Colporteurs, Night and Day

This is a picture of Paul Villard, MA.MD DDS as it says on his 1927 book Up to the Light which I just purchased off abebooks.

Unlike the book about French Methodist, written in 1907, it exists in a few places. Two copies were available online; Mcgill has one and so does Westmount Library.

I’m glad I bought it though because if I have to write Edith Nicholson and her work at Westmount Methodist I need to know this, how Protestant Missionaries in Quebec felt bout “Romish” French Canadians. It is a great story, I think, a Nature Nurture debate story, Evangelicals want to convert people and Eugenicists think it is worthless to do this. Edith will meet up with Miss Carrie Derick suffragist and supporter of eugenics who is quoted as saying ‘inferior’ humans tend to have large families, which sounds very much like a slur against French Canadians.

Edith will ask her why bother to teach anyone then?  And Edith will explain that her ancestors, the Isle of Lewis Scots had large families…

But in the “you learn something new every day” department.. growing up in Montreal, I noticed that many many many apartment buildings had a sign in the lobby, or in the vestibule with the buzzers, “pas de colporteurs’.. I remember thinking it sounded like Cole Porter, (although was more a Monkees kind of girl.)

And I must have asked because I thought I learned it meant, no peddlers. But colporteurs are a special kind of door to door salesmen in Quebec. Protestant evangelicals.

Colporteurs means hawkers, too. Of course.
Hmm. Anyway…

Edith’s Story or The 1910 Diary of Edith Nicholson: Confirmed Spinster is in the works at www.tighsolas.ca/page11.pdf.pdf

which is a follow up to Threshold Girl at www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

 

The Loom of God

Colin Firth in A Month in the Country, where he plays a WWI veteran who stammers, like in the King’s Speech.

January 18, 1918, it is written at the top of the yellowed newspaper clipping. The Gazette. On top of that in pencil “A very brilliant speaker.” Edith’s handwriting.

The Headline: War is Grim but Needed Blessing.

Dr. William J. Dawson, formerly of London, England and now of Newark is the man.

“In Saint James Methodist Church last night, William J. Dawson preached the gospel at once terrifying and comforting that the nations are being redeemed and regenerated through war. (With the help of cosmic processes.)

Dr. Dawson’s sermon was taken from Luke XXL.

The Minister admitted that while we look down at the mutilated men lying on the fields of France and Flanders, the doctrine that war is working for redemption and regeneration seems a terrible one.

One had to look up to see the loom of God weaving with many a blood-stained thread.

Peace was the mother of prosperity and best for the individual development, but what only a very few men have been able to see, that civilized nations were apt to become over-ripe with a prolongued peace, and at last rotten.

Just as vultures are ministers of purification, the eagles of war did not gather in an age and under conditions were the moral health of the world was perfect. Before war came there was always corruption of thought, some decadence of morals, a materialism which mistook luxury as the prime end of life, a weakening of the spiritual ideals of nations.

Among the signs of the coming redemption the speaker mentioned the downfall of the czar in Russia. (This following part is underlined by Edith.)

It is the testimony of history, again and again, that the fire of revolution, on behalf of liberty, once lit, never goes out. It may be trodden down, it may be drenched in blood, but it never goes out.

Other signs mentioned were the death of the party spirit, a unity of sentiment and purpose through the British Empire, and among free nations, prohibition, arrived or coming soon. (sic). And countless other reforms that without the war could not have been achieved.”

…Well, I don’t think Vera Brittain agreed after losing her brother and boyfriend.

To think of all the great books that weren’t written, great paintings not brushed on canvas, great leaders not realized, great ideas not generated, because of this slaughter.

Chances are, because you are alive today, no ancestor of yours fought in WWI.

Edith Nicholson, too, years later, after living through two wars (and being Commandant of the Quebec Red Cross in WWII, told my husband, her great nephew, that wars are always “all about money.”

A few months later, a family friend, Percy Tucker would die in battle, after re-enlisting. Just before Armistace.

I wrote about it in an earlier blog.

The Ignatieff’s had already come to Richmond, I guess, by this time. Not sure, though. This might account for Edith underlining this part. There are other Nicholson clippings about the Russian Revolution, however.