An Ecclesiastical History, Ancient and Modern, Tr. by A. MacLaine (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: where they have power and property, but chiefly from paraguay 5 which belongs to them alone0. 0 While Father Labat was at Rome, Tamburini, at that time general of the Jesuits, asked him several questions relating to the progress of Christianity in America; to which, with equal courage and candor, he gave immediately this general answer: ' that the Gospel had made little or no real progress in that 1 country; that he had never met with one adult person among ' the Americans who could be regarded as a true proselyte to 1 Christianity; and that the missionaries could scarcely pretend ' to any other exploits (of a spiritual kind) than their having: ' baptized some children at the point of death." [Labat's Voyage en Espagne et en Italic, tom, viii.] He added, that, " in order to make the Americans Christians, it was previously " necessary to make them men." This bold Dominican, who had been himself a missionary in the American islands, was inclined to give Tamburini some seasonable advice concerning the immense wealth and authority that the Jesuits had acquired in those parts of the world; but the cunning old man eluded artfully this part of the conversation, and turned it upon another subject. Labat gave, on another occasion, a still greater proof of his undaunted spirit and presence of mind; for when, in an audience granted him by Clement XI. that pontiff praised, in pompous terms, the industry and zeal of the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in promoting the salvation of the Americans, and reproached the French with inactivity and indifference in a matter of such high importance, our resolute Dominican told him plainly, " that the Spaniards and Portuguese boasted of the success of their labors without any sort of foundation; since it was well known, that, instead of converts...