might have been done. It is true that some of the early charters mention one of the objects of settlement to be the conversion of the savages; it is true that some were from the beginning filled with a desire to treat them friendly and humanely, to deal with them justly. Still the great fact remains plain, that by far the larger part of the settlers in all the colonies never had any confidence that the Indians could be civilized or morally regenerated; believed that all efforts. for their conversion or elevation were vain; that they were treacherous and dangerous, and that the best thing was to exterminate them. It is probably true that a large part of the American people, and especially the large part of all those who have had contact with them, still feel so towards that small remnant of the race lingering along the fringe of our Western civilization. The Puritans generally regarded them as the children of the devil. Yet with all the recorded instances of the Indians' cruelty and wrath, as justifiable as in any who would defend their native land when they saw it slipping from their grasp, I find here and there all through our early records the most touching instances of hospitality, generosity, and the tenderest sympathy towards the settlers when in trouble, when lost in the pathless wilderness or beset by dangers.

Eliot had hardly begun his work in the church at Rocksborough, and mingled with the red men whom he saw every day in the village streets or skulking behind the trees as he walked along the paths, when the thought came to him that these were, as well as the English, children of God, and to them also the gospel should be made known. He believed, and it was not an uncommon opinion in his day, that these Indians were the lost tribes of Israel; that in process of time they made their way after the captivity from the extreme parts of the continent of Asia into America. He also believed that in their lan

guage he would find some traces of the Hebrew, which Eliot firmly believed was the language of heaven, in which by God's own voice the Old Testament had been given to man, and which would be forever the language of all the redeemed. These were the great theological reasons, besides his broad love for humanity, which led Eliot to be a missionary among the Indians. He was a good Hebrew scholar; but as he went on, we do not find that this helped him to understand the Indian language. He saw that the first thing to do was to learn that language. This he began in earnest about the year 1643. He found as he says "a pregnant witted young man, who had been servant in an English house, who pretty well understood our language, better than he could speak it, and well understood his own language, and hath a clear pronunciation. Him I made my interpreter. . . . And thus I came at it. We must not sit still and look for miracles: up and be doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and Pains through faith in Jesus Christ, will do any thing." Then began a story of missionary zeal and labor, unique in the history of religion, full of interest, even to any one who thinks the apostle's gifts might have been exerted in a nobler service.

In 1646 Eliot began to preach to the Indians in their own tongue. At first he had a service beginning with a prayer which was in English, "being not so farre acquainted with the Indian language as to express our hearts herein, before God or them." Then he preached to them in Indian, and after he had finished asked them if they understood all that was already spoken, and whether all of them in the wigwam did understand, or only some few; and they answered to this question with a multitude of voices, that they all of them did understand all that which was then spoken to them. One asked-how he might come to know Jesus Christ. Another

-whether Englishmen were ever so ignorant of Jesus Christ as themselves? Another-whether Jesus Christ could understand prayers in the Indian language? Another-how could there be an image of God, since it was forbidden in the second commandment? Another-whether if the father be naughty and the child good, God will be offended with that child, because in the second commandment it is said he visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children?

On the 28th of October, 1646, a large number assembled in the wigwam of a Chief Waban on the south side of the Charles River near Watertown, now in the town of Newton, then called Nonantum (which means rejoicing) where was the first Indian mission established in New England. The sermon was an hour and a quarter long. Eliot's text was Ezekiel xxxvii, 9, 10. "Son of man, say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God," etc. Wind was the Indian name of Waban, the great chief— and it seemed to his hearers as if Eliot were giving out of the Bible a direct call of the Lord to Waban; but Eliot declared that when he selected the text he never thought of it.

In 1647 Eliot writes: "They have begun to build a stone wall, and want tools faster than I can furnish them, and the women spin pretty well." In the summer of 1650, Natick (a place of hills) was chosen as a fit place for a town where the praying Indians could all be gathered into a town of their own. Eliot writes of the new enterprise: "We are in great want of tooles and many necessaries, and when we cannot goe we must be content to creep."

Eliot's heart was full of joy. He had found the better side of the Indian character; they venerated him as a great benefactor and father; he in vision saw the whole race coming into the Christian fold. His zeal and labor knew no rest. By day reaching them wherever he could by walk

ing or riding, on Sunday whenever he could venture to leave his own church, and on longer journeys whenever he could take the time, down as far as the Cape, up through Concord, as far as the woods of New Hampshire, wherever he could convey the gospel to a gathering of Indians. in their wigwams, or under some broad branching tree, there the apostle was to be found. He gave his strength and his money to the cause and faced danger and death with the spirit of the early martyrs. Often shelterless, wet to the skin all day long, halting to rest at night, wringing the water from his stockings, and with no fire, he speaks of it all with joy: "God stepped in and helpedfor I considered that word of God, 'Endure hardness as a good soldier of Christ."" And then when the day's work was done, long into the hours of the night, by his tallow candle, with an endurance and enthusiasm never surpassed, translating the Scriptures and works of piety for his Indian converts.

First came a little catechism in 1654; then the book of Genesis in 1655; also in the same year the Gospel of Matthew; a few of the Psalms in 1658; the whole of the New Testament in 1661; and the whole Bible in 1663; and then other books of devotion the last of his translations being Shephard's "Sincere Convert" in 1689.

One is appalled, humiliated, as he thinks of the remarkable labors of this wonderful man. Baxter, writing to him not long before his death, says: "The industry of Jesuits and friars, and their successes in Congo, Japan and China, shame us all save you."

The latter part of the seventeenth century witnessed in all the region about our northern lakes a wonderful display of the Jesuit missionary's zeal, his readiness for toil, hardships and death. Self was forgotten in utter devotion to his order; he was ready for any sacrifice, even to martyrdom. Allouez, Dablon and Marquette were

but a few of those missionaries who at the same time with Eliot were making unsurpassed missionary journeys and efforts to bring the Indians to a knowledge of the Christian faith.

Among the Jesuit missionaries of the Northwest, perhaps no one was more active than Father Gabriel Druillettes. On one of his expeditions he came from Quebec to Rogsbray as he called Rocksborough, where he was received by Governor Dudley, and made a visit to Eliot the year after he had established his mission at Natick.

In "The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay," Dr. George E. Ellis writes: "And now we have to present to ourselves a notable scene. The priest, a Jesuit on an embassy, named Le R. Pére Gabriel Dremillette de la Compagnie de Jesu writes: 'On my way I arrived. at Rogsbray where the minister named Eliot who was instructing some savages, received me to lodge with him as the night had overtaken me. He treated me with respect and affection, and prayed me to pass the winter with him.' Here is a scene which might well engage the pencil of an artist whose sympathies responded to the subject. Two men, then in the vigor of life, who were yet to pass their fourscore years in their loved but poorly rewarded labor for the savages, separated as the poles in their religious convictions, principles and methods, trained in antipathies, and zealous hostility to each other, are seen in simple, loving converse as kind host and responsive stranger guest. The humble sitting and working room of the Apostle Eliot in his modest cottage has the essentials of comfort, and there is a guest-chamber. Around the hearthstone are two or three Indian children, whom Eliot had near him as pupils, while he himself was a learner from some docile elders of the race, whose barbarous tongue he was seeking to acquire through grunts and gutturals, that he might set forth

in it the whole oracles of God. His hopeful experiment in the Indian village at Natick had recently been put on trial. The priest was, after his own different fashion, spending himself in his own work. The aims of both were the same; their methods widely unlike."

One can scarcely imagine the difficulties which beset Eliot in the work of translation into the Indian language. The story runs that when he came to translate the verse in Judges v. 28: "The mother of Sisera looked out at the window, and cried through the lattice," he could find no word for lattice. He asked one after another and then described it as framework, netting, wicker. At last they gave him a long, unpronounceable word; some years later when he understood their dialect better, he laughed outright to find he had translated it: "The mother of Sisera looked out at the window, and cried through the eel-pot."

But an end must come even to labors such as Eliot's. All through life he had been an example of the greatest temperance and charity. He lived most frugally. His charity was boundless so that Cotton Mather says: "He that will write of Eliot must write of his charity, or say nothing.... He did not put off his charity to be put in his last will as many who therein show that their charity is against their will; but he was his own administrator. He made his own hands his executors, and his own eyes his overseers."

His wife died in 1687; and in the church book is this record: "In y yeare my ancient dearly beloved wife dyed, I was sick to death, but the Lord was pleased to delay me, and keep in my service, which was but pure and weak." Mather says: "Before a vast confluence of the good people which were come to her funeral, I heard her aged husband who rarely wept say with tears over the coffin: 'Here lies my dear, faithful, pious, prudent, prayerful wife. I

shall go to her, and she not return to me.'"

Still with difficulty but with zeal and love he made his way up to the old meeting house; and once with feebleness and weariness leaning upon the arm of his deacon he said: "This is very like the way to heaven-'tis up hill. The Lord by his grace fetch us up." And spying a bush near by he added: "And truly there are thorns and briars in the way too."

In his later years, a sense of discouragement came over him very often as to the work among the Indians. He found the evils of civilization seemed to more than balance the grace of the gospel; and as more and more their bounds were encroached upon and limited, their anger and cruelty increased. The war with Philip seemed to arouse a determination that nothing but extermination would do. That haughty and powerful sachem would have nothing to do with Christianity. When Eliot offered to come and preach to him, he took hold of a button on his coat and said that he "cared for his gospel just as much as he cared for that button."

There are not many incidents in history more pathetic than when by an order of the General Court the Indians at Natick were removed to Deer Island, and Eliot met them to see them depart quietly and early on their journey. Writes one of his biographers: "That settlement toward which the heart of the good apostle had yearned alike through seasons of discouragement and hope, the foundations of which were laid by his own hands, and hallowed by his own prayers; where the tree of life, as he believed, was firmly rooted in the wilderness; where, by the patient labor of years, he had made the word of God understood, and had reared civil and social institutions; that settlement which, probably next to his own home, he loved better than anything else on earth,-is suddenly broken up, and its inhabitants are hurried away from their fields and homes, into

what is little better than an imprisonment. At the hour of their departure, the venerable man, on whose head more than seventy winters had shed their frosts, stands with them. . . to teach them the lesson, not of resentment against man, but of submission to God."

As the end drew near a friend asked him how he was, and he said: "Alas! I have lost everything; my understanding leaves me; my memory fails me; but I thank God, my charity holds out still; I find that rather grows than fails."

On the 21st of May, 1690, in the eighty-sixth year of his age, he calmly fell asleep. No missionary who ever labored for the gospel had a nobler zeal; no martyr who ever faced the flames had a more heroic spirit; no saint in the long written or unwritten canon had a saintlier soul. His missionary spirit and earnestness were as wise as St. Paul's; his charity and sympathy as sweet as St. Francis d'Assisi's; and as the years go on his becomes one of the most commanding figures among all the English Puritans who entered into the early life of America.

When Dean Stanley came to this country, and was asked what places would be of most interest to him, he said: "I want to see the place where the Pilgrims landed, and where the Apostle Eliot preached."

We sometimes think we must look to the far-off ages for our real saints. The life of Eliot proves to us they are as possible now; and when at Newton or Ponkapog or Natick or the school house at Jamaica Plain or the old grammar school on Kearsarge Avenue, or the old church at Eliot Square in Roxbury, we mark the scenes of his labors, or by the old burying ground at the corner of Eustis and Washington Streets in Boston we stand by his grave, let us take to heart the great lesson of the ages, and know that the call to saintship has not ceased, and its possibilities have not died out.

H

E was a small man when at the high tide of life, but death, taking him in the beginning of old age, made him seem tiny and, smoothing out the crow's feet and putting here and there the mysterious touch of youth, that atoning grace the dread visitant sometimes grants, laid him in his coffin with a wrapping of resurrected boyhood about his person. His gray hair curled over his ears, much as it had in its tow colored days, while the fresh color and the pervasive sweetness of his smile assisted the illusion. Old and young filed through the room where he lay, leaned over, and looked and marvelled at the transformation. Sometimes a tear dropped on his folded hands or made a spot on the immaculate broadcloth of his coat. The air was heavy with sorrow, and yet there was no father nor mother, wife nor child, no person with any tie of blood to mourn his loss. There was a hush within the house, crowded to its utmost capacity, and through the long veranda, where men stood closely, and out on the grass plot of the front yard, where an old dog lay in dejected isolation, only moving to paw a fly off his ear now and then. A bee flew booming in and whizzed against a drawn down window shade, and the distant sound of mowing came from across the lowlands to emphasize the suspension of all activity here. A few blocks away the flag drifted at half mast on Academy Green; for the name on the coffin plate was that of the principal who for thirty years had shaped the character and destiny of the town's leading citizens. "David Ostrander, aged sixty years," the silver words said; but the boys had always called. him "Little David” behind his back.

To the community at large he had long been simply the Professor, a title synonymous with help and sustaining force and pervasive kindness.

Old, gnarled and work-twisted, Mrs. Sickles, the washerwoman, in the dark corner behind the melodeon sat and pushed down the fingers of her cotton gloves and counted backward the times those stiff folded hands in the coffin had helped her over hard places in life. It was a heterogeneous company which sat ranged along the wall and crowded closely on camp chairs, intense and silent spectators of this last scene in the drama of a life lived out. Each was passing in mental review his own association with the past of the dead. A tall pale woman with a face like a statue of accusing justice was reviewing an episode of her own, when the Professor had by wise counsel helped her to conceal a domestic disaster which publicity would have converted into a tragedy. More than one black-coated figure crowded into the hall, blew his nose with masculine stoicism, recalling the aid which had made his own future of past uncertainty and struggle into a prosperous present of professional success. had long been the proud boast of Wiltwyck that no boy or girl with courage or brains need go without a higher education. There was always the Professor as the deus ex machina. His theory was that there were deposits of power in the form of money in every community sufficient to turn out the most finished products of educated citizenship, and that a needed work was the direction of that force toward the proper material, always at hand in the public schools. So it had come about that for long years a procession of youth had filed

It