The instruction that Marguerite Bourgeoys and her companions provided to the children (initially boys as well as girls) and women of New France was foremost an education in faith that sprang from a profound religious impulse. The faith, which found expression in her life as well as in the words of hers that have been handed down and was the foundation of all her teaching, was a belief in the primary and overriding importance of the double commandment at the heart of both the Old and New Testaments: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself.  However education had, for Marguerite, other important functions than that of conveying religious instruction. Her first pupils were not the wealthy and powerful; they were the children of colonists in seventeenth-century Montreal, who had early faced the challenging tasks of earning a living for themselves and their families and of building a new country. To enable them to accomplish these tasks, she stressed the importance not only of "honourable work" but of the value and importance of their efforts.