Here we get a glimpse of the really kind and generous heart that beat under the chilling exterior of Edward Blake.
In the year 1875 there occurred in Montreal an event which caused a good deal of ill-feeling between the English and French sections of the population throughout the province of Quebec. This was the epilogue of the famous Guibord case. Joseph Guibord was a member of a society known as _L'Institut Canadien_. In 1858 the Roman Catholic bishop of Montreal issued a pastoral letter exhorting the members of this institute to purge their library of certain works regarded as immoral, and decreeing several penalties, including deprivation of the sacraments and refusal of ecclesiastical burial, in the event of disobedience. The library committee returned a reply to the effect that they were the judges of the morality of their books, and, further, that there were no immoral works in their library. { 111} The matter appears to have lain dormant for some years. In 1865 several members of the Institute, including Guibord, appealed to Rome against the action of the bishop, but in vain. Shortly afterwards Guibord died, and as he had adhered to his membership in the Institute despite the bishop's _mandement_, ecclesiastical burial was refused. His widow had recourse to the law, and ultimately the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ordered the burial of Guibord's remains in the Roman Catholic cemetery. The reasons upon which this judgment is based are that the Church of Rome in the province of Quebec, while lacking some of the features of an established church, differs materially before the law from voluntary religious bodies; that certain privileges, such as the right to collect tithes, secured to it by law, beget corresponding obligations towards the laity. One obligation is to give ecclesiastical sepulchre to its members. The proceedings against Guibord had been legally insufficient to deprive him of this right; he had not been excommunicated personally and by name, but merely lay under a general excommunication.
The first attempts of Guibord's friends to bury the body in accordance with this { 112} decision were frustrated by force; but on November 16, 1875, under a strong military escort, the remains of Joseph Guibord were finally laid to rest in the Côte des Neiges cemetery, in the presence of a sullen assemblage. This forcible, albeit legal, proceeding was deeply felt by many who needed not to take lessons in loyalty to the Queen from the members of the Institut Canadien, but who could not see why the Church of Rome should be debarred the right, supposed to appertain to every society, of determining its own conditions of membership, nor understand why the friends of a man should seek on his behalf, after his death, the ministrations of that Church whose teachings, during his lifetime, he had voluntarily despised.