Facts misrepresented by M. Chiniquy in his Letter of April 18, 1857. This paper is also by Bishop Bourget, and is dated May 6, 1857. It has been copied for us from the archives of the See of Montreal (Document D).

(5) A number of letters exchanged between Bishop Bourget and others between the years 1848 and 1858. These have likewise been transcribed for us from the authentic copies in Bishop Bourget's Register (Document E).

Charles Chiniquy was born on July 30, 1809, at Kamouraska, a town on the right bank of the St. Lawrence, some forty miles below Quebec. His parents were Charles Chiniquy, a notary by profession, and Reine Chiniquy, née Perrault. His father dying on July 19, 1821, he was adopted by his uncle, the Hon. Amable Dionne, who, on finding that he desired to be brought up for the priesthood, sent him to school at the Little Seminary of St. Nicolet. When he had been there three years a difficulty arose. "Owing to a misunderstanding between myself and my uncle Dionne he had ceased to maintain me at college" (p. 66). This is all that Chiniquy himself tells us about the matter, but Document A says: "In 1825 Mr. Dionne ceased paying for him, and refused him admittance into his house, declaring him unworthy of being a member of his honourable family," and the same document in a note says: " I [i.e., Monsignor Têtu] can certify that the Honourable Amable Dionne was an intimate friend of Bishops Plessis and Panet of Quebec, and of Bishop Provencher of the Red River Missions. The greatest sorrow of his life was to see his unworthy nephew, who had always been a bad Catholic, become a bad priest. But that was no fault of his."

We can gather from these words that the fault of which he was considered guilty was an offense against morality. But, after all, he was then only a boy, and two priests, M. Leprohon, the Director of the College, and M. Brassard, one of the Professors -- thinking that he might change for the better and deeming that there was promise in him, took upon themselves the further burden of his maintenance, and so enabled him to continue his studies and afterwards to pass on to the Greater Seminary. Moreover, M. Leprohon till his death, in 1844, and M. Brassard till the time of Chiniquy's apostasy, continued to take a fatherly interest in him, and the latter to believe in him long after all others had given him up as hopeless. On September 21, 1833, he was ordained priest by Archbishop Signaie in Quebec Cathedral, having been incorporated into that diocese. During the next few years he was assistant priest in three parishes in succession, but in 1838 he was made Curé of Beauport, a suburb of Quebec, and it was there that he inaugurated the temperance movement which brought him into great prominence. In 1842 he was transferred to his native place, Kamouraska, in the first instance as administrator under the now aged M. Varin, and shortly after as his successor.

This was the place of residence of his uncle Dionne, who was by no means glad to have him in the neighbourhood. His own account is that he signalized his tenure of office at Kamouraska by great doings which won for him the attachment of the people; still, he cannot deny that there was a strong party against him. And Mgr. Têtu's Document tells us that, whilst in that place, "he scandalized many families by his bad conduct," and that "it is absolutely certain that his uncle, Amable Dionne, forbade him to enter his house, and that many parents sent their children to confession to the neighbouring parishes, to protect them from the baneful contact of their Curé." He remained at Kamouraska till 1846, when one Sunday in September he astonished the congregation by announcing that he was leaving the place to join the Novitiate of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate at Longeuil. What was the reason?

In his Fifty Years he tells us that the ghastly spectacle of an all-pervading priestly immorality made him desire to fly to a place of refuge where he was assured it did not enter (p. 280). In his announcement to his people during the High Mass -- we learn from M. Mailloux (Document B), who tells us he has good authority for what he says -- he declared that he had long felt drawn to the religious life, but had resisted the call, which he could do no longer; besides it was bad for his soul to be so loved, honoured, and venerated as he was by his flock at Kamouraska. It was whispered, however, that there was another reason of a different kind which had most to do with the sudden change. "In 1846," says Document A, "tradition relates that he was caught in the very act of a sin against morals, and was thereupon obliged to leave the diocese of Quebec." This document acknowledges that the archives of Archbishop's House in Quebec contain no official document regarding the crime (which, if Chiniquy by leaving at once avoided a formal trial, there need not have been). But that there was some ground for the suspicion is implied in allusions to it in a private letter contained in Document E. On May 21, 1848, his faithful friend, M. Brassard, always so difficult to convince of the faults of his protégé, wrote to Bishop Bourget of Montreal a letter in which he begs the bishop to allow Chiniquy to be his locum-tenens for a short time at Longeuil, and, whilst endeavouring to forestall the bishop's probable objections, says: "I have reason for thinking that his bad conduct [mauvaise histoire] at Kamouraska is only known to his superiors and perhaps to one or two priests, for my brother the doctor, an intimate friend of the late J. Bte. Tache and of M. Dionne, the sworn enemies of M. Chiniquy, told me two years ago that these gentlemen could not refuse M. Chiniquy a certificate of morality, and that he himself, at that time a sworn enemy of priests, had only to reproach him with an excess of zeal. Besides, it seems to me that M. Chiniquy has paid heavily for his fault."