# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII.
MISSIONARY EFFORTS AMONG THE INDIANS.
I. General Remarks on Aims and Methods in the Work. — II. Roman Catholic Missionaries. — III. Protestant Missionaries.
In the Introductory pages of this volume a brief reference was made to the fact that many earnest and costly efforts had been exerted by the white colonists of this continent to offset and atone for, by benefits and blessings, the injuries they had inflicted upon the natives. The subject of Christian missions for their conversion, civilization, and instruction was deferred for this more deliberate treatment. So large and comprehensive a theme as this, with all its variety of material and interest, can be dealt with here only with a conciseness hardly consistent with its importance. It will be convenient to distribute the contents of this chapter under the three sections indicated in its title.
I. General Remarks on Aims and Methods of Missions. — The severest test to which the Christian religion has ever been subjected is not that of a critical searching by scholars of its historical documents; nor that of an acute, speculative, and often irreverent philosophy; nor even that of an estimate of its practical effect upon the characters and lives of its professors. The sternest and sharpest trial of Christianity has come from the attempts made by its instrumentality to instruct, reclaim, convert, indoctrinate, and redeem a race of heathen savages. The trial on quite ​another field has been a severe one, and as yet without decisive or satisfactory results, in the attempts to Christianize civilized heathen, — those reclaimed from barbarism, but still pagan (as we call them), — and the Orientals who hold to more or less adequate religions of their own. But it is with the efforts to Christianize barbarians, savages, that we are now concerned. We accept at the start the formidable obstacles to be encountered in offering to savage people a religion which had its birth and development under a highly advanced civilization, and which requires and implies a state of society intelligent, refined, and elevated, for its existence and exercise. With a qualification more or less emphatic to be made for the opinions and aims of the Jesuit missionaries, all who have labored in this arduous field have strongly and decidedly affirmed their full conviction that civilization must precede, or step by step accompany, every effort to Christianize our Indians. Of course it was understood that the two agencies were to be mutually helpful. But, as a general rule, the religious lesson, the condemnation of the faith which the savage was supposed to hold, and the urgent proffer of a substitute for it, have preceded any actual redemption of the savage from barbarism to a stage of civilization. The Jesuit view of missionary duty and success consisted with the allowance of a great deal of undisturbed savagery, ignorance, and intellectual torpidity. The Protestant idea has always involved the absolute necessity of civilization for Christianization. Christianity implies a civilized state for man. Its institutions, principles, and occupations of life, — its habits, virtues, charities, can coexist only with civilized people. It first appeared among a civilized community, with letters, arts, and laws, and is vitally dependent upon them. The Christian religion also is eminently, and above all other of its qualities beside those which concern its individual influences, a missionary religion. It once had but a dozen voices to proclaim it, a dozen laborers in its ​vineyard. Through them it went forth from a despised province of the Roman empire, even beyond its farthest bounds, to make disciples in faith of those not held in law or tribute to its sway. It is a profoundly serious and interesting subject for those responsible for its wise discussion, to account for the comparative lack of energy and success in modern missionary enterprises when set in contrast with those of the earlier Christian ages. Is it that the missionaries have lost their zeal, their fervor, their skill and power, in their work; or that what they offer, without much response of acceptance or gratitude from the subjects of their labor, is not the simple original boon of blessing once so triumphant in its peaceful conquests?
More than three centuries have passed through all of which the solemn avowals of nations calling themselves Christians, and claiming as such lofty prerogatives, have recognized, in obligation and purpose, the duty of making fellow-Christians of our aboriginal tribes. These nations have had large resources and appliances. They could cross mysterious and overshadowed oceans. They could take possession of vast reaches of territory, and assert easily and successfully their towering and divine right over wild lands and wild people. Making sure of conquest and possession, they palliated or justified all that there was of incidental woe or wrong, all the spoiling and tragic suffering of the heathen, by the supreme and ultimate purpose of blessing and saving them. There was no misgiving as to the fearfulness of the doom awaiting them hereafter simply because they were heathen and had had the direful misfortune of being born under a curse. In view of that, any infliction visited on them during their lifetime was of trivial consequence; and all outrages and enormities practised upon them were only blessed means of discipline, if committed with an ultimate view to their conversion. The creed of the invaders embraced two tenets, — one, the desperate condition of the natives; the other, the solemn ​obligation of Christians to save them through a boon which Christians could impart. Both these tenets pointed to the same duty of securing their conversion.
With the instigation of that master and mighty motive, the redeeming units or millions of our human race from an appalling doom, what has been accomplished in positive results by all Christian effort? Unquestionably there have been results which candor and charity and appreciative estimates may plead with a varying measure of satisfaction; there have been translations of the Scriptures, and good books, grammars, dictionaries, and primers, for sacred instruction; there have been missionary posts, schools, churches, and converted and educated native preachers, with their native flocks. But how limited, inadequate, and unsatisfactory in the sum are all these results! Every branch and communion of the Christian Church — Roman, Puritan, Moravian, Episcopal, Quaker, Baptist, Methodist — has established and maintained missionary labors among our Indians. No one of these Christian fellowships — with a possible exception, soon to be recognized, in the work of Jesuit missionaries — has ever found self-satisfaction in its success. Nearly every effort made by them, after signs of promise and reward, has failed, most of them with accompaniments of deep sadness and overwhelming disaster.
Perhaps the very best relief or palliation to be found for all the shortcomings, the wasted labors, the failures of Christians in their purposed efforts to convert the heathen here or elsewhere, is to be spoken in this confession; namely, that during all these ages a constant and earnest debate, sometimes a very passionate and angry one, has been going on among Christians themselves — the very best and most intelligent of them — as to, What is Christianity; what makes a Christian; what is it to be a Christian? This question has been put and kept in a sort of chancery suit; and it is by no means out of court yet, nor really carried up by consent to the court of last resort. And ​probably the utmost and the best which the wisest and saintliest persons among us would claim is, that they have very slowly been growing to comprehend for themselves what Christianity really is. These radical differences of opinion among Christians themselves as to the substance, the meaning, the work, and the effective fruits and triumphs of their own religion cover the whole field of opinion, means, efforts, agencies, and desired results involved in it. Is the religion a very simple or a very abstruse one in its elements, statements, and principles? Does it appeal to the common understanding and reasoning powers of man, or does it envelop itself in mysteries, in perplexing doctrines which are to be announced on authority and accepted with implicit, unquestioning assent? May it be directly received and appropriated, in its lessons and spirit and full effects, by each individual; or does it require, to make it effective, the instrumentalities of a priesthood, with commission, functions, organization, institutions, and a human mediumship and an ecclesiastical system? And then as to discipleship of this religion, such as entitles one to the name and secures to him the benefits of it, — what are the essential terms and conditions? The alternative answers to this question of course are the holding or assenting to certain tenets for belief and conviction; or the forming of a certain character and the leading a certain course of life. But this answer does not cover the whole question, as it still leaves open the whole scope of the inquiry whether the belief required is simply that which will have a practical effect on character and conduct, or a professed assent to doctrines and dogmas which lie wholly out of the range of our knowledge, and which cannot be put to any test for proving their actual verity, but must be accepted through the assumed authority of the teacher. How earnestly and passionately these vital questions have been discussed by those who have been equals in sincerity, intellectual vigor, and ability to form unbiassed opinions, and into what sharp ​and even embittered parties differences of conviction have driven them, needs no recognition here.
And if the question, “What is Christianity, in the substance of its teaching as vital truth, and in the effect to be produced by it upon life?” has proved a puzzling and a distracting one to the most intelligent and cultivated of our race, what must be its perplexity when an attempt is made to teach it to barbarians, and, as the word is, to convert them to it? If, while progress appears to be making here or there in Christianizing a tribe by one school of missionaries, the barbarians come to learn that another class of missionaries, professing the same religion, condemn their first teachers as false deceivers, and offer quite different lessons and doctrines, what must be the consequence? Over and over again has that perplexity been visited upon the heathen in various regions, but especially here among our Indians. As to sincerity in belief and purpose, it would be a simple piece of impertinence to attempt to decide which had the most of it or the more of it, the Jesuit Father or the Puritan and Moravian missionary. They were both alike sincere to the very core of their hearts; and yet they looked upon each other as fatally deceived and as misleading and endangering their converts. Frequent references are to be found in our missionary literature to the intense dislike and disapprobation, and the dread and horror, and even hate, which the Catholic and the Protestant missionaries among our Indians have felt and expressed towards each other. Evidently each party thought that the other might better have left the Indians in their natural heathenism than have taken them out of it into deadly heresy. As between the parties themselves, of course not a word is to be said here; it is the natural and inevitable effect upon the Indians of such distracting teaching that we have in view. When our New England fishing-smacks went to trade or our soldiers to fight with Indians on our Eastern coasts, they fell in with natives who were under ​the training of the French priests. Our people told these natives that their priests, though calling themselves Christians, were deceivers and idolaters, and were luring them to everlasting perdition. The priests taught their converts to reply that the New Englanders were wicked heretics, children of hell themselves, into which they would carry all who trusted in them. Occasions there doubtless were in which an Indian trained by a French Jesuit, and one trained by a Dutch Dominie or a New England Puritan, might have rested in the woods to discuss or quarrel over their creeds, — affording us a reduced copy of Milton's angels, when they “reasoned high, and found no end, in wandering mazes lost.”
This is no place or occasion for polemical discussions or for entering into religious controversies. Our concern is only with facts and incidents which present themselves as we engage with that profoundly interesting subject in its historical relations, — the attempts to Christianize our savages. Let us go back for a moment to first principles.
The Author and Teacher of the Christian religion gave utterance to the most sublime and august conception which has ever had expression on this earth for all time: it was the conception of one world-wide and universal religion, comprehensive of the whole human race; independent of time, place, or condition. His commission and promise to his messengers were: Go out over all the world and preach the gospel to every creature: go and teach all nations. I will be with you as you do it. No unanointed lips ever spoke forth such an utterance as that. And the message was described as one of “Glad tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” As that religion would comprehend all people, it would unite and benefit them all.
Three very simple but most essential conditions are implied in that commission: first, that the religion taught should be intelligible to all persons of our average humanity; second, that it should be practicable, so as to be ​complied with; third, that it should produce good effects, and prove a blessing. There should be nothing in the message but what the simple and well-meaning could understand when spoken; what it required and prescribed in character, conduct, and way of life should admit of being put into practice in any climate or country, in any age, by every class of people; and this practical trial of the religion should have a direct effect of good, with benefits and blessings for all. Such are the primary essentials of a universal religion. No idealizing of any teaching with the institutions into which it should organize itself could enhance the attractions or the expected practical benefits of such a religion offered to men. Language (and that the most simple) and sympathetic benevolence would seem to be the only agencies needed as a medium in communicating it successively to those all over the globe who could be reached by its missionaries. Here again we have a problem most worthy of engaging, for the instruction of all, the thought and wisdom of the responsible teachers of truth, to explain to us whether the neglect to keep in view one, two, or all three of those essentials of a world-wide religion is chargeable for the very limited success of modern missionary effort.
The rich experience gathered from missionary labors among the heathen here and elsewhere has drawn out very distinctly and sharply among professed Christians a radical difference of opinion and estimate applied to their religion, which we may state in plain and familiar terms as amounting to this: one class of persons will interpret and value and teach Christianity, as the means of saving souls one by one, redeeming them from guilt and an endless doom of woe; another class look away from this individual work of Christianity save as each will have a share in a common good, and identify Christianity with a general influence of civilizing, humanizing, refining, elevating, and reforming effects on whole communities. The one class will, so to speak, view this work of individual conversion and ​salvation as in this respect like the inoculation of persons, one by one, to secure them from a terrible sweeping pestilence, or like the escape of a favored few in the long-boat from a crowded company on a sinking ship. The other class will survey a whole community, and judge of the evidence of the presence and effect of Christianity by the amount of virtue, justice, righteousness, wide-spreading, humanizing, and elevating influences and charities in it.
Now, according as different persons have in their minds the one or the other of these views as to what Christianity means, what it is to effect, and what are the evidences of its presence and influence, will they decide very differently upon the matter of fact as to what has been accomplished by missionary labor in Christianizing the Indians. We can turn to many pages written in a devout, cheering, and hopeful tone, filled with details, statistics, personal narratives and proofs, which confidently assure the reader that a glorious, blessed, and benedictive work has been done by Christian missions among the Indians, crowning them with a success fully proportioned to the faith and cost and toil spent upon them. We can turn to other pages, not always, though it may be for the larger part, written by sceptics, the indifferent, and the worldly, — for some of them come from thoroughly good, sincere, and philanthropic witnesses, — affirming that Christianity has not on any extensive field made any perceptible change in the manners, characters, and lives of savages. Those who are but moderately versed in the missionary literature of recent times are well aware that while the work of which it is the record assures the confidence of its supporters in the generous supply of funds for sustaining it, “men of the world,” so called, are more than dubious about its rewards.
We can refer this discordance of judgment and testimony among discreet and sincere persons only to that radical difference of estimate just stated, as to what is Christianity, its real effective work, and the evidence of ​it. The count of a number of persons who individually, one by one, have been converted and “found salvation,” a church, a Sunday-school, native teachers, prayer-meetings, etc., established among a tribe or settlement of Indians, are satisfactory evidence to one class of Christianization. Other observers look on. They ask this question: Suppose the white man and all his influence, supplies, and helps were withdrawn to-day from that Indian community, and it were left wholly to itself, would not the surviving element of ignorance and barbarism in it very soon overbear and kill out its feeble stage of Christian civilization?
The case is presented thus: The Christian missionary comes to the savages with the evangel, the gospel, the glad tidings of great joy. His first intelligible message to them is that they are a wrecked and ruined race, born under a curse, and destined to an appalling doom, to live forever in suffering; and he offers them a way of escape, one by one. Now the Indians certainly had no previous knowledge that they were in such an awful condition, with such a dreadful destiny before them; and so far as they bring a questioning, reasoning mind to bear upon the subject, the explanation given to them of how they came to be in such an awful plight — of a race cursed for the sin of the first man — may be wholly unsatisfactory. So far, the announcement made to them cannot be called “good news,” whether coming, as it did alike, from Jesuit or from Protestant. The gospel quality of the message came in afterwards, as applied to the means of escape, the way of relief, from their curse and doom. Here the Jesuit and the Protestant were found by the Indians to part company. The one held up a book as the means of deliverance; the other, the mediation of the Church. The priest himself, not only as the teacher of simple lessons, but as a personal medium of sacramental graces, was the essential agent for securing salvation to the Indians. In the nature of things it was utterly impossible for the savage ​to understand how the drops of baptismal water on his forehead, and the fragment of the holy wafer, remedied his foredoomed subjection to the eternal pit of woe. He accepted the relation between the evil and its relief on the word of the priest. And we may recognize, in effect, the same perplexity for the savage in trying to apprehend the curative process wrought by the Puritan creed as drawn from a most mysterious book, which, though held in the hand of a man, was made and given by the infinite spirit above.
Loskiel, in his “History of the Moravian Mission in North America,” gives the following as the address of the Missionary Rauch to a tribe of Indians in Shekomeko, on the borders of New York and Connecticut, in 1740: —
“I came hither from beyond the great ocean, to bring unto you the glad tidings that God, our Creator, so loved us that he became a man, lived thirty years in this world, went about doing good to all men, and at last for our sins was nailed to the cross, on which he shed his precious blood, and died for us, that we might be delivered from sin, saved by his merits, and become heirs of everlasting life. On the third day he rose again from the dead, ascended into Heaven, where he sits upon his throne of glory, but yet is always present with us, though we see him not with our bodily eyes; and his only desire is to show his love unto us,” etc.
The missionary says he perceived to his sorrow that his words “excited derision,” and that his hearers “openly laughed him to scorn.” Yet persevering steadfastly upon this doctrinal or dogmatic interpretation of the gospel as the basis for preaching and the work of conversion, the Moravians soon began to have such a measure of success as gratified them. Less than any class of Indian missionaries holding in substance the same dogmatic creed, did they attempt to deal with its metaphysical or perplexing elements. They tried not to overtask the intelligence of their rude and simple hearers. From their church register, under date of 1772, it appears that they had baptized ​seven hundred and twenty converts. Nor did they by any means perform that rite on the easy terms with which the Jesuit Fathers were satisfied. They required of the candidates protracted, patient, and intentionally thorough previous discipline as evidence that they understood and appreciated the significance of the rite, and consistency of feeling and conduct after it. The Moravians were especially faithful in didactic, moral teachings, in purity, sincerity, and integrity, — making changed habits and manners essential. The Moravians also insisted, as much as did the Friends, on peace principles. Their converts were to be non-combatants. To this we are to ascribe in large part the trials and sufferings and removals to which they were subjected. The heathen Indians despised them as cowards, lacking in patriotism, and the whites believed they were secretly treacherous.
Apart from all deeper tests and the preferences resting upon our individual views and beliefs, we may freely admit and even commend the great advantages which the Roman Catholic forms and methods have over the bare and didactic teachings of Protestants, in effecting what is called the “conversion” of savages. The ceremonies, the altar ritual, the emblems and symbols of the old Church — often as easy of exhibition and as readily furnished in a wilderness, and really perhaps more imposing and impressive in the rude forest surroundings, in groves, on lake and river shores, than anywhere else — would be attractive, even awing, to simple, childlike people. The very few and the very elemental lessons, positively spoken, never argued, never explained, in which the accompanying teachings were conveyed, asking only assent and implicit faith, would not make a severe exaction on the savage mind. That mind was called a docile one because of the facility with which it yielded its assent, — all the readier, as the Jesuits themselves allowed, in exact proportion to the lack of comprehension of what was taught. Father ​Garzes, on his mission in Upper California, carried a canvas banner, with the Virgin Mary attractively drawn on one side, and the Devil stirring the flames of hell on the other. This he unfurled when he reached an Indian village. The natives of course exclaimed, of one side, “It is good;” of the other, “It is bad.” The more glaring a painting the better was it suited for use in a mission chapel. Perouse said the picture of hell in the church of San Carlos had done a mighty work of conversion, where Protestantism, without images or ceremonies, would have been powerless. The other side of the same banner-picture, which presented the charms of Paradise, was wholly ineffective. The Indians pronounced it “tame.” Langsdorff tells us of the wonders wrought “by a figure of the Virgin Mary represented as springing from the coronal of leaves of the great American aloe, instead of the ordinary stem.”
The Roman Church has been in a measure compelled — and shall we not say justified? — in its abundant and various use of the scenic, dramatic, symbolic, and ritual element in addressing such masses of the ignorant, rude, and simple in deserts and wildernesses. These are the same scenic and ritualistic elements which, lifted by refining tastes and elegant appliances, with vestments, music, and processionals, have the highest æsthetic effect for the most cultivated.
Father Palon's first baptism on one of his missions in California must have exhibited an interesting family group. An Indian presented himself with a mother and three daughters, to all four of whom he was the husband, and each of the daughters offered a son by him for baptism. The infants were nearly of the same age. The dependence upon their ritual altar furnishing must, however, at times have embarrassed the good Fathers. We read that after De Soto's disastrous battle at Mobile, in October, 1540, in which all his sacramental furniture was burned, the priests ​and officers held a council to consider if they might substitute the meal of Indian corn for wheat flour for the Mass. It was decided that they could not. The vestments and ornaments having all been destroyed, some dressed skin-robes and rude altar-trappings were provided. On Sundays and holy days the introductory prayers were offered; but the consecration was omitted. This was called the “dry Mass.” Yet simple as was the rite of baptism, we frequently read in the frank relations of the Jesuits that the savages refused to have it performed on themselves and their children, regarding it as an evil charm. Captain Bossu, of the French Marines, in his Travels through Louisiana (1759), says: —
“I saw a Choctaw Indian recently baptized, and, because he afterwards had no luck in hunting, supposed himself bewitched, and made complaint to Father Lefèvre, who had converted and initiated him. With angry excitement, he demanded release from the enchantment by the annulling of the ceremony. The priest made some show of complying with the demand. The Indian soon after killed a deer, which made him very happy.”
There were embarrassments also occasionally met by the priests when they attempted to explain their mysteries to an acute-minded savage. We have a graphic account of an interview of Cortes and his priest with Montezuma, in the effort to attempt his conversion. The barbarian emperor accepted Cortes's account of the creation, as conformed to his people's traditions; but the abstruse doctrines and mysteries of the Christian faith announced to him baffled him. Especially was his mind exercised when Cortes, after a sharp reproach upon him for human sacrifices and the cannibal eating of human flesh, undertook to explain to him the doctrine of transubstantiation in the holy wafer at the Mass. That, said the emperor, was eating God, — a far more monstrous act than the eating of a human being.
A Jesuit Father, writing of a famous chief, Therouet, who died at Montreal, says he was a true Christian, and as ​such was buried with pomp and with the rites of the Church; “for when the passion of Christ crucified by the Jews was explained to him he said to me, ‘Oh! had I been there, I would have revenged his death and brought away their scalps!’ ”
A good illustration of the perplexity of mind in an intelligent savage, caused by the proffer of religious instruction by the various Christian sects, is found in the calm judgment uttered by a high chief in the Red River region. Catholics and Protestants had rival missions around him. The chief said to Father Derveau, the priest: “You tell us there is but one religion that can save us, and that you have got it. Mr. Cowley, the Protestant minister, tells us that he has got it. Now, which of you white men am I to believe?” After a long pause, — smoking his pipe, and talking with his people, — he turned round and said: “I will tell you the resolution I and my people have come to; it is this: when you both agree, and travel the same road, we will travel with you; till then, however, we will adhere to our own religion: we think it the best.”
Missionaries had been stationed, Catholic and Protestant, for more than thirty years, twenty-seven in number, within the Red River region of two hundred miles, at a charge on Christian benevolence of £50,000 sterling. The judgment is that the labor had been nearly fruitless, the system defective, the method radically wrong. The Hudson Bay agent and explorer, Samuel Hearne, in his “Journey from the Prince of Wales's Fort to the Northern Ocean,” in 1771, gives the following account of his meeting with some Copper River Indians, and of the impression he made upon them: —
“As I was the first Englishman whom they had ever seen, and in all probability might be the last, it was curious to see how they flocked about me, and expressed as much desire to examine me from top to toe as a European naturalist would a nondescript animal. They, however, found and pronounced me to be a perfect human ​being, except in the color of my hair and eyes. The former, they said, was like the stained hair of a buffalo's tail; and the latter, being light, were like those of a gull. The whiteness of my skin, also, was in their opinion no ornament, as they said it resembled meat which had been sodden in water till all the blood was extracted. On the whole, I was viewed as so great a curiosity in this part of the world, that, during my stay there, whenever I combed my head, some or other of them never failed to ask for the hairs that came off, which they carefully wrapped up, saying, ‘When I see you again you shall again see your hair!’ ”
The author adds the following sketch of the character and religion of his guide to the Copper River, the Indian chief Matonabbee, who, his father dying when he was young, lived for many years with, and was educated after a fashion by, Governor Norton, of the Hudson Bay service, at Prince of Wales's Fort: —
“It was during this period that he gained a knowledge of the Christian faith; and he always declared that it was too deep and intricate for his comprehension. Though he was a perfect bigot with respect to the arts and tricks of Indian jugglers, yet he could by no means be impressed with a belief of any part of our religion, nor of the religion of the Southern Indians, who have as firm a belief in a future state as any people under the sun. He had so much natural good sense and liberality of sentiment, however, as not to think that he had a right to ridicule any particular sect on account of their religious opinions. On the contrary, he declared that he held them all equally in esteem, but was determined, as he came into the world, so he would go out of it, without professing any religion at all. Notwithstanding his aversion from religion, I have met with few Christians who possessed more good moral qualities, or fewer bad ones. It is impossible for any man to have been more punctual in the performance of a promise than he was: his scrupulous adherence to truth and honesty would have done honor to the most enlightened and devout Christian, while his benevolence and universal humanity to all the human race, according to his abilities and manner of life, could not be exceeded by the most illustrious personage now on record.”
​“He could tell a better story of our Saviour's birth and life than one half of those who call themselves Christians yet he always declared to me that neither he nor any of his countrymen had an idea of a future state. He was an advocate for universal toleration, and I have seen him several times assist at some of the most sacred rites performed by the Southern (Canada) Indians, apparently with as much zeal as if he had given as much credit to them as they did. And with the same liberality of sentiment he would, I am persuaded, have assisted at the altar of a Christian Church, or in a Jewish synagogue; not with a view to reap any advantage himself, but merely, as he observed, to assist others who believed in such ceremonies.”
This interesting person kept eight wives in good order.
Let us quote briefly the judgment passed by a missionary of one Christian fellowship upon his brethren of another communion. The Roman Catholic Bishop Taché, having referred to the zeal with which Protestant missions had been conducted in the Northwest, cautiously qualifies his estimate thus: —
“I say the zeal. The word may surprise, and I may be asked my reason for using it. ‘But have these Protestant ministers zeal?’ If by zeal he meant that sweet and divine flame which consumes all that is merely human, that sacred fire which enwraps the heart to the extent that a man wholly forgets himself that he may entirely consecrate himself to the search, to the preaching, of the truth, to the sanctification of his fellow-creatures, I will say without hesitation, No! the ministers of error have no zeal, and they cannot have it. If, on the other hand, for having zeal it suffices, for one motive or another, to spend in the service of any cause a vast amount of energy and efforts, alike for giving prevalence to this cause and for combating that which is opposed to it, above all that which opposes it with the force of repulsion which the truth has against error, — then I will say that these men have very much of zeal. Some of them bring to their ministry an ardor, an activity, sometimes even a devotedness, certainly worthy of a better cause. Would to Heaven that they had not so much zeal! that ​the infinitely good God would arrest such as these on the way to Damascus! that the hand so gentle and so strong of his infinite pity might cause to fall from the vision of their hearts the scales which hinder their sight of the true light, which would thus make them chosen vessels to preach to the gentiles the veritable gospel of the grace of God.”
These earnest words, in which one kind of zeal seems to outrun any kind of charity, may well introduce the second section of our large theme.
II. Roman Catholic Missionaries among the Indians. — We have to recognize the fact that the whole world-wide communion representing the Roman Church has found vastly more encouragement and satisfaction in its missionary work among the Indians and elsewhere than have the Protestant folds. True, the Protestants have no secrets about such matters. Everything of success or failure becomes public. It may be that in the Roman Church discipline and authority suppress what it would be discouraging to divulge, and that we do not know of shortcomings and failures. However this may be, it is worthy of emphatic statement, that in no one of the voluminous and minute reports returned to their superiors by the priests is there to be found any confession of regret, of disappointment of expectation, of unrewarded labor, — any looking back to easy and cheering fields from the most lonely, gloomy, and saddened wildernesses of stern exposure, peril, and toil. There are no more sunny, hopeful, and grateful laborers than these hard-tasked missionaries. All of them seemed to wear rose-colored glasses. These devoted men, absolutely secluded from all the exciting and engrossing interests and incidents of public and civilized life, with no personal or political ambitions, no means for self-indulgence even in listless idleness, very few mental resources save in their engrossment upon the most ​rudimental exercises, could have no other spur or solace than what they found in their clerical duties. The tedium of life, in its utmost oppressiveness, could be shaken off only by complete engrossment in their work and such satisfaction as its faithful discharge afforded. Very rarely would one or another of the Jesuits in the forests indulge a scholarly, artistic, or philosophical proclivity which had been manifested and encouraged in his education as a youth in the seminary. This might enhance his enjoyment of wild scenery, make him a curious observer of natural phenomena, of botany or natural history, give a zest to his life and converse with rude humanity, and yield him solace in his loneliness. Yet we have from the Jesuit Fathers, besides their Indian vocabularies and translations of religious works, a few excellent narratives of travel and adventure, some contributions to natural philosophy and history, and a few able scientific works written here. They were contented — yes, even happy — in their service, never complaining, reluctant, or regretful.
In the motives and instruments first engaged in behalf of France, for discovery and colonization in the New World, there was certainly no element of nobleness which exalts them above or even raises them to the level of those which insured success to the seaboard English colonies. The glowing zeal and the heroic devotion of the Jesuit Fathers gave to one period of the history of New France in America a sublime and a tragic interest, the narration of which will never fail to engage the profoundest homage of the appreciative reader. But they were not the earliest actors in the enterprise. The fisheries and the fur-trade, with reckless adventurers, felons, and outlaws, mingled with a qualifying but not an overruling element of men of loftier motive and purpose, came first upon the scene of New France. In inaugurating the work of colonization in Acadia, De Monts brought thither a mixed company of nobles, gentlemen, thieves, convicts, and ruffians. Champlain, as ​voyager, explorer, administrator, and organizer of the most successful of the whole series of undertakings, fills the eye with the majesty of his form and bearing, and meets the scrutiny of the keenest study of his motives and of his whole career. Poutrincourt and his son Biencourt, who are identified with the hopes and the disasters which gave such a checkered series of fortunes to Acadia, win our regard for their persistency under sharp discomfitures. Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, as fellow-passengers, had abundant time on their long voyage for initiating the contentions to be pursued on the virgin soil. Poutrincourt brought with him to Port Royal a secular priest, La Fleche, who at once set himself to the work of making Christians of the natives, so far as could be done by baptizing them. A famous chief, named Membertou, figures prominently in the early narrative. He appears to have been an astute and wily savage, making himself very pliant and serviceable to the adventurers, and finding his account in it. He is said, when he appears on the scene, to have been of the age of one hundred and ten years, and all that time in the service of the Devil, — reckoning probably by the sum of his sins, rather than by the number of seasons which had toughened him. His end, however, satisfied the standard of his priestly instructors. La Fleche first took him in hand, and with all the pomp and manifestation which the resources of time and circumstance admitted, baptized him and his family of twenty-one members — squaws, children, and grandchildren — on the shore of Port Royal. The historian Lescarbot describes the scene, solemnized by a procession, the Te Deum, and a volley of cannon. The savage group received the names respectively of the members of the royal family, and of some of the high nobles of the empire; and the registry of their baptisms was sent to France. La Fleche seemed, however, to have been very willing, after having in one year diligently performed the rite for more than a hundred of such converts, to take his ​homeward voyage on the appearance of the Jesuit Fathers Biard and Masse, who, as the first of their Order to set foot in New France, arrived after four months of peril on the sea, at an anchorage at Port Royal, on the feast of Pentecost, May 22, 1611. They both wrote home their first report, June 10, 1611. Their letters are given in Carayon's “Première Mission, etc.” Gilbert Du Thet, the third of the Fathers, joined his brethren in 1612, and soon went back; but returned here again the next year with a fourth missionary, Du Quentin. Biard applied himself with great zeal and industry to master the language of the savages, that he might improve upon the method of La Fleche; for he had resolved that while he baptized as many infants as possible, he would delay the rite for adults till he had offered them something in the form of Christian instruction. It seems that he was sadly trifled with by a waggish or a scoffing Indian, upon whose aid he relied as an interpreter. Putting himself in the place of a pupil before his naked and presumptuous instructor, he received in good faith the Indian terms offered to him as equivalents for such sacred words as Faith, Hope, Charity, Sacraments, Baptism, Eucharist, Trinity, Incarnation, etc. Whether or not the Indian vocabulary had equivalent terms, is a question that can hardly be raised to palliate the trick put upon the good Father by his swarthy teacher, who gave him as definitions some of the foulest and filthiest words that ever came from the tongues of the natives. As these were introduced by the Father into his catechism, they were of course received with shouts of derision, when he repeated them in his teachings in the wigwams. The same trick was afterwards played upon Le Jeune, one of the missionaries to the Hurons, by his Algonquin teacher, who, as a famous sorcerer, was his rival. It may deserve mention that the Apostle Eliot does not appear ever to have been made the subject of such trifling, which would have introduced foul blots into his Indian Bible.
​The sachem Membertou was gloried over by Father Biard as his first and most eminent convert, with more confidence than the Apostle Eliot expressed over his own disciple, the chief Waban. A son of Membertou's had been miraculously raised from mortal sickness through the help, says the Jesuit, “of a bone of the precious relics of the glorious St. Lawrence, Archbishop of Dublin, which M. de la Place, the worthy Abbot of Eu, and the Priors and Chapter, had graciously given to us to convoy our voyage.” This bone, laid on with a vow, restored the sufferer. “Membertou,” says the Father, “was the greatest, most renowned, and redoubtable savage in the memory of man; of noble frame, tall and muscular, and bearded like a Frenchman. He bade us hasten to learn his language, in order that, as soon as we had mastered it and had thus been able to teach him the faith, he might become a preacher like ourselves. He was the first of all the savages in these regions who had received the first and the last sacrament, — baptism and extreme unction; the first who of his own will and direction received Christian burial.” Membertou proposed an improvement in the Lord's Prayer. He did not like the limitation in the petition to “daily bread," and wished to include “moose-meat and fish.”
In 1615 the noble Champlain made another resolute attempt to plant a colony at Quebec. Profoundly religious, though not an implicit instrument of the Jesuits, he brought with him four Franciscan Friars, of the Order of the Récollets, and two more soon followed. They were faithful and devoted men, heroic and all-enduring in their zeal and sacrifices, and they nobly began the missions among the distant Hurons, though soon surrendering the stern service to the Jesuits, whose fervid toil and more than apostolic warfare with Nature and heathendom promised for a brief season a ​glorious triumph, to be shrouded in the most dismal and appalling disaster. The Récollets, as before stated, celebrated the first Mass within the territory of Canada.
By the request, or at least by the consent, of the Friars, three Jesuit Fathers, the first of their Order in Canada, came to undertake the mission there in 1625. This was fourteen years after their brethren, Biard and Masse, had come to Acadia. Two more Fathers joined them in 1626. Up to this time Huguenots had been free to share in the enterprise of colonization in New France, but after 1627 the privilege was rigidly restricted to Catholics. The brief episode of the English possession of Canada, on its seizure by Kirk, threatened to thwart the whole project of the French missions. But the field was restored to the original adventurers in 1632. The Récollets then resigned their honorable and peaceful beginnings in a consecrated work; two more Jesuits joined those already in their forest sanctuaries, and thenceforward the record of endeavor and endurance, of constancy and patience, of single-hearted zeal and of martyrdom, protracted through long years of misery, pain, and all mortal extremities, is written under the title of “The Jesuit Missions in New France.”
The heroism of piety and zeal, certified by absolute self-renunciation and consecrated fidelity to vows and obligations, finds its loftiest and consummate examples in the world's whole annals of holy purpose and endeavor in the work of the Jesuit Fathers in New France. Protestantism, in none of its forms or sects, has a match for them. No preferences, prejudgments, animosities, or entailed ​antipathies of our own; no conclusions or convictions, however intelligently and dispassionately drawn from the fullest and most candid study of the distracted pages of controversy and rivalry among those who are called Christians, — can bid us deny or grudge to those intrepid soldiers of the cross of Christ (the Jesuit Fathers) the meed of our reverential homage and admiration. Their vows were the sternest in their severity and exactions, and those who took them intensified that severity in the self-testing of their own fidelity to them. Their pupilage and training in discipleship decided the constancy of their apostleship. The appalling contrast between the scenes and the spheres to which many of the most devoted of them were born — in palace and chateau, and for the life of court gayety and intrigue — and the scenes and companionship of their solitary toil in dreary wildernesses of savages and peril, is a symbol of their characters and their work.
Trained in the rigid discipline of the seminary, under the keen, soul-penetrating search of his spiritual director, to an entire self-disclosure and an absolute self-surrender in abnegation and obedience, the pupil yielded his whole being, thought, purpose, will, and inclination to the control of his superior. No searching tests or methods of the alembic or crucible so thoroughly expose the elemental constituents of the ore or the vapor as did that soul-search open to all the secrets of the inner being of the novitiate. And on the knowledge thus reached was planted the authority of the superior or director. This absolute authority was not exercised by caprice or wilfulness, nor with any partiality or favoritism, but it was conscientious and discriminating; for the director was under the same constraint of subjection in vow as was imposed upon his scholar. By that knowledge of the make and fibre of the soul of his pupil, his aptitude, his strength or feebleness of tone, and his special fitness for a special work, the director assigned his place and service. Sometimes these ​accorded with, sometimes they crossed, what we should have called the longings and preferences of his pupil, save that no such inclinations were longer to be felt in his subjugated and enthralled personality.
And there was a stage at the entrance on his mission work, and at every crisis of danger and endeavor in it, when the Jesuit, no longer a novice, found his highest joy in adding, of his own free choice, to his pledged vows. He could select his own patron among the glorified and beatified saints. In his ecstatic devotions his kindled eye would have visions of their shining hosts, and the fervor of his zeal and his hidden energies of patience would be quickened in the deep calm of his unfaltering trust. In the hour of mortal peril, as at every crisis of his lot, in the preparation for each missionary enterprise, and when the direst fate of his wilderness exposure was impending over him in starvation, in freezing cold, or from savage malignity, he would make a solemn contract by special vow with the Holy Mother or his heavenly Patron. The tranquillity, the resolve, and the unflinching steadfastness which then possessed him came as a fond assurance that the unseen contracting party in the skies had listened to his vow, ratified, and recorded it. The deepest, dearest longing of the good Father's soul was for the palm of martyrdom. His otherwise joyless life transferred all pleasure and benediction thitherward. To yield his spirit in the sweet rewarding service of Holy Church, the blessed Saviour, the Virgin, and the saints, by suffering, torture, or mortal extremity, was to him the consummation of bliss. But there was a condition, a stern one; and this faithful conscience did not grudge or shrink from it. That crowning glory of martyrdom was to come in the path of simple duty, as a necessity and a boon, — not self-sought and won, not by rash daring, or running unadvised into peril. The least courting of avertible risks on his way to death would deprive him of the coveted palm.
​So we follow these heroic pioneers of the Cross deep and far into their mission stations of the wilderness, which they were the first of white men to penetrate. They would go alone if so it were best; they asked no companionship for their own safety or cheer. To one obligation which kept them in converse with the world they had parted with they were ever considerately faithful. Once in a year at least, if by any possibility it could be effected, it was their duty to send from their lonely posts a report of the work of their missions. Many a birchen skiff, paddled by an Indian through the calm or fretted waters of our lakes and rivers, has for centuries borne to Quebec or Montreal these Jesuit “Relations” for transmission across the water to the Superiors of the Order. Blindly did the Indian courier marvel over the mystery of the packet with which he was intrusted, and which he was bid to guard as the choicest portion of his trading freight. Written often on birch bark, with charcoal and grease, or with the juice of some wild sap or berry, these Relations told many a story of dire extremity, of dauntless courage, and occasionally of exultant joy over some gleaming success. Truthful, candid, and full of a sweet and gentle placidity of spirit are those wilderness missives. One, two, three, even more years did the solitary apostle pursue his strange toil among fickle and capricious disciples without the sight of a white man. To soothe and soften their savage breasts, to save their doomed souls from a fate worse than the torturings which they inflicted on their victims, and to impart just so much of the teaching of the most elementary instruction in the faith as would justify the giving of Christian baptism, — this was his task. An Indian infant just passing out of life needed only the water-drop, moistening the sign of the cross, to rescue his soul for bliss. When the jealous savages, visited with contagious diseases or plagues, turned fiercely on the priest who was so eager to perform the rite, and charged him with sorcery or magic wrought for their ​destruction, it would seem as if only special help from heaven could protect him. Thus, destitute of what we call the necessaries of life, even without salt; clinging only to their simple altar furniture; patching their black robes, worn to shreds, with hides and skins; making a common home in what Roger Williams well calls “the filthy, smoky holes” of the natives; eating their loathsome diet, sharing their indecencies and vermin, and supporting life in wilderness exigencies on berries, roots, and even their own moccasons and apparel; tramping through the forests on snow-shoes, through oozy swamps and bogs; paddling the unstable canoe, and bearing without a murmur or regret the most dreaded privations and risks, — these Jesuit Fathers, the crusaders of New France, performed their missions. Rightfully have many of them left their enshrined names on rivers, bays, capes, and estuaries, through all our north and west, festooned in wreaths of admiring homage, as the regions which they opened to the light once were with the vines and mosses of the primeval forest.
The method of life pursued by the Jesuit Fathers in their missionary labors among the natives was substantially as follows: In some instances, in promising fields and with a considerable tribe of Indians, there would be resident two or more of the Fathers. In more cases, however, each was alone, a single man, isolated from his fellows and from civilization, in a remote station, with infrequent intercourse with the world beyond him. Occasionally the Father would have, under the title of a donné, a young lay assistant, equally devoted with himself to his holy work, and able and willing to render him a variety of services, — menial, functionary, and official, — helping in the work of interpretation, of translation, and the instruction and oversight of catechumens. Many instances there were of constancy, devotion, and patient suffering of these lay brethren. As a general thing, the missionary conformed to the mode of life of the savages, — sharing their viands, and bearing their ​hardships in common; always on the route content with their foul, smoky, and vermin-infested lodgings; sleeping on boughs or skins, or on the bare earth, with pestiferous odors, and children and dogs crawling over him. He never attempted to carry with him the luxuries of life, leaving them all behind him. We read of one of them who had contrived, through all the perils of canoe navigation and of trampings by the portages round the cataracts, to transport into the far wilderness a clock. The wondering savages would come into his cabin to hear it strike the hours, apparently at the command of the missionary. Indispensable to him as his own luggage, however, were the materials and paraphernalia of altar furniture for the daily celebration of the mass and for festival occasions: his own robes, a little wine and wheat for the sacrament, rosaries, crucifixes, bells, and pictures, — if possible, a robed and painted image of the Virgin Mary or a saint, and writing materials. For a year at least he could expect no replenishing. His severest deprivation was when he could not obtain a few grains of wheat or a drop or two of the juice of the grape for the sacrament. One of the Fathers, after leaving Quebec with a few Indians for the Huron wilderness, was sadly discomfited when an Indian, on the first night's encampment on the Isle of Orleans, became crazily drunk, having purloined and consumed the contents of a little keg of wine, the year's supply of the missionary.
As soon as possible, on taking up residence in an Indian village, the missionary would construct a simple log or bark chapel, rough and rustic, surmounted with a cross. A large central cross would also be planted in or near the settlement. Either in connection with or beside the chapel he would provide a rude cabin for himself, with two apartments, — one of which he reserved for strict privacy, the other accessible for a wonderful variety of business with the Indians. The daily altar offices, which indeed were seldom omitted even on the wilderness tramp, were at once ​regularly established in the village. The savages were engaged by eye and sense before it was possible to reach their minds by any lessons. Heroic, resolute, and unflagging was the zeal of the missionary to master the language of his disciples, as teaching them his own or that of the Church was out of the question. He would select one of the most intelligent as his interpreter and instructor in his cabin. He would — as soon as he could venture to do so — make a vocabulary, and put his sacred formulas into the native tongue. Instances have been already mentioned in which roguish tricks were played upon the confiding missionary, odious and filthy terms being given to him in Indian as the equivalents of sacred words.
The station would be put under the name of a saint of the Church calendar, and be committed to his or her patronage. Sooner or later a miracle of mercy or help would attest that the pledge was recognized from above. There was never the slightest faltering in the mind of the Jesuit as to which incidents, events, and agencies he should assign to the saint, and which to the Devil. The division was generally an equal one. The daily routine of life in the lulls from the war or hunting excitements found all the natives gathered in early morning about the cross, or in the chapel, attending upon the Mass, and so towards evening on Vespers. Hours of the day were assigned for instruction. In every case the missionary was zealous to baptize every infant within his reach, especially those who were dangerously ill. The missionary meant to be scrupulous — we can hardly say cautious — about performing this saving rite for adults. Some instruction, with a generous and easy conviction that it was understood, must precede. The Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, a simple catechism, and a few hortatory words on the divine authority of the Church were the medium of full conversion.
The Fathers, alike from preference and from policy, ​ventured to abstain as far as possible from confusing the minds of the savages with abstract instruction, with arguments or explanations. The savages assented most readily to propositions which they least understood. Implicit trust and obedience were what was required of them, and, within a limited range, yielded. Especially were the Fathers — quite unlike all Protestant missionaries in this respect — very careful not to interfere with the habits, the modes of life, the inclinations, the superstitions even, of the savages, beyond what was absolutely indispensable for their purposes. They did not aim to civilize the savages, to confine them to industrious toils and handicrafts, to limit their roaming life, to meddle with their usages, to change their relations to their chiefs and warriors, or to restrain their warlike ferocity, or absolutely to forbid polygamy. In their earlier residence and work among the savages the Jesuits found their wisdom, patience, and efforts sufficiently tasked in securing their own footing, in having their presence tolerated among a wild, suspicious, and capricious set of stolid and superstitious barbarians. At times they needed to practise extreme caution, to show no fear, to temporize and endure, but never to yield, give over effort, or run away. The jealous savages, forming but the faintest conception of the real object, the wholly unselfish and consecrated aim, of the missionary, would imagine all evil of him. On occasions of plagues or prevailing diseases, many an evil eye would be turned upon the Jesuit; the knife or tomahawk would be threateningly brandished, on the dark, dread suspicion that he had artfully introduced the malady and was working hellish charms upon them. The missionary, thwarted and threatened, stood firm and unquailing. He was perfectly willing, he would have been triumphantly happy, to die as a martyr; but if in haste, or lack of prudence, or heat of zeal he in any way provoked or facilitated death, or failed to use every human effort to avert it, he lost the glorious palm.
​We meet with frequent and very candid admissions in the relations of the Jesuit Fathers, that the most formidable opposition which they encountered in their mission work came from the medicine-men, the magicians, sorcerers, and medical practitioners among the Indians. The Jesuits regarded these priestly physicians as diabolical agents, and of course were viewed in their turn as rivals in the same evil ministry. Working on the fear and superstitions of the Indians when under a cloud or ill, these medicine-men, partly through their own craft and partly by the credulity of the people, were invested with a supernatural character. Yet the element of fraud in their pretensions and practices does not seem to have been so predominant but that they may have been the dupes of their own ignorance and delusion. It was, however, a matter of first importance with the Jesuits to win over, dissuade, and convert these medicine-men, and failing in that effort, to expose their pretences and incompetency. This was always a difficult, and often a critical and dangerous undertaking, disturbing the traditional belief and usages of the wild men inherited from generations. The Jesuits were occasionally cautious in dealing with this perilous mischief; but they faithfully met the risk, and calmly or boldly defied the impostors, as they regarded them.
Nor is it at all strange that the good Fathers themselves, as they candidly tell us, were often regarded by jealous and hard-hearted savages as sorcerers and magicians. It was altogether natural that it should have been so. Arrayed in their long robes, surplices, and other vestments which had a magical look, with their backs to the people, with frequent changes of attitude and posture, genuflections and crossings, they were seen to be handling the altar furniture, putting something into their mouths, — not enough for real sustenance, — and muttering some unintelligible sounds which might be charms. This ritual service of ​the Mass was a profound mystery in its show and emblems to the lookers-on. Then there were occasions of prevailing disease among children, the parents dismayed as to the cause. The Jesuits asking permission to baptize a dying infant, and being sternly forbidden as if it were an evil charm, were occasionally observed performing the rite by stealth. The savages having no answering conception in their minds as to the meaning of the act would be infuriated, and would regard the priest as a sorcerer of the most malicious kind.
All the more should we hold ourselves to the loftiest appreciation of the sincerity, the devotion, the heroic fidelity of those Jesuit Fathers, because, whether it be from our Protestant prejudices or perverseness, or with good reasons for our judgment, we put so slight an estimate upon the results reached by all this holy endeavor. Those who did that work felt that it was blessed and rewarded. Buffeted and thwarted as they were, they kept their serenity of spirit, and reported with modest assurance, that had no quality of boasting, a success which made them happy at heart. They tell by thousands the number of their converts, and do not hesitate to call them Christians here, and to claim for them the heaven of the redeemed. There is something of an almost languishing tenderness, of even a maudlin sentiment, in the fond relations of the docility and the simple reliance of their converts as creatures of an Arcadian paradise. Shrewder and keener observers of the Indian character have told us with what facility and responsiveness an astute savage will assent to any abstract proposition or any assertion beyond the scope of his thinking; that this assent was all the readier and more beaming, the less the proposition made was understood. Very hospitable is the savage to the incomprehensible in words and ideas. He is a natural transcendentalist.
But this assent of his wild catechumen was to the good Father conviction and faith, at times even the effect of ​supernatural grace. It would be unreasonable in us, using our tests and standards, to affirm that the Jesuit Fathers made no attempt to impart to their wild converts those Christian ideas, sentiments, motives, which go to the roots of one's being, work the great inner conversion, and build up character, renewed and vitalized. The Jesuits attempted what is in our view the utterly futile task of Christianizing without civilizing the savages. The fundamental difference between their aim with what they regarded as their success in it, and those of every Protestant communion in their missions among the Indians, is this: The Jesuits can make their discipleship accord with the habits, the life, the mental range, the moral laxness, the forest license of those who are still barbarians; the Protestant missionaries are primarily teachers, reformers, civilizers, requiring of their disciples industry, toil, humanity, restraint of passion, radical changes in all their views and customs of living.
The champion and eulogist of the members of the Society of Jesus might well find his account, in a polemical or historic essay, in pleading, that, for the purpose of claiming for them a just and kindly estimate, he would isolate one single company of them in one single field of their effort and devotion, and try and test the spirit of their Order in aim and motive and method there. Leaving all the tangled and irritating questions concerning their intermeddlings, intrigues, and complications with court policy and secular ambitions and strifes, he would study them as remote from scenes where these angry feuds and soiling schemes have place, and as engaged simply and purely in their mission work. Such a restricted field and such a selected fellowship of Christian evangelists might well be claimed to present themselves within the range of our present subject. The Jesuit missionaries in New France came as near to such isolation from the reputed motives and methods of their Order, as the organic and vital rule of it would under ​any circumstances admit. Of course the vow of obedience, the rigid bond of discipline, the subjection to directions from a superior, the bounden duty of self-reckoning and of detailed reports, and the animating soul of the company which enthralled all separate, abnegated wills, as if unified by one inspiring and directing volition, — these were ties and sentient chords which distance and loneliness only quickened and intensified. Martyrdom, uninvited, but ventured and longed for, if it could be met in the path of patient, courageous duty, was the all-coveted reward; but it could crown the sacrifice only of a consecrated and pledged life. But early in the mission life in Canada we begin to meet interminglings of motive for the extended dominion of France, for anticipated collisions with heretics, and for the gains of trade and power. Still, allowing for all these limitations and qualifications of the perfect zeal exclusively and thoroughly religious, coming later into the mixed motives of the missionaries, the palm of pre-eminent self-consecration in a service than which none more severely exacting was performed on this earth by man for man, was nobly won by them. Whatever repelling and odious associations of subtle intrigue, sinuous policy, and artful casuistry the word Jesuit has gathered around it, from courts, confessionals, and the directorship of female consciences, it surely parted with them in the depths of the Huron wilderness. There was no occasion or material for such things there. Had the Jesuits not entered upon their work with a single consecrated aim, they would have been held to its sole regard in the American forests.
In our European histories, biographies, and court and police records we meet with the wily and plotting Jesuit disguised as soldier, sailor, courtier, travelling merchant, day-laborer, Protestant preacher even. It may be that as in the case of many who have achieved an ill repute, including even the Evil One himself, they have incurred the odium of mischief which they never did. But the Jesuit put on ​no disguises here. The insignia of his order and profession, clung to in all extremities and hazards, were the only outward badges of his pride. His glorious privilege to the investiture, marking him as one of a pledged company who were facing the perils of all climes on their missions, was a compensation for all the inconvenience and risks of such a garb. For, indeed, alike in the wilderness tramp and in the frail canoe by lake or river, the long, closely-fitted cassock, which secured for the wearer the Indian title of the “Black Robe,” was the least convenient form of apparel. This, with the wide-brimmed, flopped hat, the cross, and the rosary, were the badges of his profession, inviting respect from friends and pledging constancy in the presence of foes. For two, three, and even more years, hundreds of leagues within wildernesses in the region between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Lake Superior, remote from all converse or succor from European colonists, the Jesuit would wear this garb by day and night, in the wigwam and along the route, and even in its tatters he would preserve its semblance with patches of bark and skin.
The discipline of the novitiate, in the seminary and under the sway of an astute and thoroughly skilled director of conscience, had subjugated and enthralled the individual will, the conscience, the mastering motives, of the candidate for membership of the Order. Obedience, unquestioned and unreasoned, to his superior, was the complement and sum of all his virtues. To do what was assigned to him, to go where he was sent, to report himself only as in the way of his duty, to raise no alternatives of preference or prudence, never to forecast consequences, to measure risks, or turn aside from peril or death, — such were his vows. His calling was from outside of this world; and therefore the powers of this world, in motive, fear, or reward, were not to be recognized by him. His record and reckoning were for the world to come. What was signified to the Jesuit by the term faith, either as the matter or the way ​of belief, may seem to us like the weakest credulity and the most puerile superstition. To him it was peace, patience, fortitude, courage, gentleness, and a victory over all physical longings and all mortal dreads. Nothing that we call, in these days, emancipation of the reason, intelligence, strength of mind, scientific vigor, or discernment of truth, has ever wrought with such a potent and unyielding sway over the inward essence and the outward conduct of a human being as has the faith of a Jesuit. The courage of the soldier, the dauntlessness of the hero, are but fragments of the sum of his prowess and self-mastery. Even the miracles which the Jesuit believed were wrought for him by St. Joseph and the Virgin were really less marvellous than the effects produced in himself by his faith in them. His great exemplar in remote and perilous missionary endurance, St. Francis Xavier, rather than his soldier-founder Loyola, was the model and inspirer of the height and fulness and measure of his zeal. His life among the savages was but a series of exhausting hardships, vexations, anxieties, discomfitures, ever-impending fatalities, changing disappointments and ultimate failures; and death came to most of the Fathers in a series of variations of the sombre tragedy of humanity. Father Le Jeune wrote from Quebec to his Provincial: “The chastity of our temperament must be altogether angelic.” Father Brebeuf wrote from St. Joseph to his General, in Rome: “That which above all things is demanded in laborers destined for this mission is an unfailing sweetness and a patience thoroughly tested. It is neither by force nor by authority that one can hope to gain our savages.” Father Jogues, the lamb and the lion of the missions, found in the stroke of the hatchet which ended his work a mild release from all the ingenuities of savage torture. Father de Nonë, at the age of sixty-three, was frozen into ice in the attitude of prayer in February, 1646, on the shore of the St. Lawrence, having lost his way in the snow while on a lonely errand of kindness. A ​French noble, and once a court-page, he had lived in the wilderness twenty-one years. Father Masse, after thirty-five years of service, died the same year of hardships in it, at the age of seventy-two, at Sillery. Father Daniel, twenty years in the Society, pierced with arrows and balls, was flung, in 1648, into the burning ruins of his chapel at St. Joseph's, at the age of forty-eight. The sturdy-framed and the lion-hearted Father Brebeuf, of the race of the English Earls of Arundel, founder of the Huron Mission, in the twenty-fifth year of his service, came to a martyr's death, March 16, 1649. He bore unflinchingly the extremities and barbarities of the tortures which all the revolting ingenuity of his tormentors could devise. They drank his blood, that it might transfuse into their veins his intrepid heroism, while their chief devoured his heart. His skull, in a silver bust of him sent from France, is preserved as a holy relic at Quebec. His companion, Father Jerome Lalemant, met a similar fate on the next day. He had been in the country less than three years, and was thirty-nine years of age. Physically he had the weakness and delicacy of a woman, but he had the soul of a hero. Father Chabanel, in his seventh year of service, to which he had bound himself for life by a solemn vow, was murdered by a renegade Huron catechist, Dec. 8, 1649. Father Garnier after thirteen years of mission life, yielded it under gunshot and the hatchet, while administering the last offices to his disciples slaughtered in a ferocious assault of the Iroquois. He also was of noble blood and gentle nurture. His beardless face, after he was thirty years old, made him an object of ridicule in Paris, but it added a grace to him for the eye of the Indian. Father Buteux was waylaid and killed, in 1652, while on a most arduous and perilous journey, with one companion, from Three Rivers, in a mission to the distant Algonquin nation of the White Fish. Father Marquette, in May, 1675, died at the age of thirty-eight, as he had wished that he might die, on ​the bare earth of the deep inner wilderness, with two humble attendants carrying his worn and sinking frame to the spot where he was to find release. There he consecrated the holy water for his last needs, and instructed his rude nurses how to keep the crucifix, which he took from under his robe, before his closing eyes; how to prompt his closing lips, in his last agony, with the words Jesus and Mary; how to compose his lifeless form for burial, and then to raise the cross over his grave at the spot which he indicated, at the mouth of the river that now bears his name.
Of the five Récollets who had begun the Canada mission, one, Nicholas Viel, was killed in 1625. The others, as above stated, returned. Of the twenty-five Jesuit missionaries to the Hurons recorded by Father Martin in his “Relation Abregée,” seven were killed, one was frozen to death, one died of his wounds, eight died in service, and eight returned to France after the catastrophe which overwhelmed the Huron mission in the direful fate of the nation. Their field extended over the region between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Lake Superior.
A lively sketch of the inner life and the daily work of the Jesuits in one of their remote residences will be found in the following, translated from Carayon, from a letter of Father Francis Du Peron, at La Conception, among the Hurons, April 27, 1639, to his brother Joseph, a Jesuit in France:
“. . . We are lodged and we live after the manner of the savages; we have no ground for cultivation except a little borrowed patch where we raise French wheat merely sufficient for the host for the Mass. We leave the rest to divine Providence, who supplies us with more of Indian corn than if we had the best fields: one will bring us three ears of corn, another six; one a pumpkin; one will give us a fish, another bread baked in the ashes. We live happily and content with our lot. For their presents we return little glass ornaments, rings, awls, and knives. This is all our money. Of the good things of France we have none here; the ordinary sauce of our viands is pure water, and for gravy, corn or pumpkins. The luxuries which come from France do not get up ​beyond Three Rivers. All that we can transport farther are some church ornaments, wine for the Mass (of which we use only four or five drops in the cup), and some vestments, with a few prunes and raisins for the sick, everything being at great risk on the way. We have lost this year two of our packages. Our platters, though of wood, cost more than do yours, their worth being that of a beaver skin, — that is, a hundred francs.
“The kingdom of God makes a grand advance in these countries. We have here a foreign nation of refugees, in part from their enemies the Iroquois, as also because of a pestilence which had been very fatal among them. Nearly all of them are baptized before they die. I have baptized some of them, and the Fathers have no small task, morning and evening, in visiting and instructing the poor sick ones who seem to have escaped a cruel death from their enemies only to meet the happy end of the elect. I leave you to judge if it be not a great consolation to those who give their prayers and their toils to the conversion of these poor souls, that God is willing to save them if we, on our part, offer no hindrance to it. I ask and implore for this end the assistance of the prayers of your Reverence and of my acquaintance. I salute them all with a heart of affection; I believe they will not fail me.
“Here, now, is a little journal since my arrival. Having fortunately reached the land of the Hurons after a journey of twenty-six days in a canoe, or rather a bark cradle of a birch tree, on September 29, at one o'clock in the morning, and being put in the way of reaching one of our residences in season to celebrate the Mass on that day, the rain and the exhaustion caused by the preceding journey, in which we were on the water from one 'o'clock in the morning till after midnight, without a chance to rest, and induced, by the hope of being able to say Mass, to eat nothing after my landing, the rain and the fatigue, and also the distance of the place, — five or six leagues, — and ignorance of the paths, constrained me to stop at the first village and to take some little nourishment. I then entered the cabin of a chief of the settlement; they passed me the compliment of a chay (welcome) in their language, the ordinary salute as ‘good day,’ and immediately spread a mat on the earth for me to lie upon, and then took four ears of corn which they roasted and presented to me, as also two pumpkins roasted in the ashes, and a platter of sagamy. I assure your Reverence that this was delicious food to me. The little children and others ​gathered in the cabin with wonder at looking at me. Ignorance of their language kept me dumb, and their habit of saying nothing but the word of welcome to a stranger made them also mute; only they scanned me from head to foot, and all of them wanted to try on my shoes and my hat, each of them putting the hat on his head and the shoes on his feet. After having remunerated my host for his welcome and kind treatment with a knife and an awl, I asked him to provide me a savage to carry my sack and to conduct me to one of our residences. He brought me to the Fathers' by six in the evening. They received me with all love and affection, though my entertainment was no better than that of the savage, for the good things of life are common to us and the natives: that is, a porridge of Indian corn and water, morning and evening; for drink a draught of icy water, the savages sometimes scattering some ashes in the sagamy for seasoning, and at other times a sprinkling of water. These are like the cakes of the Provence, for grand occasions and festivals. The most thoughtful of them, after the fishing season, reserve some fish to mix with the sagamy for the rest of the year. For fourteen persons they put in about half of a large carp, and the more rotten the fish is the better it serves. As for drink, it is hardly to be named, the sagamy serving for solid and liquid, as one may be six months without drinking, except on a journey.
“The importunity of the savages who continually infest our cabin, and sometimes push open the door, throwing stones into it and hitting us, compels us to have as strict rules for our hours as in the French colleges. At four o'clock the bell rouses us; after our devotions comes the Mass, till eight o'clock, during which we have an interval of silence, reading a spiritual book and saying the Small Hours. At eight we open the door for the savages till four in the afternoon, during which time we allow them free converse, alike for their instruction and that we may learn their language. The Fathers also, during this time, go out to visit in the cabins of the settlement to baptize the sick and to instruct those who are well. For me, my occupation is the study of the language, guarding the cabin, praying for the converts and the catechumens, and keeping school for the children from noon till two o'clock. At two we are summoned to examination of conscience; then comes dinner, at which a chapter in the Bible is read, and often the Philagie of Jesus, by the Rev. Father du Barry. We have the blessing and the grace in Huron for the sake of the savages who may be present at the time. We ​dine seated on stools round the fire, with our platters on the ground. At noon I begin the school for the children, which lasts two hours. Sometimes I have but two or three scholars. Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays the school closes at one o'clock, at which time we teach the most notable of the settlement, whether Christians or not; on Thursdays only the Christians and catechumens; Sunday morning the Christians only. At the public Mass there is a sermon; before the Mass the holy water is consecrated with singing, and at the offertory the sacred bread is distributed among the savages. On the great feasts we have singing and the Mass. After dinner on Sunday, at one o'clock, we chant the Vespers; then comes instruction of Christians and catechumens. At five we chant the Compline, and Saturday evening the Salve with the Litanies of the Virgin. On the same day, at the close of the school, there is a little catechising of the children; and during the month there is a public catechising for the whole settlement, besides the daily instruction which is given in their cabins. At four o'clock in the afternoon we exclude the savages, and say in quiet together our matins and lauds, at the end of which we consult for three quarters of an hour on the progress or the obstacles in the way of the faith in these regions; then we study the language in conference, till supper time, which is at half-past six; at eight we have the Litanies and the examination of conscience, and then to bed. We have here no whole night's repose as in France. All the Fathers and our domestics, except one or two, myself being one, rise four or five times each night, as the fashion of resting here is on a mat with all your clothes on. Since I came from France I have never taken off my cassock except to change my underclothing. Thank God! I have found no inconvenience in it, and I daily realize how little will satisfy nature; and I believe that we are subjects rather for envy than compassion. For ourselves we do not envy the condition of any one in our France, — ‘Better is a day in Thy courts than a thousand,’ etc. It is true that we have the reality, as you do, only in a picture. How precious is the gift of the Faith! We have to deal with a people which has been wholly enslaved to the Devil ever since the deluge.”
In a manuscript letter of Father Garnier, to a friend in France, copied by Mr. Parkman, we have a confidential disclosure which shows a shrewd conception of the means ​most apt to work effectively on the imagination of an Indian. In specifying articles needed for the mission, the writer asks for “a picture of Christ without a beard,” the Indians disliking that appendage. Several Virgins are desired, as also several representations of âmes damnèes, to show variety and intensity in the forms of their torments through an ingenious arrangement of demons, dragons, and flames. One happy or beatified soul will suffice in that kind. The pictures must not be in profile, but in full face, looking squarely with open eyes at the beholder; and all in bright colors, without flowers or animals, which only distract. Some of the missionaries who lived within reach of the bayberry soon learned to boil its fruit, and, mixing the product with animal fat, to supply themselves abundantly with good candles. The wild grape afforded them wine for the sacrament; the rosary was found a very serviceable help; the cross always and everywhere held its place of veneration. Images and devices on tin and pewter came to be coveted rewards. A yellow calico dress formed a change in the wardrobe of the Virgin. Father Ralle had trained forty young Indians to assist at the Mass, in chants, and processions.
In a letter to his nephew he writes: —
“I have built a church which is well arranged and richly adorned. I have believed that I ought to grudge nothing, either in its decoration, or in the beauty of its ornaments which adapt it for our holy ceremonies; trimmings, chasubles, copes, sacred vessels, everything is becoming there, and would so be regarded in our European churches. I have provided a little clergy of about forty young savages, who assist in divine service in cassocks and surplices; they have their several functions, as well for serving at the holy sacrifice of the Mass as for chanting the divine office, for the benediction of the Holy Sacrament, and for the processions which are made before a grand concourse of savages, who often come from a great distance to see them. You would be edified with the perfect order which they keep, and by the piety which they manifest.”
​He says that he had also planted two chapels on the outskirts of the village; one on the way to the fields, the other on the edge of the forest. These were dedicated respectively to the Virgin, with her image in relief, and to the Guardian Angel. The Indian women rivalled each other in lavishing upon these chapels all their trinkets and finery.
In the “Relation” of Father Jacques Bigot, from the Sillery Mission of St. Francis de Sales, in 1684, we read the following: —
“On the 29th of January we dressed anew an Altar much more richly ornamented than the previous one. The Reverend Father Superior of all our missions in Canada had given the most beautiful ornament of this Altar, which was a very large image of St. Francis de Sales upon satin. I had enriched it with a border of gold and silver. I verily say that I never saw in France a more beautiful image of the Saint, nor more enriched than this. Indeed, to speak freely, I had scruples as to the expense we had incurred for this when we were so poor that we had not even the necessaries of life for our mission, not even for the most miserable. But my scruples did not last long, judging that on so important an occasion as this we ought to spare everything to insure the utmost efficacy to implant sentiments of piety in these poor savages whom we wish to win to Jesus Christ. Our image, thus ornamented, was set upon a little satin carpet with a fringe of gold and silver. This carpet was put on the top of the Altar of the Saint, and showed the image in its whole size. At the base of the image was a splendid circlet of china, ornamented with porcupine quills, which our savages,” etc.
Without these altar furnishings the Jesuit was as a workman without materials or tools. Father Le Jeune, in the “Relation” for 1637, writes: —
“The heretics are greatly blamable for condemning and destroying images, which admit of such good uses. These holy representations are half of the instruction which one is able to impart to savages. I had applied for some representations of hell, and of a damned soul, and there were sent to me some on paper; but they were too confused. The devils are mixed in with men in such a ​way that one cannot get at any meaning without a very sharp study. If one would paint three, four, or five devils tormenting one soul with divers agonies, — one applying fire, another serpents, another red-hot pincers, and another holding him bound with chains, — it would have a fine effect, especially if the whole were distinctly shown, and rage and misery should appear on the features of this damned soul.”
The good priest does not seem to have remembered that his Indians had often seen and taken part in the reality of which he desired a painting. If, instead of teaching the savages that the Great Father of the human race imitated them in the infliction of torture, what would have been the effect upon them of a picture of the benedictive Saviour, the Great Physician, standing in a group of sufferers by every ill and woe, who received from him relief and blessing?
How in contrast with all this was the stark realism of the Puritan meeting-house and worship, without altar, painting, symbol, or ritual!
If space permitted, I might introduce here a sketch of the noble and tragic ministry and career of Father Jogues, a young Jesuit scholar, who arrived at Quebec in 1686, and went among the Iroquois. The narrative of his zeal and fidelity, of his sufferings and mutilations, of his escape from a long captivity, of his reconsecration to his work, and of his final martyrdom, is so thrilling, so wrought in with marvels of heroism and endurance, as well as with variety of picturesque and shifting scenes, that it might be called a romance, if it were not for its fearfully sombre cast and close.
So also is the narrative of Father Bressani, an Italian Jesuit, who in 1642 was put upon desperate service as a missionary among the Hurons. No hero ever did nobler work, in trial and endurance. Captured by the Iroquois, he was tortured and mutilated, but, escaping with life, returned to his work till the scenes of missionary labor ​among the Hurons were reduced to a desolation. Some extracts from his narrative will present us the most instructive reports and descriptions of the missionary work of the Jesuits: —
“Bressani gives us an approximation to the results of the Jesuit Huron missions after some sixteen years. ‘I will say only, in one word, that the number of our neophytes would have been much more considerable, and that we should in a short time have made the whole country Christian, if we had had regard only for numbers and the name. But we had been unwilling to receive a single adult in perfect health before we had got their language, and had subjected to long trial, sometimes protracted through years, their pious resolution to receive baptism and to be faithful to the law of God, which called them often to grievous difficulties. We sought to augment the joy of heaven rather than to multiply Christians in name, and we should have incurred a sharp reproach if any one among us had deserved to have it said of him, “Thou hast increased the people, but hast not increased the joy.” So that in the space of a few years we have baptized about twelve thousand savages, of whom the greater part are now — as we are confident — in heaven, because of their sublime fervor and their admirable constancy in the faith. We had predicted the eclipse of the 30th January, 1646, which began here an hour and a quarter before midnight. Our Christians were on the watch; so that when it occurred one of the more fervent, consulting only his zeal, ran to rouse some of the savages. “Come,” said he, “see how worthy our missionaries are of our confidence, and hesitate no longer to believe the truth which they preach.” A good old man, a fervent Christian, who knew nothing of the answer of the King St. Louis, on the subject of the miracle of the holy sacrament, said with much shrewdness, “that those who doubted the truth of the faith went to see the eclipse. They have no other evidence than that of their sight; our faith has better proofs.” Some of our neophytes have visited the colony of the European heretics. When they understood that they were reproached for making the sign of the cross, and for wearing the beads round their necks, not only were they undisturbed by it, but they themselves took these heretics to task for their irreligion, with a liberty truly Christian. Some of ​them having seen that the colonists in New Sweden had but little reserve with the women, had no difficulty in preaching to Europeans the virtue which these should have been the first to have inculcated on them. The struggle against their temptations has been the occasion of many heroic acts. We have more than once seen the neophytes, after the example of the saints, throw themselves into the snow in the severest rigors of the winter, to cool the ardor of their concupiscence, or repressing it by the flames, as if in view of the pains of the life to come. How many young girls have preferred death to the loss of their honor! How many savages have openly espoused the faith, in spite of their fellows, and have willingly offered blood and life to defend it! I am convinced that one would have found among them many martyrs, if he had dared to persecute them. The grace of God produces everywhere the same effects. It can transform stones, and make of them children of Israel.’
“ ‘Some persons have had a pious curiosity to know the arguments which serve for the conversion of the savages. We put foremost the grounds of credibility generally given by theologians. Those which are the most effective may be reduced to three. The first is the accordance of our law and of the commandments of God with the light of reason. There is nothing forbidden by the faith which is not equally so by reason, and nothing commanded or allowed by the faith which reason does not also approve. Thus, the first of our Christians, in asking for baptism, made this avowal to Father Brebeuf: “I have meant for three years to speak to you of the faith taught by this man endowed with an excellent judgment; and as you have been preaching I have silently said to myself, ‘He speaks the truth.’ Since the first day, I have begun to put in practice what you have taught me.” In this view, our savages are indeed much superior in intelligence and constancy to the people of the East, of whom our Indian apostle, St. Francis Xavier, drew so sad a representation in his letters. They yield readily to reason. My second argument was drawn from the written monuments, — not only Holy Scripture, but also the works of men; and with this argument we shut the mouths of their false prophets, or rather charlatans. They have among them neither books nor writings, as we have said. When they recount their fables about the creation of the world, about the deluge (of which they have a confused idea), and about the land of souls, we ask them, “Who told you ​that?" They answer, “Our elders.” We reply, “But your ancients were men like yourselves. They could deceive themselves as well as you, who in your relations so often mix up exaggeration, deceit, and falsehood. How then can I believe you with confidence?” This argument cuts them keenly. They are bombastic in their tales. They make up fables, and have no hesitation about lying. We follow up the argument thus: As for us, we carry with us irrefutable witnesses for that which we teach, — namely Scripture, which is the word of God, and which cannot falsify. Scripture does not change like the speech of men, which is a deceiver almost by nature. After having admired the excellence of the material Scripture (which we are not wont to appreciate, because of familiarity), they come to recognize the certainty of the divine word, which we show them contained in the holy books dictated by the Lord himself. We read them the promises, the commandments, the threatenings; and often the simple and artless recital of the judgments of God and the pains of hell prepared for the guilty stirs them with a fear and terror like that which we read of as taking hold of the unjust judge Felix.
“ ‘But the strongest argument was that which we drew from our case after the example of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. Without prejudice to his profound humility he recounted to his disciples at Corinth, but in the third person, not only his sufferings and the labors which he had undertaken in the service of his Master, but also the revelations and the marvellous gifts which he had received from them who had sent him to preach his holy gospel. We did not scruple to use this language to our savages: —
“You see us here, Brothers, among you, languishing rather than living, in ashes and smoke, half-naked, pierced with cold, dying of hunger and wretchedness. Remember now that we were born and educated in a country where all things abound. There we did not have for a bed, as here, a rough bark or a coarse plank, but a bed of soft fleece. Salt was not the only seasoning of our food, but there was so great a difference between ours and yours that those who were nearly famished among us would not touch their lips to what you eat. Our houses were not dark and filled with smoke, like your cabins, but large, commodious, and light. Ask your people who have visited the French at Kebec [Quebec] the difference there is between their way of life and yours, and if it be possible to compare the blessings they enjoy with your miseries. And still they ​have many deprivations so far from their rich country. Draw your own inference, then. If these men are wise, as you believe, they must have some motive for so great a change of their abode; they must have set for themselves some design. You love dearly your own country, parents, and friends, and we ourselves are neither marble nor stone. We also love ours, and perhaps with more reason than you, who cannot expect of them such great and good services. Still, we have willingly left all; we have said adieu to happy Europe; we have trusted ourselves to a cruel and perfidious element instead of fearing it. For every one dreads those rafts by which we cross the seas. A spark in the powder makes it fly into destruction; the winds rend the sails to tatters; the waters threaten to engulf them; the shoals of sand and the hidden reefs wreck them. In fine, to reach your shores — that is, your dismal deserts — at the risk of meeting the burning piles of your enraged enemies, we have braved a thousand tempests, a thousand shipwrecks, a thousand accidents, without fear even of the pirates who day and night sweep the wide seas. Can we do all this without motives inducing us?
“Some of us among you have been subjected to the torments of the Iroquois, and have been obliged to return to Europe for the cure of mutilations. Still, after such fearful sufferings, our parents and friends have not been able to prevail upon us to remain with them even for a few months, as we regard it a solemn duty to return to these forests. Should we consent to this without grave and pressing reasons?
“Nor are you ignorant that we have never sought to gain what you value most, or to secure any of your goods. On the contrary, in spite of our poverty we make you every day rich presents. Then it is not our interest which moves us, but your welfare. The end we have in view is one of the highest importance. It is your souls, and not these woods, nor these rude cabins, that have drawn us here. Being of such value in the eyes of God, can we esteem them too highly?”
“ ‘Such is the example which has proved the most effective means, in the hand of the Lord, to plant the faith and the standard of the Cross in this wilderness.’ ”
His wounds having been dressed, Bressani returned to Canada in season to be present at Three Rivers at the ​mock treaty with the Iroquois, in July, 1645. Here he met with kindness some of his tormentors. In the autumn he started for his former Huron mission, ignorant of the language, but preaching by the veneration won for him by his mutilations and scars, and his dauntless heroism. After three years of isolation in a service beset with direful perils, the Hurons, cut off from trade and in extreme want, resolved upon a desperate effort to open communication with the French at Three Rivers. In July, 1648, Bressani started with a convoy of two hundred and fifty Indians, more than half of whom were Christian catechumens. Just as they were reaching their destination they were set upon by a party of ambushed Iroquois, but came off victors, taking thirty-five prisoners. Bressani's functions were needed in absolving, instructing, and baptizing the dying. On this occasion some Algonquin allies of the Hurons were the first to refrain, under the influence of their mission teachings, from torturing a prisoner, given to them for that purpose. The Hurons said they could admire but could not imitate the humanity. While the Indians drove their traffic, Bressani went to Quebec, full of glowing zeal and undiminished constancy to win more laborers and to obtain altar supplies. Five more Fathers were designated for the mission. Said one of them: “We shall be taken, we shall be massacred, we shall be burned. Let it be so! The bed does not always make the happiest death. I see no one drop his head. On the contrary, each craves the post. To reach the field one must smell the smoke of the Iroquois cabins, and perhaps be roasted by a slow fire. But whatever befalls us, I know well that the hearts of those whom God shall call, will there find his paradise, and that their zeal will not be stifled by water or flames.” The party returned safely, with twelve soldiers, some workmen, and a cannon, twenty-six Frenchmen reinforcing it. But on reaching their villages they were torn with horror and rage at the scene before them. The ​Iroquois, continuing the war of desolation and extinction on which they had entered, had struck an appalling blow at the mission of St. Joseph, killing seven hundred Hurons, with the misssionary Father Daniel. On the 6th of March of the next year, 1649, the mission of St. Ignatius shared the same appalling fate, — Fathers Brebeuf and Lalemant perishing with their flock. The inhabitants of five of the Huron villages, in their fright and despair, burned their cabins and dispersed to various other mission stations. There were then eleven of these stations, — eight for the Hurons, and three for the Algonquins, served by eighteen of the Fathers. Forty Frenchmen, soldiers, traders, and domestics lived with them. The principal mission was that of St. Marie, which a fort was supposed to make safe and tenable; but famine compelled its desertion, and Manitoulin Island was sought as a refuge. The Huron chiefs were reluctant to go so far, and the missionaries, yielding to their passionate entreaties, agreed to go with them to the Island St. Joseph. It was with heavy hearts that they abandoned St. Marie, which with all its woes and wretchedness had become to them a second country. Here, too, in their new refuge, famine made horrible ravages with the wretched remnant. Soon news came of the massacre at St. Jean, in which Father Garnier perished. The heroic Bressani was again sent for relief to Quebec, and reached it in safety; but he vainly sought succor from the enfeebled colonists. He longed to return, even empty of relief, to his despairing flock, but could not start till June 15, 1650. His errand then was, as had been agreed upon in Quebec, to gather the Huron remnant to the neighborhood of that place. As the party were encamped near the mouth of the Ottawa they were set upon furiously by ten Iroquois, six of whom fell. Bressani was dangerously but not fatally wounded. Farther on in their route they met Father Ragueneau, with a crowd of three hundred of every age and sex, rushing on to throw themselves under the ​protection of the French. Bressani and his party returned with them to Quebec, where shortly all the missionaries left alive, with the sad remains of their flocks, gathered for an asylum. The Huron mission was ended. Many of the Fathers were sent back to Europe. Among these was Bressani. Only his vow of obedience would have reconciled him, though wrecked in health, to leave the scene of his labors and woes and his dear neophytes. He embarked for Italy, Nov. 1, 1650. His strength was renewed. He preached with great power and acceptance in the principal cities of Italy. He could say, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” He retired at last to the house of the Novitiate at Florence, where he died, Sept. 9, 1672, full of years and of honors.
The series of catastrophes which thus brought a complete discomfiture upon the heroic efforts of the Jesuit Fathers marks the surrender of the Huron missions. One by one their villages, and then their places of refuge, had been desolated. The proud hopes which rested on visions and ecstasies and anticipated the crowns of martyrdom were blasted. But those in whose heroic breasts such hopes had glowed with more of just assurance than any human longings can claim, did win and now wear the martyr's crown. Such of them as returned to Europe were ready and anxious, at the word of their superior, to come back to the scene of their sacrifices. Of those who remained here, most became victims. Another company of the Fathers were yet to find the field for similar labors and woes in the far West. But of those whose way of peril and of death we have been tracking, we repeat responsively the words of Mr. Parkman, so apt and eloquent: “Their virtues shine amid the rubbish of error like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent.” He bears witness to the softening influence of the Jesuits on the ferocity of the savages. He also regards the series of Iroquois onsets at this period, which nearly annihilated the Hurons and the Algonquins, as closing the missionary ​epoch in Canada, and yielding the field to the aims of French policy and trade for secular dominion. In this case it was not by invading white men, greedy for territory and plunder, but by the ferocity of their own kindred tribes, that the Hurons were extirpated. Yet the Iroquois were armed by the Dutch. The result might have been otherwise. Prosperous and extended missions might have brought the whole region of the lakes and the West under priestly sway, through France; and an Indian empire, “tamed but not civilized,” might have grown up while the seaboard colonies were weak.
III. Protestant Mission-work among the Indians. — As we have taken the Jesuit Fathers of New France to represent to us the missionary work of the Roman Catholic Church for our aborigines, so the Puritan ministers of New England may represent to us the same work under Protestantism.
After the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, the first publication through the press in London, specially prepared in the form of a Report of the fortune of the enterprise, was a vigorously written pamphlet issued in 1643, entitled, “New England's First Fruits; etc.” The first subject presented is the relations established between the colonists and the natives, with particular reference to the work of conversion. The pledges made in the charter, and the avowals and professions of the colonists as to their intentions and obligations towards the Indians were then fresh in their minds. With the exception of the bloody and almost exterminating war with the Pequots, which is represented as having been provoked by the savages, and to have had peculiar reasons for justifying it, there had been a show of amity between the whites and the few red men they had encountered. There is a tone of satisfaction and heartiness about the report of the progress of a Christian work among the Indians. Instances are given of apparently real convictions ​and conversions, according to the Puritan standard. There are several English families which have Indians for servants and laborers. Many of these enjoy an attendance on “the Word,” religious and Bible lessons, family prayers, grace at meals, etc., and offer evidence of being really reached by compunctions of sin, and good hopes. Their sagamores had welcomed the whites, and mutual courtesies had passed between them. Rights in land had been fairly purchased, and no trespasses were allowed.
But, — and here comes in full recognition the characteristic disgust of the English for the Indians, which the French seem never to have felt or else cautiously suppressed, — the authors of this pamphlet arrest themselves while most complacent in their account of the Indians, thus: “Yet (mistake us not) we are wont to keep them at such a distance (knowing they serve the Devil and are led by him) as not to embolden them too much, or trust them too far; though we do them what good we can.” “No real intentions of evil against us” have been seen in any of them, “excepting that act of the Pequots. . . And if there should be such intentions, and that they all should combine together against us, with all their strength that they could raise, we see no probable ground at all to fear any hurt from them, they being naked men and the number of them that be amongst us not considerable.”
In the charter patents of all the New England colonies, in the directions and instructions issued to their magistrates, and in the professions of their leading officials, the Christianizing of the native savages of the continent held, as we have seen, a very prominent place. They were to be treated justly and kindly, to be converted to and by the gospel, and to be civilized. When John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew simultaneously first set about an efficient effort to fulfil these obligations and avowals, some of the most inquisitive of the natives put to them the natural but embarrassing question, why the English should have allowed ​nearly thirty years, the period of a generation, to pass since they had occupied the soil of Massachusetts, without undertaking the serious work. The colonists had learned enough of the Indian tongue for the purposes of trade and barter; they had made the natives feel the power and superiority of the white men, and kept them at a distance as barbarians and pagans, holding them subject to their own laws for theft, polygamy, and murder, and waging dire war against them for acts which the Indians regarded only as a defence of their natural rights; but as yet, and not till a long interval of years had passed, had the white men proposed to make the savages equal sharers in the blessings of their civilization and religion. So far as the needful efforts to this end would have required expense and any combined and systematic labor, the colonists might reasonably have explained and excused their delay by their own scanty means and the extreme difficulty they found in maintaining their own existence, and in laying, through toil and struggle and many bufferings, the foundations of their commonwealth. Incidentally, too, we must recognize the fact, that from the first all the Indians who came in contact with the English received from them help, tools, appliances, resources, and many comforts to relieve the wretchedness of their lot and life. The childlike sincerity of Eliot furnished him with a reply which best apologized for the neglect of the past by regret and by the earnestness of his purpose for the future. The Presbyterian Baylie, in his invective against the New England “Church way,” charges upon its supporters a neglect of the work of con- version. He says that they were, “of all that ever crossed the American seas, the most neglectful” of that work. The grounds of his charge rest upon quotations from Roger Williams. On his voyage to England, in the spring of 1643, Williams employed himself upon his “Key into the Language of America,” which was published in London in ​the summer. He had also published a “little additional discourse . . . of the name Heathen,” treating of these natives of New England “and that great point of their conversion.” Of this latter work no copy was known to be in existence until one was discovered last year. Baylie quotes from it the following sentences: —
“For our New England parts, I can speak it confidently, I know it to have been easy for myself, long ere this, to have brought many thousands of these natives — yea, the whole country — to a far greater antichristian conversion than ever was heard of in America. I could have brought the whole country to observe one day in seven: I add, to have received baptism; to have come to a stated church meeting; to have maintained priests, and forms of prayer, and a whole form of antichristian worship, in life and death. . . . Woe be to me if I call that conversion to God which is indeed the subversion of the souls of millions in Christendom from one false worship to another!”
He says, “God was pleased to give me a painful, patient spirit to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes to gain their tongue.” Baylie exempts from his censure Williams alone, who “in the time of his banishment did essay what could be done with those desolate souls.” It is possible that the publication of Williams's Key, with the interest which it awakened in England, may have prompted the action of the General Court of Massachusetts in some further enactments for the Indians. At the Court in March, 1644, some of the sachems, with their subjects, had been induced to come under a covenant of voluntary subjection to the Government, and into an agreement to worship the God of the English, to observe the commandments, and to allow their children to learn to read the Bible, etc. An order of the Court in the November following provided that the county courts should care for the civilization of the Indians and for their instruction in the knowledge and worship of God. Again, in October, 1645, the Court desired ​that “the reverend elders propose means to bring the natives to the knowledge of God and his ways, and to civilize them as speedily as may be.”
President Dunster, of Harvard College, seems to have been regarded as eccentric because he urged that the Indians were to be instructed through their own language rather than through the English. In November, 1646, the Court, admitting that the Indians were not to be compelled to adopt Christianity, decreed that they were to be held amenable to what it regarded as simple natural religion, and so should be punished for blasphemy, and should be forbidden to worship false gods, and that all “powwowing” should at once be prohibited. “Necessary and wholesome laws for reducing them to the civility of life” should be made and read to them once in a year by some able interpreter.
The conspicuous and ever-honored representative of Puritan zeal and labor in civilizing and Christianizing the Indians, who with his co-worker Mayhew can alone “match the Jesuit” in this work, was the famous John Eliot. Edward Winslow, in his “Glorious Progress of the Gospel among the Indians” (London, 1649), had spoken of Eliot as “the Indian evangelist.” The modest saint, writing to Winslow at the close of the year, after he had seen the above tract, expresses a wish that that sacred word “could be obliterated, if any of the books remain” unsold; because Winslow had seemed to use the title “for that extraordinary office mentioned in the New Testament.” “I do beseech you,” he adds, “to suppress all such things, if ever you should have occasion of doing the like. Let us speak and do and carry all things with humility.” What would Eliot have said to the title of “the apostle,” which he has long borne and will ever bear unchallenged; or even to that of “the Augustine of New England,” which M. Du Ponceau attached to his name?
John Eliot, born near Nasing, in Essex, England, in 1604, graduated A. B. at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1623, ​and prepared for the ministry. From the first he was distinguished for his talent and proficiency in the study of languages. He became an assistant in the grammar-school of Mr. Hooker (afterwards of our Cambridge), at Little Baddow, in Essex. He came to Boston in November, 1631. Having pledged himself to become the minister of his fellow-voyagers if they should claim his services, he accepted the office over them in their settlement at Roxbury, as constituting the First Church there, Nov. 5, 1632; though he had to resist the urgent desire of the Church in Boston to become its pastor, in the absence of Wilson. He was soon married to a lady to whom he had been engaged in England, and who followed him hither. He retained his office in Roxbury till his death, May 20, 1690, at the age of eighty-six, — his faithful partner, Mrs. Ann Eliot, having gone before him, in her eighty-fourth year, March 24, 1687.
It would appear that Eliot had given heart and thought to a Christian service for the Indians in their instruction and civilization, immediately upon his settlement at Roxbury. As soon as the enterprise exhibited hopefulness, and through the efforts of Edward Winslow, at the time agent of the colony in London, had been brought to the notice and sympathy of friends in England, measures were taken, first privately and then by a parliamentary corporation, to draw to it patronage and funds. But it should always be mentioned to the honor of Eliot, that his sacred aim was self-prompted. Mayhew, of Martha's Vineyard, appears to have engaged simultaneously in the same effort, and in similar ways; but there had been no concert between the two. In fact, Eliot's first announcement of his purpose met with incredulity and opposition from some around him; and though he was afterwards greatly cheered and aided by sympathy and funds from the English society, his initiatory work and his hardest-won success preceded its organization, as well as the very moderate recognition of the ​interests of the Indians by the Massachusetts Court, which in 1647 voted him a gratuity of ten pounds. Incidentally it should be mentioned that the early struggles and poverty of Harvard College found in that same society more efficient and needful patronage than has been generally recognized, in direct and indirect aid from its funds.
Eliot says that the first native, “whom he used to teach him words and to be his interpreter,” was an Indian who was taken in the Pequot wars, and who lived with Mr. Richard Collicott, of Dorchester. He took the most unwearied pains in his strange lessons from this uncouth teacher, finding progress very slow and baffling, and receiving no aid in it whatever from his skill in other tongues so differently constituted, inflected, and augmented. Though he is regarded as having gained an amazing mastery of the Indian language, he frequently, during the full half century of his work, avows and laments his lack of skill in it. We can pick out from his extant writings scraps of information about his difficulties and his mastery of them. His main dependence was upon securing the more intelligent, and, as he calls them, “nimble-witted” natives, young or grown, to live at his house in Roxbury, to be the medium of communicating to him words and ideas, to accompany him on his visits, and to be, with him, mutually teacher and learner.
Singularly enough, his greatest success was attained in a direction which we should have thought least likely, — namely, in his being able to convey to the Indians, through what seemed to be their own poor and scant vocabulary, spiritual ideas, truths, and relations. Mr. Shepherd, in his “Cleare Sunshine,” etc., paid him a beautiful tribute, when he wrote: “In sacred language, about the holy things of God, Mr. Eliot excels any other of the English that in the Indian language about common matters (trade, etc.) excel him.”
Quite different opinions were at the time expressed by ​those who essayed, as interpreters, teachers, and preachers, to master the tongue, as to the construction and compass of the language, and the difficulties or facilities of its acquisition. It would seem that of it, as of other languages, ancient and modern, barbarous or cultivated, written or unwritten, it was easy to catch enough of it for the common intercourse of life in the woods, the wigwam, or traffic. The embarrassment of communication in it increased according to the importance or dignity of the theme. Mr. William Leverich, a very successful preacher to the Indians in Sandwich, Mass., wrote, in 1651: —
“I cannot but reckon it a matter of success and encouragement that, though the Indian tongue be very difficult, irregular, and anomalous, and wherein I cannot meet with a verb substantive as yet, nor any such particles as conjunctions, etc., which are essential to the several sorts of axioms, and consequently to all rational and perfect discourses, and that though their words are generally very long, even sesquipidalia verba, yet I find — God helping — not only myself to learn and attain more of it in a short time than I could of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew in the like space of time, when my memory was stronger, and when all known rules of art are helpful to fasten such notions in the mind of the learner; but also the Indians to understand me fully (as they acknowledge), so far as I have gone. I am constrained by many ambages and circumlocutions to supply the former defect, to express myself to them as I may.”
Eliot seems even to intimate that Cotton of Plymouth was his superior in a mastery of the Indian tongue, and he relied largely upon Cotton's aid in his translation and printing of the Scriptures. He gave two full years of close study and practical trial of the language before he ventured to preach in it. Feeling that the time had fully come to justify the experiment, he invited the petty chief Waban and some of his Indians to gather near his wigwam, under an oak tree on a hill in Nonantum, now Newton, Mass.; and on the 28th of October, 1646, he discoursed to them in their ​own tongue, from Ezekiel xxxvii. 9. This, his first service, lasting for an hour and a quarter, was introduced by a prayer in English, because he scrupled lest he might use some unfit or unworthy terms in the solemn office. This prompted an inquiry from his hearers whether God and Christ could understand prayers in their own tongue. In his second service, a fortnight afterwards, he ventured to pray in Indian. In his successive visits to his deeply interested but much confused disciples, his method was, to offer a short prayer; to recite and explain the Ten Commandments; to describe the character of Christ, how he appeared on earth, where he is now, and his coming to judge the good and the wicked; to teach the creation and fall of man; and then to appeal to them to repent and pray, and come to Christ as their Saviour. The Indians were then asked and encouraged to put questions which arose in their own minds, or were prompted by what they had heard. As we shall soon see, they exhibited much acumen in using this privilege, generally putting apt and pertinent inquiries, showing that their minds were naturally active or readily quickened. For instance, they were at once puzzled to understand how man could be made in the image of God, when the Fourth Commandment forbade such an imitative work. Cotton Mather, in commending Eliot's style in sermonizing, says: “Lambs might wade into his discourses on those texts and themes wherein elephants might swim.” Such a style must have been equally apt for his white or red auditors.
From time to time, one or more of his brother elders and of the magistrates, with the Governor and some of the leading men of the colony, accompanied Eliot on his missionary visits, listened to the exercises, and learned to sympathize with his devoted efforts; and, however they may have measured or estimated the stages of progress or the prospect of desirable and rewarding results, they, with scarce an exception, showed a most grateful and hearty appreciation of his zeal and purpose. From the very first ​stages of his exacting task Eliot was sure that his success was dependent upon the establishment of Indian communities in settlements exclusively their own, with fixed habits of life and industrious occupations, ultimately with school-teachers and dames, mechanics, preachers, and local magistrates of their own race, and with all the comforts and securities of the towns of the white men, and their organized churches. He wrote, “I find it absolutely necessary to carry on civility with religion.” The Rev. John Danforth, the poet divine of Dorchester, whom Eliot helped to put in office, commemorated the Apostle and his wife, “the virtuous consort,” in some verses after their decease. He thus puts into rhyme Eliot's matter-of-fact opinion on this subject: —
* Address, I pray, your senate for good orders
* To civilize the heathen in our borders.
* Virtue must turn into necessity,
* Or this brave work will in its urn still lie.
* Till agriculture and cohabitation
* Come under full restraint and regulation,
* Much you would do you'll find impracticable,
* And much you do will prove unprofitable.
* In common lands that lie unfenced, you know,
* The husbandman in vain doth plow and sow;
* We hope in vain the plant of grace will thrive
* In forests where civility can't live.”
After many visits of search and exploration over a wide circuit, with Indian companions for counsel and help, Eliot chose a region of territory a part of which now bears its original name, — Natick, — to begin his great experiment. “The praying Indians” came to be the term, henceforward, for designating those of the natives who had been brought under degrees of instruction and of voluntary submission to Christian influences. By the earnest and effective agency of Eliot a large company of these were gathered to the above named site in 1651, as a place for their permanent settlement and abode, for further progress in civilization and religion. Besides engaging in his behalf the most ​zealous and kind-hearted of his own brethren, Eliot was careful to secure for every stage of his undertaking the sanction and patronage of the General Court, which he addressed in his petitions, and which he kept informed of his plans, hopes, and progress. It is noteworthy to read in the records of the Court its orders for selecting, bounding, and securing to the successive settlements of the Indians, for their ownership and improvements, portions of that wilderness territory of the whole of which, but a score of years before, they had been the unchallenged owners. From the date just named, onward, the entries on the Court records indicate that its legislation for the Indians alternated in measures of apprehension, caution, and restraint, with intended patronage and favors.
It was about the time of Eliot's most busy and anxious employment in planning his first Indian town, that there occurred an incident in his life at Roxbury which, however much or little significance it may have had for him, presents to us a suggestiveness and a charm that persuade us to linger for a moment upon it. The incident was a visit made to the Puritan Eliot by an honored and devoted Jesuit Father, who was laboring in the same cause, though in another way. Father Gabriel Druillettes, born in France in 1593, was sent as a missionary to New France, with two of his Jesuit brethren, in 1643. The horrid smoke of the Indian cabin, in his first winter with the Algonquins, deprived him, after intense suffering, of his sight, as he thought permanently, — the application of Indian remedies having destroyed his hope of restoration. Hundreds of leagues of lake, river, mountain, forest, and swamp kept him from all aid and sympathy from his brethren. He was led about by a child, and performed his offices and functions by memory and touch. His faithful neophytes proposed to draw him to Quebec on a sledge. He laughed at this proposal; and, instead, invited them to try the power of prayer. A votive Mass to the Virgin was ​speedily offered, at which he felt his way among the vessels of the altar and recited the office by memory. Just as he was raising the Host his sight returned, and never failed him again, through a long-protracted service in various places, till his death at Quebec in 1681, at the age of eighty-eight. He was sent twice by the Governor of Canada on diplomatic missions to New England, — alone in 1650, and with Godefroy, of the Canadian Council, the next year. This diplomatic character was his full protection, and, in Massachusetts at least, his salvation from imprisonment and banishment; and from death, should he break confinement or return again. Such was the reception Massachusetts then gave by her law, copying that of England, to “Papistical and Jesuitical” intruders, unless they might be shipwrecked on the coast. Respect, hospitality, and kindness — for which the Father expresses his warm recognition and gratitude in his own journal (fortunately in our hands) — was the far preferable treatment extended to him. He says he was called the “Patriarch” on the Kennebec and the coast of Acadia. Leaving Quebec Sept. 1, 1650, he went to Norridgewock, where he met John Winslow, the agent of the Plymouth colony at that post, and brother of Edward, who had procured from Parliament, July 27, 1649, the charter of the Corporation for Propagating the Gospel here, in aid of Eliot's work.
It would seem that Druillettes and Winslow must have had even a jolly time together in the warmth of good fellowship and cheer, for the Jesuit expresses himself as heartily upon it as became his cloth. Leaving Augusta by land for Merry Meeting Bay, and sailing thence November 25, they reached Cape Ann December 5, and, partly by land and boat, came on shore at Boston December 8. We may be sure that Winslow took care that the Jesuit should at once be known as an ambassador. The latter playfully calls Winslow his “Pereira,” — in allusion to the Portuguese merchant who had shown like care and love, as a ​friend, to St. Francis Xavier. His mission, founded upon previous correspondence with Governor Winthrop, was to induce the Massachusetts to enter into an alliance with the French for protection, and even warfare, against the Iroquois, or the Mohawks or Maquas. Winslow took Druillettes to the house of Major-General Edward Gibbons, a man of multiform and varied experience, serviceable, and of some repute, but of dubitable sanctity as a Puritan under church covenant. He was a most cordial host, giving the Jesuit a private room, with “a key,” in his own house, and being thus probably an abettor of the first service of the Mass in Boston. The Jesuit was next taken to visit the Governor (Dudley) at Roxbury, to whom he presented his letters. Here, too, he was most cordially received, the Governor promising to notify the magistrates, with whom, in strange grouping, the Jesuit dined on the 13th. He represented himself as ambassador in the interest and for the protection of his catechumens at Kennebec, as against their deadly foes the Iroquois, who sooner or later would be in hostility against the English. He was turned over to the authorities of Plymouth, as having jurisdiction over the region from which he came. Winslow accompanied him to the Pilgrim colony, where he arrived December 22, lodging with Mr. Paddy. The excellent Governor Bradford, with much courtesy, received him at dinner, which, it being Friday, was considerately one of fish, and paid all his expenses. He returned to Boston by land on the 24th December. He had further interviews with Ellery and Dudley, and, embarking for the Kennebec Jan. 5, 1651 (N. S.), was compelled by bad weather to put into Marblehead. Here, he says, the minister “received me with great affection, and took me to Salem to visit Governor Endicott.” This stern Puritan of the Puritans was most friendly and hospitable to the Jesuit, conversing with him in French, giving him money, as he was penniless, and inviting him to dine with the local magistrates.
​It is pleasant to follow in Druillettes' Journal, through its marvellous misspelling of the names of places and persons, his recognitions of kindly and cordial treatment. The one that especially engages us is that in which, as he was returning from Plymouth to Boston, he tells us that he went to see “Mr. Heliot,” the minister; adding, “He treated me with respect and affection, and invited me to pass the winter with him.” Here then, face to face together, in the humble cottage, but by the generous fireside of the village wilderness pastor, were seated in respectful and affectionate converse two Christian men, each and both of whom spent nearly half a century in what was to them the most sacred of all labors. It must have been on or near Christmas day. We know well how much there was to alienate them in opinion, in prejudice, in profoundly sincere convictions, and in experience. Had they been so disposed, the very sight of each other in times of religious ardor and passionate strife, like those through which they lived, might have prompted a bitter and aimless discussion. But we are certain that nothing of this sort passed between them. They were Christian gentlemen. Peaceful, gentle, and respectful, however otherwise earnest, must have been their interview by the fireside on that winter's day. The season of the year, so dreary and perilous for the Jesuit's return journey, doubtless suggested the kindly invitation to him to make his winter's home with the Puritan pastor. We picture the scene to our minds, and love to gaze upon it as full of pleasing and elevating suggestions. We might be interested in the subject of their conversation for itself; we certainly should be interested in their talk, because it was theirs. A letter of Eliot's of that date shows that he was seriously exercised upon the question whether the natives of the continent were the descendants of the lost Jewish tribes. The question was then one of exciting interest and discussion among the Puritans, and it appears that some of Eliot's own brethren were cool in their ​sympathy with or distrustful of any great success in his labors among the Indians, because they were persuaded that the conversion of the heathen was to be deferred until after “the coming in of the Jews.” Now if these heathen were at the same time dispersed and degenerate Jews, Eliot, of course, would find his side greatly cheered and strengthened. But this was rather a bon bouche for Puritans than for the Jesuit, and it is hardly likely that Druillettes had any special views about it or would care to discuss it.
As to Druillettes' errand, this is to be said. There seem to have been a hope and purpose that the union of the four New England colonies, in 1643, should have been more comprehensive, embracing the French and the Dutch, each colony to retain its own language, religion, and habits, but all to be confederate for protection, thrift, and commerce. Hutchinson says proposals had in 1648 been made to D'Ailleboust, Governor of Canada, for a free commerce with Massachusetts. These were received with pleasure, and correspondence was continued till Druillettes was sent on his mission in 1650. The prime condition exacted by the French was that the English should combine with them in hostilities against the Iroquois, as common enemies. Here we note the working of the complications of the rival relations of the European nationalities with our aborigines. The Dutch had already armed the Iroquois at the cost of the French. Massachusetts was safe from that foe, and did not wish to open a war. Plymouth was willing to comply with Druillettes' proposal; but neither that colony nor Massachusetts could act in the matter without the consent of the Commissioners of the Four Colonies. Druillettes came the next year with Councillor Godefroy to confer with them, but he did not succeed in the purpose of his embassy. In the records of the Commissioners there is no recognition of the priestly character of the envoy. He is referred to as “Mr. Drovilletty,” bearing a letter “to the honored ​Governor from Mounsier Delabout, Governor and Leftenant for the King of France, in the flood St. Lawrence.” The Commissioners were quite ready to enter into friendly relations for trade, but were chary of any entanglements in matters of war.
There was matter enough on which the two ministers of Christ could converse together. Possibly there might have been seated by the fireside one or more of those inmates of his family of the native stock whom Eliot continued to turn to his own help in the language. That language and its dialects as compared with tongues more familiar to Druillettes, and a statement by Eliot of the approaching culmination of his plans in an Indian town, may well have been the topics of the interview.
The experiment at Natick, as it was the first of a series of such made with degrees of completeness in several places, was from the beginning, and through its whole development and trial, under the especial care of Elliot. There was not in him a particle of assumption or self-assertion in magnifying his cause, or in insisting upon his own authority or opinion. All along he sought to secure and to deserve the intelligent advice and the hearty co-operation of the magistrates, ministers, and leading men; and he sometimes yielded his own judgment or preference to conciliate and avert variances. There was a stage in the experiment when his well-guarded and moderate hopes seemed to have the promise of being crowned with fair success. The records of his own church and the traditions of his ministry in Roxbury prove that he most, faithfully performed there all the laborious routine duties of a teacher and pastor in those days, in Sunday and Lecture service, in catechising, in administering discipline, and in constant oversight of the members of families in their various relations, with cares for the sick, the sorrowing, the dying, and bereaved. His rule was to visit Natick once a fortnight, riding there in all weathers, on his own horse, by paths ​through the woods which he did more than any one else to make a road over hills and swamps and streams. The distance was eighteen miles. He was always laden with miscellaneous burdens. Though his own beverage was water, and his diet of the simplest, and he abhorred the use of tobacco, he was willing that the Indians should in some cases have wine; and he himself, after his professional work was done, distributed tobacco to the men, and apples and other little gifts to the pappooses. Probably some cast-off clothing from the backs of his own flock, with household stuff generally, formed a portion of his load. There are evidences that, like most fond and unselfish laborers for pets of their own fancy, he had acquired that exquisite art of begging gracefully from others, he himself dropping out in the solicitations.
Anything like the weakness of mere enthusiasm or overexpectation from his labors was all along provided against in his case by the lack of them in many others around him. The wordly-minded and “the ungodly” — and there were some such even in his Puritan community — ridiculed his schemes, and did what they could to thwart them so far as they would tend to protect the Indians against contemptuous treatment or injustice in trade. Even some of the sincerest yet narrowest sympathizers mistrusted lest Eliot's project was premature, as they thought the time had not been providentially reached “for the coming in of the fulness of the Gentiles.” The magistrates were cautious and often hesitating, and in many cases failed to carry into effect provisions of their own enactment designed for the benefit of the Indians. Though the Puritan missionaries, in the field of their effort, did not encounter such malignant and ingenious opposition as did the Jesuits from the powwows and sourcerers, — the Indian practitioners of divination and medicine, — they felt the effect of it, and had difficulty in reasoning it away. The Indians, whose whole resource for aid in their troubles and extremities had been ​in their powwows, feared that if these fell into discredit or disuse, in any case of emergency in the future in which the help of white men should fail them they would be without relief. Eliot wrote to England to invite over doctors and surgeons for them, with appliances and drugs, and thought it desirable that they should have lectures, with the help of an “atomy,” or skeleton. In a letter to Mr. Boyle, he wrote: “I have some thoughts, if God give life and means, to read medicine, and call for such roots — for they altogether use the root, and not the herb — as they have experience of.” His chief difficulty, however, came from the apprehensions, the distrust, and in many cases the positive hostility of most of the sachems, sagamores, and grades of chieftains among the Indians. These apprehended that they would henceforward be deprived of the tribute which they had been wont to receive or to exact from their people. Eliot tried to act as a fair umpire in this matter, enjoining that the tribute due as such to chiefs should be continued, though qualified and reduced according to circumstances. While concentrating his labors at Natick, and dividing them among some half-dozen other Indian settlements soon initiated, he sought to make his movement one of wider compass, at least to other New England tribes; but his success was slight. The famous King Philip, taking hold of one of Eliot's coat-buttons, told him he cared no more for his religion than for that; and Uncas, sachem of the Mohicans, utterly forbade any proselyting work among his Indians. Roger Williams, in a letter to the Commissioners of the United Colonies, in 1654, wrote that in his recent visit to England he had been charged by the Narragansett sachems to petition Cromwell and the Council in their behalf, that they should not be compelled to change their religion.
The Charles River — sometimes fordable, sometimes swollen — ran through “the place of hills,” which Eliot and his guides had chosen for their experiment in ​“cohabitation and civility.” The bounds of the plantation were laid out by the Court in 1652. Mainly by the labor of the Indians, a strong, arched foot-bridge, eighty feet long and eight feet high, had been thrown over the stream, with its pilings heavily laden with stone. Proud were its rude builders when it stood through the frost and freshets of the next season, which wrecked a bridge built by the English over the same stream at Medfield. Three wide parallel streets ran, two on one side and one on the other side of the stream, through the projected village; and the territory was portioned into lots, with walls and fencing, for houses, tillage, and pasturage. Fruit-trees were planted, and a palisaded fort enclosed a meeting-house fifty feet long, twenty-five broad, and twelve high, built of squared timber after the English fashion, with sills and plates, mortises and tenons, and a chimney. The Indians had no other aid in this work than that of an English carpenter for two days. The lower story was to be used for a school and for preaching and worship, and the loft for a place for keeping furs and garments, and for a bed-room for Eliot. Wilson, the Boston pastor, describes the scene when he was present at a lecture. He says the women and the men sat apart on benches, there being about one hundred Indians, “most, if not all, clad in English apparel,” and thirty English. The place soon began to wear the aspect of industry and thrift, and to offer the comforts and securities of household life, with fields fenced and broken for crops, and fruit-trees set in the ground. The Indians preferred to construct their dwellings in their own style; but cleanliness and a regard for decency were strictly required of them. A sort of magistracy among themselves was established in the autumn. Eliot, throughout his plan, followed the theocratic model after which the colonists themselves were self-governed. He directed the Indians to choose among themselves ten rulers of tens, two of fifties, and one of a hundred, by the Scripture pattern. On Sept. 24, 1651, ​they solemnly, after prayer and counsel and exhortation, entered “into covenant with God and each other to be the Lord's people, and to be governed by the word of the Lord in all things.” In the mean time diligent efforts were in progress for the primer and catechetical training of children, for their education in English, and for the preparation in school, and even in college, of promising natives for teaching and preaching.
From the first tokens of hopeful promise and possible ultimate success in his arduous work, Eliot began to cheer himself with the joy which he should realize in setting before him, as a crowning result, the establishment in exclusive Indian towns of the perfected idea of the Puritan church. This required a company of covenanted believers, men and women, “saints by profession and in the judgment of charity,” keeping strictly the Sabbath and the ordinances, with teachers of their own race, educated, consecrated, and duly ordained, and in communion with sister churches. The pastor of an Indian church should be such, in attainment, ability, and piety, as would put him on an equality, certainly for all official functions and regards, with the ministers of the English. Communicants should be received, as among the whites, on giving satisfactory evidence of their conversion, their conviction of sin, their spiritual experience and renewal, and their sincere purpose to lead a consistent, godly life, observing all the then requisite conditions and methods, — prayer and Bible-reading daily in their families, grace at meals, and the religious training of their children and households. The brethren and sisters thus covenanted together were to have a rigid watch and ward over each other, jealously guarding themselves against reproach or scandal, keeping all wrong-doers in awe, attracting the well-disposed, and proving themselves a body of the elect. Only the children of covenanted parents should be baptized, and the gifted of the flock were to be encouraged “to exercise in prayer and exhortation.”
​But all this was prospective, in the future. The more fervently it was desired and aimed after, the more wisely and diligently should every intervening step and condition be regarded. With all his zeal and fervor, and his clear apprehension of his final object which alone would be success, Eliot was a most patient, sagacious, and methodical overseer of his own work. He thoughtfully and prudently kept in view all needful conditions and preliminaries; he was content with very slow progress; he calmly met all obstacles, and gently treated all mistrusts; and he did not hurry to anticipate the result. Companies of his converts, after he had catechised and preached to them for a little more than a year, began to importune him for an entrance upon full Christian standing and privileges. Kindly, and with reasons which seemed to convince, he postponed the solemn work which they would have hastened. It proved to be four years before he and they were fully gratified.
He felt that he had planned wisely in planting the Indian towns as remote from those of the English as would consist with the occasional intercourse needful for their oversight and direction. One very desirable end he thought would thus be secured, in restraining what had come to be realized as a troublesome and dangerous evil, — the loitering of Indians, as vagabonds or pilferers, on the skirts of the English towns. Even the best of them had so far only intermitted spasmodic periods of labor for themselves, or on wages for the whites in harvest-time, with wide wilderness roamings. So long as they pursued this course they could not be held to the social and legal obligations of a community, much less to the rules of Christian morality and church discipline. As soon as it was thought safe to do so, what may be called the municipal concerns of the Indian settlements and the adjudication of petty issues between man and man were administered by some among themselves. English magistrates were appointed by the Court to make periodical visits, to dispose of more ​important causes. In 1656 the Court chose and commissioned Mr. Daniel Gookin to have the general oversight, as magistrate, of all the Indian towns. He sympathized warmly with the plans and labors of Eliot, was a man of great purity and nobleness of heart, of excellent judgment and exemplary patience, and became the most steadfast friend under severe discomfitures and trials of those who were committed to his charge. His office and work proved as exacting as those of Eliot.
The Society incorporated by the English Parliament for obtaining and administering funds for these gospel labors among the Indians drew to it many and very liberal friends. Its income came to amount to six or seven hundred pounds. The Commissioners of the United Colonies were, by provision of its charter, in relations of correspondence and advice with its officers, and were intrusted with the disbursing of its funds. Communications were sent over from Boston in a steady succession, reporting each stage of hopefulness and promise in the work, with full and minute information. These were indorsed by Presbyterian and Independent ministers in and near London, commended to the notice of the Puritan Parliament, and printed. Indifference, mistrust, and opposition to the cause as useless or overstated occasionally manifested themselves, but were met and silenced.
The funds were to be used for various specified purposes, — salaries of ministers, interpreters, and school-teachers, the building of an Indian college at Cambridge and the support of native pupils and scholars, the purchase of clothing and books, etc. The Records of the Commissioners give evidence that there was some little friction in their agency ​as correspondents with the English Society, in overseeing the work and distributing and accounting for the funds, as they were thus brought into delicate relations with Eliot. The Commissioners preferred that he should make report of his work through them, and not by any private letters; and that all gifts to him should pass through their hands, or be within their knowledge. He began his labors and accomplished some of the most difficult parts of them unaided and at his own charges. He afterwards received a salary, first of £20, then of £40, and finally of £50, from the funds of the Society.
An illustration here presents itself of the mighty solvent power of that faith, common so far to the Puritan and the Jesuit missionary, which could so readily distribute the alternations of promise and disappointment in the stages of their work, assigning the encouragements to God and the discouragements to Satan. Thus, in connection with the active and costly enterprise at Natick, the English Society had been enlisted to send over large quantities of farming tools and implements of industry and household thrift, clothing, etc. A vessel laden with these was on its way, and Eliot had quickened the hearts of the Indians by telling them what warm and generous friends God had raised up for them across the sea. The vessel was wrecked with great losses on Cohasset rocks, though some of its freight was saved in a damaged condition. “Satan wrecked the vessel, but God rescued some of its contents.” Again, on the eve of the occasion appointed for instituting a church at Natick, “three Indians of the unsound sort had got several quarts of strong water.” The natural consequences followed. Of this Eliot says: “There fell out a very great discouragement, which might have been a scandal to them, and I doubt not but Satan intended it so; but the Lord improved it to stir up faith and prayer, and so turned it another way.” Mighty indeed is that assuring trust which can thus allot the bane and the blessing of human life!
​To the communications made from time to time by Eliot for the sake of their being printed by the Society in England, in order to draw confidence and funds to the mission work, he generally attached some interesting matter indicating the active intelligence of his Indian disciples. As has been said, one of the exercises in Eliot's religious services on his visits to Natick was his allowing and prompting his hearers to ask him any questions which seriously sprung up in their own minds, as they tried to understand and appropriate his teachings. We know how fruitful the creed of Calvin, and doctrines drawn from the Puritan estimate and mode of using the Bible — the Jewish and Christian Scriptures — have been in puzzles for the brains of civilized and well-trained men and women. It is not strange that the savages found in them riddles and perplexities. The Jesuit put foremost to his more docile disciples the creed, the authority, and symbols of his church, thus leaving to a reduced and secondary place of importance the promptings of the reasoning faculty on speculative and didactic points. But the Puritan stirred a spirit of disputation, with which he found it difficult to deal. Eliot, however, with kind and honest frankness indulged the liberty which he had offered. So he was wont to append to his communications to his English patrons some of the questions which came to his mind when he wrote, as having been put to him by the Indians. He says: “They are fruitful that way,” though some of them ask “weak questions, which I mention not; you have the best.” The excellent Gookin, who was often present, writes: “Divers of them had a faculty to frame hard and difficult questions, touching something then spoken, or some other matter in religion, tending to their illumination; which questions Mr. Eliot, in a grave and Christian manner, did endeavor to resolve and answer to their satisfaction.”
It was altogether natural that the Indians, being so positively told by those who seemed to have knowledge in the ​case, that they were the natural bond-subjects of Satan in life and in death, and being generally treated by the English in conformity with this teaching, should be especially interested in learning all they could about their dark, spiritual adversary. So most of their questions had reference to him and his unseen realm. They asked, “If there might not be something, if only a little, gained by praying to him?” “Whether the Devil or man was made first?” “Why does not God, having full power, kill the Devil, that makes all men so bad?” “Why do Englishmen so eagerly kill all snakes?” “If God made Hell in one of the six days, why did he make Hell before Adam had sinned?” “If all the world be burned up, where shall Hell be then?” “If all the Indians already dead were in Hell, and only a few now in the way of getting to Heaven?” Some of their queries showed no slight skill in casuistry. Eliot, insisting that his disciples should have but one wife, was asked, “If an Indian have two wives, the first without, the second with children, which of them shall he put away? If he renounces the first, then he wrongs the one who has the strongest claim upon him. If he discards the second, then he breaks a living tie, and makes his children bastards.” “If one man sins knowingly and another ignorantly, will God punish both alike?” “If God loves those who turn to him, why does he ever afflict them after they have turned to him?” “Why did not God give all men good hearts, that they might be good?” “When Christ arose, whence came his soul?” When Eliot answered “from Heaven,” it was replied, “How then was Christ punished in our stead, afore death, or after?” “Whither their little children go when they die, seeing they have not sinned?” Eliot says, “This gave occasion to teach them more fully original sin, and the damned state of all men. I could give them no further comfort than that when God elects the parents, he elects their seed also.” “If a man should be inclosed in iron a foot thick, and thrown into the fire, what would ​become of his soul? Whether could the soul come forth thence, or not?” There is a singular beauty in one of the questions put by these pupils of natural religion: “Can one be saved by reading the Book of the Creature [Nature]?” Eliot says, “This question was made when I taught them that God gave us two books, and that in the Book of the Creature every creature was a word or sentence.”
A specimen of the “weak questions” is the following: “What shall be in the room of the world when it is burnt up?” Eliot calls this “an old woman's question, yesterday.” The women were allowed to ask questions through their husbands, — not always, either in savage or civilized life, a satisfactory medium.
Only once does there seem to have been trifling. Eliot says, “We had this year a malignant, drunken Indian, that (to cast some reproach, as we feared, upon this way) boldly pronounced this question: ‘Mr. Eliot, who made sack, who made sack?’ [the word for all strong drinks]. But he was soon snibbed [snubbed?] by the other Indians calling it ‘a pappoose question,’ and seriously and gravely answered, not so much to his question as to his spirit, which hath cooled his boldness ever since.”
This wicked Indian, named George, seems to have been a sad reprobate. He killed and skinned a young cow belonging to a settler in Cambridge, and had the effrontery to pass it off as “a moose” to Mr. Dunster, the President of the College, “and covered it with many lies.” He was “convented before an assembly of the elders,” and made confession, which was kindly received.
Patience, gentleness, and dialectic skill must have been equally needed by the good Apostle under these questionings. Supposing his readers well furnished at such points, he does not give us his answers.
Eliot made several distinctly marked stages of his work in the process of preparing his flock at Natick for and admitting them to the full privileges of what he calls “a ​Church estate.” He and they looked longingly forward to that crowning result. The most earnest of his converts were anxious to be put upon the same level with the English in the coveted enjoyment of all ecclesiastical rights and ordinances. He was himself naturally deliberate and scrupulous in avoiding all haste and in making sure of his ground. There were additional reasons also for hesitancy and delay in the case, furnished by the jealousy, the lingering prejudices, and the still unreconciled opposition of some of his own brethren. English pride and self-respect, and watchfulness for the dignity of the Puritan institutions, would keep careful guard over all the preliminaries for the recognition of a Church composed of natives. Stragglers and groups of them occasionally attended upon the Sabbath assemblies of the whites, with uncertain edification, understanding but little, and not always welcome, — though invited, and even constrained to come. The best of them might well realize that any good they were to derive from such services could be secured only when they met to worship by themselves, with “exercises” in their own language. Perhaps curiosity, novelty, and the love of imitation had their influence. As the Indians became impatient at the deferring of the consummation of their wishes, Eliot most wisely improved the opportunity by efforts to keep them steadfast, and to reconcile them to the delay by making sure of the gains already reached. It was hard to wean them from a roaming life and to accustom them to that fixed residence, “cohabitation,” which was the prime essential to religious discipline and a covenanted religion. They must dwell together if they would be “a people with whom the Lord would delight to dwell.” One stage in the tedious and responsible work had been secured in the measure already noticed, by which the families occupying the fifty lots in the new town had entered into a civil compact, after the model of the Jewish Theocracy. One of the laws which they had themselves made, of course under Eliot's ​prompting, was in these words: “All those men that wear long hair shall pay five shillings.” Eliot says “they had a vain pride in their hair,” so that the sacrifice was a hard one. He himself was sturdily opposed to the wigs worn by his own brethren. In the summer of 1652, Eliot began to pursue, with a few of the most promising of the male Indians, precisely the same process by which in his own Puritan church individuals in the congregation from time to time became members in full communion. And he followed this method with even more formality in every subsequent step of the process. He drew from some half-dozen of his converts what are called “confessions,” — relations of private religious experience. These he translated and wrote down, and then submitted to a meeting of his own ministerial brethren. Oct. 16, 1652, was appointed for their assembling at Natick on a day of solemn fasting and prayer, for the hearing of further “confessions,” which were to be formally interpreted, opportunity being given for searching examination of them. These confessions, with an accompanying narrative, were sent to England and published in the interest of the Society which fostered the Indian missionary work. Eliot waited for the receipt of some of these tracts from England, that the circulation of them might reassure the confidence of friends here and remove what still remained of doubt or opposition to his work and purpose. He had another reason for delay, as “the waters were troubled” by threatening of war with the Dutch neighbors, and it seemed wise to wait for calmer seas. Eliot availed himself of the occasion of a great gathering in Boston, on a meeting of the Commissioners of the colonies, to bring his cause before the assembled elders, with the book of confessions. He asked for their approval of his proceeding to admit his Indians to a “Church estate,” and induced them to attend upon a solemn meeting to be held at Roxbury in July, 1654, for hearing the confessions of some of his candidates from Natick, to be ​selected by himself. To insure impartiality in interpretation, Mayhew came to help him. The natives gave to the appointed day the term Natootomahteac, “the day of examination;” and they were advised to prepare themselves for it by private religious exercises. A public fast occurred in the interval, which those natives observed. Eliot suffered just at this time a dreadful, staggering blow, which almost disheartened him. As with hopeful heart he was mounting his horse, ten days before the set occasion, to prepare his candidates, word was brought to him that three drunken Indians had drawn into their revels the son of one of his foremost disciples. He was the more distressed because, as he says, one of the culprits, “though the least in the offence, was he that hath been my interpreter, whom I have used in translating a good part of the Holy Scriptures; and in that respect I saw much of Satan's venom, and in God I saw displeasure. I lay him by for that day of our examination, and used another in his room.” The men were judged by their own local magistrates, put in the stocks, and whipped at a tree. The boy was put in the stocks for a short time, and then whipped by his father in the school.
When the great day came, Eliot proceeded with the utmost deliberation, with full caution, and charming candor. He wished to secure a rigidly fair interpretation and a clear understanding of the candidates by the elders, so that all should be scanned and tried. “For my desire was to be true to Christ, to their souls, and to the churches.” Eight candidates were examined, and we have the proceedings in full in one of the London tracts. Eliot frankly said, as to the subjects of his efforts in general, “We know the profession of very many of them is but a mere paint, and their best graces nothing but mere flashes and pangs.” If, according to the literalism of the Puritan faith, the names of all true covenanted Christians are written in the “Lamb's book of life,” there may be found upon it the names of the following members of the fold in Natick: ​Totherswamp, Waban, Nataôus, Monequassum (the native schoolmaster, who could spell, read, and write, then wasting in consumption), Ponampam, Peter (“a ruler of ten, a godly man,” who soon after died in sanctity), John Speen, Robin Speen, Nishohkon, Magus, Poquanum, Nookan, Antony, Owussumag, and Ephraim. Eliot says the Indians were abashed in making their confessions. The hearing of them deliberately spoken and then interpreted, must have been a tedious trial of patience to some of the English listeners, “who whispered and went out.” Eliot says, “These things did make the work longsome, considering the enlargement of spirit God gave some of them.” Sunset was near before the close. “The place being remote in the woods, the nights long and cold, and people not fitted to lie abroad, and no competent lodgings in the place for such persons, and the work of such moment as would not admit of huddling up in haste,” — it was concluded not to complete it on that day. The Indians were disappointed; but Eliot comforted them, as the elders did him, with just praise and encouragement. The poor man needed all sympathy and cheer. He says he “missed some words of weight in some sentences, — partly by my short and curt touches of what they more fully spake, and partly by reason of the different idioms of their language and ours.” The schoolmaster especially, in his confession, had the “enlargement of spirit.” “The graver sort thought the time long; therefore, knowing he had spoken enough (at least as I judged), I here took him off. Then one of the elders asked if I took, him off, or whether had he finished. I answered that I took him off. So after my reading what he had said, we called another.”
These “confessions” doubtless suffered in the interpretation. They are juiceless and parrot-like, formal, constrained, and technical, wholly lacking in the unique and picturesque originality of the Indian speech. They are for the most part accounts of thoughts or impressions ascribed ​to a text on which Eliot had preached, or suggested by something he had said.
It was not until 1660 that a church of native members was instituted after the Puritan pattern at Natick. On the occasion, of which we do not know the date, Eliot officiated, baptized the candidates, and administered the Lord's Supper.
It would seem that the great accomplishment of Mr. Eliot's life, growing out of his missionary work, — the translation of the Scriptures entire, — so far from having entered into his original plans, had been regarded by him as impossible. In a letter to Winslow, in England, June 8, 1649, he wrote: —
“I do very much desire to translate some parts of the Scripture into their language, and to print some primer in their language, wherein to initiate and teach them to read, which some of the men do much also desire, and printing such a thing will he troublesome and chargeable; and having yet but little skill in their language, — having little leisure to attend it, by reason of my continual attendance on my ministry in my own church, — I must have some Indians, it may be, and other help continually about me to try and examine translations, which I look at as a sacred and holy work, and to be regarded with much fear, care, and reverence; and all this is chargeable: therefore I look at that as a special matter on which cost is to be bestowed, if the Lord provide means; for I have not means of my own for it. I have a family of many children to educate, and therefore I cannot give over my ministry in our own church, whereby,” etc.
This allusion to his responsibilities, as the head of a family, reminds us of the different conditions under which Eliot and a Jesuit labored in their respective fields. Eliot had a daughter and five sons. All these five sons he trained for Harvard College, dedicating them all to the Indian work. One of them died in his college course; the other four were preachers, one being his assistant at Roxbury. The daughter, with one only of the sons, survived the father. He writes: —
​“Moreover, there be sundry prompt and pregnant witted youths — not viciously inclined, but well-disposed — which I desire may be wholly sequestered to learning, and put to schools for that purpose, had we means.”
In 1650 he writes, pleading earnestly for help to support an Indian school: —
“I have compiled a short catechism, and wrote it in the master's [the native teacher's] book, which he can read and teach them; and also all the copies he setteth his scholars when he teacheth them to write are the questions and answers of the catechism, that so the children may be the more prompt and ready therein. We aspire to no higher learning yet but to spell, read, and write, that so they may be able to write for themselves such Scriptures as I have already or hereafter may (by the blessing of God) translate for them; for I have no hope to see the Bible translated, much less printed, in my days.”
There had been grammars and dictionaries of native languages in Spanish America, published a century before Eliot meditated a similar work. There are intimations in the correspondence of the Commissioners, as agents of the Society in London, that they feared he might be tempted to print some of his translations before he was sufficiently skilled in the native tongue, with its possible variations of dialect even with New England tribes. In a letter to him dated Sept. 18, 1654, they say: —
“We desired that Thomas Stanton's [the official interpreter in their affairs with the Indians] help might have been used in the catechism printed, and wish that no inconvenience be found through the want thereof. And shall now advise that before you proceed in translating the Scriptures or any part of them, you improve the best helps the country affords for the Indian language, that, if it may be, these Southwestern Indians may understand and have the benefit of what is printed.”
Eliot, in his sensitiveness, misapprehended the intent of this advice, for at the meeting of the Commissioners in the year following, in a reply to a letter from him, they say:
​“The Commissioners never forbade you to translate the Scriptures for preaching, or for any other use either of your own or of your hearers, but advised that what you meant to print or set forth upon the Corporation charge might be done with such consideration of the language and improvement of the best helps to be had therein, that as much as may be the Indians in all parts of New England might share in the benefit; which we fear they cannot so well do by what you have already printed.”
Mr. Abraham Pierson, of Connecticut, came under the patronage of the Society for his labor and skill in the mastery of the Indian language. Fifteen hundred copies of an Indian catechism made by him, printed by the Society in our Cambridge in 1659, preceded any work of Eliot's. The quaint simplicity of Eliot's remarks at the close of his Indian Grammar, also printed in Cambridge, 1666, makes them worthy of being copied here: —
“I have now finished what I shall do at present; and in a word or two, to satisfy the prudent inquirer how I found out these new ways of grammar, which no other learned language (so far as I know) useth, I thus inform him. God first put into my heart a compassion over their poor souls, and a desire to teach them to know Christ and to bring them into his kingdom. Then presently I found out (by God's wise providence) a pregnant-witted young man, who had been a 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. By his help I translated the Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and many texts of Scripture. Also I compiled both exhortations and prayers by his help. I diligently marked the difference of their grammar from ours. When I found the way of them, I would pursue a word — a noun, a verb — through all variations I could think of. 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 Christ, will do anything. Nil tam difficile quod non. I do believe and hope that the gospel shall be spread to all the ends of the earth and to the dark corners of the world by such a way, and by such instruments ​as the churches shall send forth for that end and purpose. Lord hasten those good days, and pour out that good spirit upon thy people! Amen.”
One cannot but wish that Eliot might have had for his help and guidance some of the best practical hints which the science of phonography has in recent years suggested in the way of simplicity and labor-saving in the writing and printing, at least, of a language which as yet has only been spoken. The evidence is abundant that many of the English teachers acquired great facility in speaking the Indian language, but no two of them, in attempting to put into writing a page or a single sentence of it, would have fallen upon the same mode of spelling, or would have used the same number or order of the letters for the same word. Indeed the field was an admirable one for the trial of phonography. And it was of course wholly by the sound that Eliot was guided in his choice and collocation of letters for a word. He had arbitrary power in the case. Any one who mechanically turns over the pages of either of his Indian works can hardly resist the conviction that he might have dispensed with a considerable number both of the consonants and vowels lavishly used by him. But he sought to do full justice to those large elements of the medium of converse among his disciples which he found to consist of gutturals and of grunts. Within the space of a few pages of the same book we notice the words aukooks and ohkukes, as giving the name of the stone-kettles of the Indians. Either of a dozen other collocations of letters would have served equally well for the symbol of the sound. It was to his great relief and help that Eliot learned that in the structure of the Indian grammatical forms there was a regularity and method as strict and systematic as in those of the classical languages, though quite unlike theirs. Gender and number, moods and tenses, direction, relation, etc., found their full definition in augments or inflections. As in our unskilled ignorance we try to understand anything ​in Roger Williams's Key, or in Eliot's Grammar, it seems to us as if an Indian word began little and compact, like one of their own pappooses, and then grew at either extremity, and thickened in the middle, and extended in shape and proportion in each limb and member, and was completed with a feathered head-knot, — thus assimilating each acquisition of knowledge and experience as well as of food and ornament. Such we feel sure must have been the history of the genesis and development of a word before us in forty-three letters.
The Jesuit Biard, in Acadia, says he was satisfied with translating into Indian “the Lord's Prayer, the Salutation of the Virgin, the Creed, the Commandments of God and of the Church, with a short explanation of the Sacraments, and some Prayers, for this is all the theology they need.” But Eliot, true to the Puritan idea that the Bible ought to be to all Christians what the Church was to the Romanists, considered that the seal of his life's work and the pledge of its continuity and security would be found only in a complete translation of the Holy Scriptures, of both Testaments. The Puritan made no discrimination as to the divine authority or edifying use of one or another portion of those writings. The Bible was one book, — a whole in itself. What in it was not of present application had value as authenticating its most vital and essential teachings. So the devoted and laborious Apostle gave himself to the task of transferring the details of the patriarchal history, of the wars in Canaan, of the Levitical institutions and the tabernacle worship, of the genealogical tables of Kings and Chronicles, and of the burdens of the Prophet, as well as the Psalms of aspiration and the sweet benedictions and parables of Christ, into an equivalent in the barbarian tongue. An unskilled person, in turning over the pages of the Indian Bible, will see that he found relief from what would have been an impossibility had he felt himself bound to give an Indian equivalent for proper names and ​technical terms in the Scriptures, by simply using the Bible word and adding an Indian termination. A story has obtained currency, that when Eliot was rendering the passage in Judges v. 28, where the mother of Sisera is said to have “cried through the lattice,” after much perplexity to find an Indian word for lattice, he adopted one given him by a native, which, to his amusement and regret, he afterwards found signified “an eel-pot.” The story is a fiction. In both editions of his Old Testament the word lattice is rendered latticent, — the English fitted with an Indian termination, though it is said that the word is Indian for “eel-pot” by haphazard. It is in evidence, too, that the Indian teachers and preachers found it easy and pleasant to use his Bible for all the purposes for which, with such zeal and toil, he had labored upon it. References are frequent, many years after, in the decaying Indian towns, to copies of the book which showed the same tokens of having been conned and pored over with the reverential affection lavished upon the English book in Puritan households. Eliot made two catechisms, one for younger and one for older scholars. He also provided a simple Indian primer. He translated some of the Psalms into Indian metre, which are said to have been “melodiously improved” by his disciples in their worship. His translations of Baxter's “Call” (1664) and of the “Practice of Piety” (1665), the former undertaken at the request of the Hon. Robert Boyle, were in the same service of the style of Puritan religion into which he would train his converts. After his grammar appeared, the use of it must have furnished facilities alike for teachers and pupils. It would seem that two editions were printed of most if not of all his works.
By a letter from the Secretary of the Society in London, of date May 18, 1661, the Commissioners were informed that under the new order of things, in the restoration of the monarchy, the Parliament's Corporation was dissolved by ​legal defect. But the hope was confidently expressed that the King would renew it. The Commissioners therefore availed themselves of the fact that Eliot's translation of the New Testament was about to issue from the press in Cambridge, Mass., to improve it to a good purpose. The volume appeared Sept. 5, 1661. The title is, “Wusku Wuttestamentum Nul-Lordumun Jesus Christ Nuppoquohwussuacneumun.” The Commissioners had a dedication prepared and printed in several copies, offering the strange work, with their homage, to Charles II., as appearing in the first year of his reign, and making it the appropriate medium of their petition that he would be graciously pleased to re-establish and confirm the defunct Corporation. The next year brought them the grateful tidings that his Majesty had renewed the charter under a prestige which drew in the patronage of “many of the nobility and other persons of quality.” The materials for the expensive work of printing, and Mr. Marmaduke Johnson, as overseer, had all been furnished by the Society. The Old Testament, having been three years in the press, engaging the constant pains of Eliot and his assistants, was published in 1663. It was bound up with the New Testament, with a Catechism, and a translation in metre of the Psalms. The copy that was sent to the King was elegantly bound, as were also a few others in London. These were furnished with a somewhat fulsome dedication, though the donors might well find pride and satisfaction in their offering. In inscribing the New Testament to their sovereign, they had expressed their “weak apprehensions” that his Majesty had “a greater interest in this work than we believe is generally understood.” In dedicating to him “the whole Bible” in the language of the natives of New England, they recognize his favor in the reincorporation of the Society, and congratulate him as being the first European sovereign that ever received such a work, with such “a superlative lustre” upon it, from his subjects. There were a thousand copies of this edition. ​In 1680 a second edition of the New Testament was printed, and in 1685 another edition of two thousand copies of the Old Testament appeared, to supply the loss in the wreck of King Philip's war. The cost of this second imprint of the Bible was a thousand pounds. Its title is, “Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up Biblum God Naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament.” Copies of the book have been sold recently for more than a thousand dollars each. Generous as were the contributions made in England to this work, the Commissioners were equally earnest in their appeals for more, and needed an occasional reminder from the officers of the Society that their funds were limited. It is somewhat curious to note a fact appearing on the record, that these officers of a society with the King's charter, in making remittances here of silver “pieces of eight,” — Spanish dollars, — approve the reminting of the specie, at a profit, in Boston, in contravention of the King's prerogative.
Father J. F. Chaumonot, who spent fifty years among the Hurons, made a dictionary of their language which has never been recovered. Father Sebastian Ralle made a vocabulary of the Abnaki tongue, which, as one of the spoils of war, was seized by the Massachusetts soldiers, and has been published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Eliot's Indian Bible, having long since ceased to serve the uses of piety, — except as the very sight and history of it will ever have a sacramental power, — has a value assigned to it in abstruse philological and linguistic studies by such scholars as Adelung, Duponeeau, Pickering, Professor Whitney, and Max Müller.
What would have been the later working and the continuous and final results of the experiment put on trial among the Massachusetts Indians, if left to a natural and peaceful development, fostered and not obstructed, is certainly a question of interest. But it would seem to admit of but one decision, to be inferred from all the knowledge ​we have since acquired by actual trial of similar experiments. Some new phases and complications of the problem of the co-existence of two races on different levels of intelligence, ability, and thrift, — living in immediate proximity, the inferior overborne by the superior, — would have offered more intricate issues for our politics and more puzzling perplexities for our philanthropists. The calamitous occurrences soon to be referred to, which violently arrested the working of the experiment and brought most grievous disappointment to Eliot, while entailing bitter inflictions on the Christian Indians, will be regarded by different persons according to their varying judgments, as either merely precipitating a foregone conclusion or thwarting a prospect of fair promise. Mr. Gookin, the earnest and self-sacrificing English magistrate charged with the oversight of the Indian towns, wrote his carefully prepared account of them for the Society in England, in 1674, though the manuscript was first put into print by the Massachusetts Historical Society not until 1792. His account of the progress of the experiment up to the date of his writing represented the prospect as prevailingly fair and hopeful. He himself had labored jointly with Eliot, with so much zeal and patience, and with such an unselfish and devout spirit, that he had attained a full knowledge and appreciation of all the exactions and embarrassments of the enterprise. While himself cheerful and assured, he was not over-sanguine, still less enthusiastic. He was always cautious, moderate, and discreet, recognizing alike the serious difficulties of the undertaking from the rude material with which he had to deal, and from the distrust and lack of sympathy of many of the English. He counted seven tolerably well established settlements or villages of the more or less Christianized Indians, and seven others in a crude state working towards that condition. The former were occupied substantially by natives who, with some exceptions in each, had abandoned a vagabond life, and were ​trying to subsist on the produce of the soil, with occasional hunting and fishing, on wages paid them by the English for labor, and on the profit of some simple employments in handicraft. The first seven of these villages had their forts, their outlying fields, fenced or walled, their more cleanly and decent cabins, their blacksmiths, their meeting-houses, native preachers, teachers, and petty magistrates, and their administration of local affairs, with occasional help from the whites. Fruit-trees and growing crops gave a show of thrift and culture to the scenes. The Indians were kept under a jealous and rigid Puritan oversight, which could not but have been irritating, even if necessary in restraining them. It might be said that no scheme or effort, in its device or conduct, undertaken by Europeans for the Christian civilization of the natives of this soil, and indeed that no missionary enterprise among pagans in any part of the earth, was ever more sincerely attempted, or pursued with more practical wisdom and with more reasonable grounds for a rightful success, than this. Yet even with this experiment in full view, without the discomfiture brought upon it, a general and sweeping conclusion might with something more than mere plausibility be drawn, that the Indians cannot be civilized by the agency of the white man instigating and co-operating with them. Inherent and insurmountable obstacles from the blood and fibre, the instincts and temperament, — the nature, so to speak, — of the red race withstand all such efforts. As well essay, it may be said, to expel the game-flavor from the deer or the sea-fowl. Eliot and Gookin had to realize, from the first and increasingly, the distrust, the antipathy, and even the firm-set opposition, of their own countrymen to the work they were performing. And these feelings were by no means to be ascribed in all cases to unworthy or even unchristian motives. The Indians were said to have in view “the loaves and fishes,” to be untamable, and in fact likely, as hypocrites or weaklings or dependent and ​shiftless paupers, to prove more of a nuisance in their simulated state of civilization than in their wild condition. Candor also requires the acknowledgment that the considerable cost and charges of the work among the Massachusetts Indians were not borne by the colony treasury, nor relieved to any extent by contributions of the colonists themselves, who might have reasonably excused themselves by their own necessities. The experiment was in the main supported by the charitable and pious sympathy and gifts of the contributors to the funds of the Society in England.
But a copy of the manuscript of Gookin's hopeful narrative could not have been long in England before he was compelled, under date, at his residence in Cambridge, of December, 1677, to employ his pen in finishing a most sad narrative. This second narrative, after an obscured existence in England, was found there long after in private hands, and was put into print merely as an antiquarian document, by the American Antiquarian Society, only in 1836. Even at this late day, and while the pangs which it cost the writer, and of which as borne by others it was the faithful record, have long been stilled in peace, it cannot be read without a profound sympathy of sorrow. It is entitled, “An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England, in the years 1675, 1676, and 1677, impartially drawn, by one well acquainted with that Affair,” for the Corporation in England. The gentle, earnest truthfulness, the sweet forbearance, the passionless tone, and the full, minute, and well-authenticated matter of this record, draw to the writer our warmest respect and confidence. The substance of it is a matter-of-fact, detailed rehearsal of the jealousies, apprehensions, and severe measures on the part of the people and Government of Massachusetts, in their dealing with the “Praying Indians,” during the horrors and massacres of that exterminating war which is accredited, somewhat doubtfully, in its plan and conduct to the astute and able Metacomet, or ​King Philip, sachem of the Narragansetts. Gookin and Eliot were fully persuaded, from their own knowledge, that the Indians under instruction were then sufficient in numbers, with constancy and sincerity for the emergency, if they had been judiciously managed, to have been most effective allies of the whites in that war; and that their settlements were in fact admirably adapted to be a wall of defence. But from the outbreak of that havoc of burning, pillage, and carnage arose horrid apprehensions of treachery fostered in the Indian towns. Rumors that Philip's runners and messengers were engaging in the bloody work all the natives, even of distant tribes, filled the air. Tribes heretofore hostile to each other and harmless towards the English were said to be in the league. The darkest jealousies, which could not be reasoned with, popular panics, and bruited or whispered suspicions, had full sway. The word was, “We have been nourishing vipers.” It was affirmed that, either by artifice, or threats, or promise of reward, Philip would sooner or later induce the converted Indians to make common cause with him as spies or traitors. This jealousy was natural, and is not to be wondered over. The magistrates seem to have tried to withstand it. Many of their first measures in dealing with it were considerate and forbearing, as they remonstrated with the popular excitement, and endeavored to restrain it, manifesting a true sympathy with the suspected and odious parties. But it was all in vain. Just enough cases also did occur, which, when aggravated by rumor and generalized upon, seemed to warrant suspicion and distrust of all the Christianized Indians. Some few who had settlements in the towns, and a larger number of those who had never committed themselves directly to the experiment on trial in their behalf, slipped away into the woods. In three instances barns or outbuildings in exposed situations were set on fire, as was suspected and alleged, by Indians who had been under the kindly care of the whites. In no ​instance, however, was such a deed proved against any one of them, while there were mischievous and malignant strollers enough in those dismal days to have done many such acts, and worse ones. In the mean time several outrages and even murders were committed against the Indians by the exasperated whites, and the juries would not convict the offenders in the courts, though the magistrates faithfully instructed and urged them to do so. It would appear that, as the excitement and panic increased, something of the effect followed which had from the first been apprehended. Many of the Indians who were not the most constant or attached to their new mode of life, with others who had taken a disgust to its restraints, and still more who were discouraged or maddened by the jealousy which was turned against them, did leave the villages and enter with some measure of sympathy and active malice into the schemes of the enemy. It cannot be denied that some who had been regarded as pledged to civilization and Christianity, and who were under obligation to the whites, did prove false in various degrees of criminality. Even a young, intelligent, and well-taught Indian, called James Printer, alias Wawans, who had been Eliot's main dependence in printing his Bible at Cambridge, ran off to the enemy, though he was afterwards received as a returning penitent, he being acute enough to offer excuses or to plead for palliation. In the histories of the then frontier towns of Massachusetts which have of recent years been prepared and published by local antiquarians, we find mention of one or more Natick, Grafton, or Marlborough Indians as seen in the files or ambush parties of the devastating foe.
As day by day brought fresh alarms, with tidings all too true, that the infuriated enemy, maddened by their own unchecked advances, had burned one after another of our outlying towns, and would inevitably come within the frontiers to the older settlements, the suspicions and animosities against the Christianized Indians could no longer be ​held in check. Some indeed were ready to turn against them with the deadliest weapons. The General and the County Courts were compelled to act in the case by some decisive measures. A committee of the magistrates advised that the Indians should be removed from their own settlements to the close neighborhood of the seaboard English towns, — to Cambridge Plains, to Dorchester Neck, and Noddle's Island, and some to Concord and Mendon. But this proposition only exasperated the more the inhabitants of those towns, as it would but bring the dreaded scourge nearer to them. It was evident, all along, that the greater familiarity into which the whites had been drawn with the natives, in the process of their so-called civilization, only made such as were not influenced by the highest considerations of religion and true commiseration regard them with more repugnance than when they were in their wild state. The rooted race-prejudice stirred the English blood. Their occasional assumptions of equality, induced by their common Christian profession and observances, made the Indians offensive. Timid and thrifty persons dreaded the strolling or camping of a few of them in their neighborhood, as worse than gypsies. The Indians observed and felt all these things, and it is not to be wondered at that they sometimes gave the whites reason to dread their proximity.
But there was no alternative to the removal of the Indians from their settlements; and that at Natick, the most secure, and the least likely it was thought to furnish traitors, was put under treatment from the misfortunes of which it never really renewed its first prosperity. Eliot and Gookin stood resolutely and most affectionately for the championship of the objects of their care. They had no distrust, no wavering in their love. They pleaded, remonstrated, and offered themselves to be sureties for the fidelity of the wretched and cowering converts. Gookin was confronted and insulted for his conduct in the case, and even Eliot was treated by some with reproaches and ​disdain. The courts were compelled to yield to the wishes of the panic-stricken whites.
Those who have read in detail the history of these melancholy years in Massachusetts cannot but muse sadly as they pass the present site of the United States Arsenal in Watertown, formerly called “The Pines,” in Cambridge, over a scene that was presented there in the autumn of 1675. The magistrates had reluctantly ordered the removal of the Natick Indians to Deer Island, which was then largely covered with forest trees, and used for the grazing of sheep. The owner, Samuel Shrimpton, allowed this use of his island, with a covenant that the trees should not be cut down nor the sheep molested. A friendly person, Captain Thomas Prentiss of Cambridge, was charged with the removal of the Indians. With a party of horse and six carts, to transport a few movables and the sick and lame, he brought about two hundred of them away from their ripened crops, their rude homes, and all the associations which had become dear and sacred to them, to camp temporarily at the Pines. Good Mr. Eliot and some sympathizing English met them there, and were deeply moved by their submissive patience. He prayed with, comforted, and assured them. At midnight, the tide serving, on October 30, they were shipped in three vessels for the island. Their numbers were increased before the end of December to about five hundred, by the Punkapoag or Stoughton Indians. Eliot then went down to cheer and encourage them. He writes of them: —
“I observed in all my visits to them that they carried themselves patiently, humbly, and piously, without murmuring or complaining against the English for their sufferings (which were not few), for they lived chiefly upon clams and shellfish, that they digged out of the sand at low water. The Island was bleak and cold, and their wigwams poor and mean, their clothes few and thin. Some little corn they had of their own which the Council ordered to be fetched from their plantations and conveyed to them by little and little. Also, a boat and man was appointed to look after them.”
​The continued distrust of the “Praying Indians” was steadily met by the confidence and urgency of the few friends, who made themselves personal enemies by so doing. By and by, the English found that all their efforts against the wily foe, at ruinous sacrifices of money, property, and life, were baffled by the mode of the enemy's warfare, in ambushes and surprises, in dense forests and in swamps. It seemed as if the advantage was on their side, and that the white settlements would all fall before the torch and the massacre. In this dire extremity Eliot and Gookin proposed that some of their disciples, for whose fidelity, prowess, and skill in Indian warfare they would pledge themselves, should be employed as guides and allies, especially on errands for redeeming such captive whites as had not been tomahawked, and to penetrate swamps and thickets. With extreme misgiving and caution, and not without sharpening new jealousies, the suggestion was heeded, and the resource proved to be highly serviceable. At first one, then two, and slowly more, of the poor wretches on Deer Island were put to this use. The allies proved faithful. They stripped and painted themselves like the enemy, and tracked them to their lairs. At last a company of eighty of them was put under the command of Captain Hunting of Charlestown, and did eminent service. Gookin affirms that in the summer of 1676 the Indian allies, in scouting and in battles, had killed at least four hundred of the enemy, and that their co-operation “turned the balance to the English side,” and “the enemy went down the wind amain.” It was alleged that an Indian would always yield to the temptation of liquor, and would become infuriated by it. Gookin said, that, being used only to water, a very little spirit would intoxicate one of them. He could not bear the fourth part of an Englishman's dram. Gookin had “known one drunk with an eighth of a pint of strong water, and others with a little more than a pint of cider.” Another statement of Gookin's on this point may ​be quoted, though it can hardly be said to relieve the responsibility of the English in furnishing the Indians with liquor, inasmuch as they must have taught them how to make it: —
“If it were possible, as it is not, to prevent the English selling them strong drink, yet they have a native liberty to plant orchards and sow grain, as barley and the like, of which they may and do make strong drink that doth inebriate them; so that nothing can overcome and conquer this exorbitancy but the sovereign grace of God.”
It had still been intended that the removed Indians should remain, and work and plant on the islands in the harbor. But the good service done by many of them helped a relenting feeling. The distressed condition of the old men, the women, and the children drew pity towards them. Good Thomas Oliver, their friend, offered to harbor them at his place on Charles River, Cambridge. Their release in May, 1676, was a jubilee to the poor creatures. It was estimated that about a fourth part of all the Indians in New England — Massachusetts numbering three thousand — had been more or less influenced by civilization and Christianity. It was believed by some that had it not been for these, and had they on the other hand been leagued with Philip, the whites would have been exterminated. After the war the “stated places” for Indian churches in Massachusetts were contracted to four. Occasional stations were established for preaching, where the natives met to fish, hunt, or gather nuts. In Plymouth colony and in the Vineyard there were ten in each, and in Nantucket five. In 1670 Eliot, with Cotton of Plymouth, and Mr. Mayhew, ordained at the Vineyard Hiacoomes, the first converted native pastor of the Indian church, — a worthy and noted man. He had had a promising son in Harvard College. An Indian church was soon after gathered at Mashpee, with an English pastor. The “Praying Indians” in Massachusetts, Plymouth, and the Vineyard, in 1674, were numbered at ​3,600. Eliot, writing in 1673, names six Indian churches at Natick, Grafton, Mashpee, Nantucket, and two at the Vineyard. All these, he says, have regular native teachers, except Natick, where, “in modesty, they stand off, because so long as I live, they say, there is no need.” In 1687 President Increase Mather wrote to Professor Leusden, of Holland: “There are six regular churches of baptized Indians in New England, and eighteen assemblies of catechumens (or candidates for baptism), professing the name of Christ. Of the Indians there are twenty-four preachers of the Word. There are also four English ministers who preach the Gospel in the Indian tongue.” In 1698 Grindal Kawson and Samuel Danforth, as a committee appointed to visit Natick, reported: “We find there a small church, consisting of seven men and three women. Their pastor (ordained by that reverend and holy man of God John Eliot, deceased) is Daniel Tahawampait, and is a person of good knowledge. Here are fifty-nine men, fifty-one women, and seventy children under sixteen years of age. We find no schoolmaster here, and only one child that can read.” Up to the year 1733 all the town officers of Natick were Indians. They were partially such till 1762, after which date there were none. The place was incorporated as an English town in 1762, having been under its former character from 1651 to that date. By the census of 1763 there were in the town thirty-seven Indians. In 1792 there remained but a single Indian family, that having five members.
October 28, 1846, there was a local celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of Eliot's first visit to the spot. Two very suggestive incidents, deeply pathetic, marked that occasion. There was present at the exercises a girl of sixteen years, who was the only lineal descendant of the Indians known to exist. A copy of Eliot's Indian Bible — purchased by subscription for the purpose, from the sale of the library of the Hon. John Pickering — was then presented for deposit among the town's records.
​Not the least among the sad memories shrouding this wilderness-work, — earnest and sincere in its purpose, but so utterly thwarted and blighted in its time for fruitage, — are those of the Indian boys and young men for whose special use the first substantial building was erected on the grounds of Harvard College. The flavor and restlessness of a forest life were to be extracted from their blood and fibres by a classical and scholarly academic training; though the forest would have been sure to reclaim every one that consumption or the change in diet and habit might spare. Six youths, after a preliminary training in a grammar-school, were in the classes at one time. Of two, who were just about to graduate, one — the most promising, a son of Hiacoomes, the much-esteemed convert at the Vineyard — was murdered on a vacation visit home. The other, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, whose name alone is on the catalogue, graduated in 1665, a classmate of the royal Governor Joseph Dudley. He died within a year, of consumption.
Eliot set up a fortnightly lecture at Natick for the Indians, “in logic and theology,” in their own language. Six young Hurons were contemporaneously taken by the priests into a seminary in Quebec. At the end of five years they had run off into the woods, carrying their Latin with them. The only one who had “commenced Bachelor of Arts” followed after them.
No laments could deepen the melancholy in which this story finds its conclusion. To moralize over it would be to open an inexhaustible theme. There were places where feeble remnants of these partially-civilized natives remained a little longer than at Natick. But the longer they survived the more forlorn was the spectacle they presented. Here and there may be seen in Massachusetts, in these days, a poor pensioner or vagabond, in whose veins are mixed Indian and African blood. Still there are trust-funds for their relief and benefit, which happily are legally available ​for poor fishermen on islands and headlands. The only knowledge of the ancient race which young persons in Massachusetts have by actual eyesight is when their summer sojourns bring them to the waters of the Penobscot, the great hostleries near the mountains and the lakes, and the borders of Canada. Here are still humiliated and taciturn specimens of full-blooded Indians. Such religion as they have is the legacy of the Jesuit missions.
As we view the devoted and zealous laborers in those first Indian missions, we have to say that the task with which the Jesuit charged himself was intellectually far lighter than that assumed by the Puritan; that is to say, it was a lesser task to turn an Indian into a Christian by the Jesuit than by the Puritan method. It is not easy for us to learn with any minuteness or fulness of detail exactly how and what, in the nature of intellectual instruction in religious and Christian truths and duties, — their authority, scope, and consistent influence, — the Jesuit taught the Indian disciple. We have but slight information on this point in the earliest records of their missions. The authority of the Church passed for very much, and the recognition of this, in an assent to whatever its priest should teach or require, seems to have been the great comprehensive demand of the missionary. The savages who came with most docility or with the least resistance on their part under the training of the priest, seem to have done so without argument or much explanation. Those who resisted the appeal, and who in any way tried to justify their rejection of the proffered blessing, were able and ready in some cases to give reasons — of weight with themselves — for so doing. We have to judge that the Jesuit method was the easier and the more compliant one, because he was much more readily satisfied than the Puritan would have been as to the evidences of Christian conversion required of and manifested by one of the heathen. This easier work of the Jesuit applies only to the strain upon his own intellect and ​that of his disciples. If, however, the test be applied to the relative exaction of toil, sacrifice, and personal endurance of the two classes of missionaries, the Jesuit was put to a far sterner trial; and nobly did he meet it. Starting for at least a year of isolation in the deep forest, with his Indian crew, he tucks up the skirts of his cassock and takes off his shoes, so as not to carry sand or water into or to pierce the canoe. He bears his share of packs over the portages. He has at hand flint and steel to light fires and pipes. He must be patient and cheerful, and never tease or worry the Indians with questions. He goes to share with them the life of squalor and dreariness already described, in close intimacy. He became, as we may say, fond of his companions.
The first Puritan ministers who labored for the Indians were men with families, and generally with parishes of their own. They visited the Indians at intervals, but never domiciled with them. They compelled them to cut off their hair and to wear clothing. Eliot drew upon the cast-off wardrobes and ragbags of his friends, as well as upon remnants of old sails and horse-blankets, that he might prepare his red flock to enter Paradise with some of the apparel which Adam put on when he was leaving it. This teasing interference with all the personal habits of the Indians is an illustration of that strong antipathy, already remarked upon, which the Englishman felt for the native. This antipathy, and the hauteur accompanying it, alienated the Indian. When Major Gibbons was commissioned, in 1645, to aid our allies the Mohicans, he was instructed “to make good use of our confederates, having due regard to the honor of God, who is both our sword and shield, and to the distance which is to be observed between Christians and barbarians, as well in wars as in other negotiations.” The historian Hutchinson remarks on this advice: “It seems strange that men who professed to ​believe that ‘God hath made of one blood,’ etc., should so early and upon every occasion take care to preserve this distinction. Perhaps nothing has more effectually defeated the endeavors for Christianizing the Indians. It seems to have done more, — to have sunk their spirits, led them to intemperance, and extirpated the whole race.”
Wilson, the pastor of the Boston Church, writing to the Missionary Society in England, refers to the visit to the town, in 1651, of “Humanequim, a grave and solemn man,” ordained by Mayhew as pastor of an Indian church in Martha's Vineyard. Wilson says he was “a great proficient in knowledge and utterance, and love and practice of the things of Christ.” “On the Lord's Day, in the Assembly,” Wilson said he asked one of the brethren “to receive that good Indian” into his pew, which he did. Why did he not share the pulpit? It stands, however, to the credit of the Puritans that they raised up native preachers, which the Jesuits did not. And yet candor requires the acknowledgment that one may easily read between the lines of many contemporary writings, that to the stiffer and sterner of the Puritans, both clerical and lay, such imitative approaches to the ways and manners of the whites as were reached by a few of the educated natives only made them more repulsive. Their “civility and humanity” seemed but a parody of the bearing into which ages of softening and refining processes, with the decencies and sanctities of home life, had trained the colonists. The official and clerical services of Indian preachers, and the ecclesiastical proceedings of their flocks, — rude and even ludicrous as for the most part they must have been, — must on occasion have tried the spirits and pride of grim-faced observers. Cotton Mather betrays the disgust working in his own feelings in this sentence of his Life of Eliot: “To think of raising a number of these hideous creatures unto the elevations of our holy religion, must argue more than common or little sentiment in the undertaker.” Too often ​under forced training the Indian lost whatever of spontaneous or inherent simplicity or dignity he might have caught as he roamed the woods, a child of nature. The virility of his manhood yielded to a humiliated sense of inferiority. His former attitude of spirit which stood for self-respect was bowed into conscious dread, though not always deference, for the white race.
Some of Eliot's successors, such as Sergeant, Edwards, Brainerd, and others, attempted a simpler method in teaching the Indians. The first of these, though a Calvinist, said he had “learned not to meddle with high themes, such as predestination and the origin of evil, but preached faith, repentance, and morality.” The Jesuit teaching must also in its way have had many elements for confounding and puzzling the minds of their disciples. One of them, a prisoner in Boston, said that he had been taught — or at any rate had so understood the lesson — that the Virgin Mary was a French woman, and that Christ was born in France. Certainly the extremes of difference in means and methods for reaching a result which had any common significance to both parties — such as the making of Christians in belief and life — could hardly present themselves in sharper antagonism than did those of the Jesuit and the Puritan.
The abundant quotations which have been made in the preceding pages from prime authorities, and the comments upon them, present to us in full view the little that has been common between the aims and methods of the two great branches of the Christian church in their efforts to convert the natives. As to the larger proportion of what has been variant and discordant, and even antagonistic, in those aims and methods, charity and wise judgment will best guide the reader in his own decision. The statement has been made with this fulness as regards the beginnings of this missionary work, because, as our space will not allow us to trace its progress and present aspects down to our own time, we may feel relieved of the task by the simple ​suggestion that the beginnings of the work set the example which has substantially been followed since by both parties of Christians. That missionary work among the Indians has never to this day been given over. In spite of all the perplexities and embarrassments which have attended it, and notwithstanding all the discouragements, thwartings, and failures which have clouded it, the inspiration of faith and duty has always won to it earnest and zealous laborers, and has secured to them the full sympathy and the generous patronage so essential to its support. Driven from one field of labor by war or ruin, the missionaries have sought another; disappointed in the trial of one scheme, they have soon devised a substitute. As each new organization or society, starting with hopefulness in friends and funds, has languished and been left to die, a fresh enterprise finds a ready rallying at its call. And all this is true, notwithstanding the frequent rebuke that heathen across the seas engage the sympathy which is needed for those at home.
It is further to be observed that Roman Catholics and Protestants, in their continued and unintermitted missionary efforts, still pursue substantially the same divergent aims and methods in their service among the Indians which we have found were adopted by them at the first. Perhaps, however, this statement should be subjected to the following qualifications: namely, that the Jesuit missionaries have of late been more regardful of the obligation and necessity of direct efforts for civilizing the Indians, while Protestant missionaries have to a certain extent subordinated direct religious, or at least dogmatical, teaching to preparatory training in secular education, manual industry, and morals. The Jesuit has adapted his efforts to the changes in the circumstances of the lives and conditions of some Indian tribes incident upon their removals, the crowding upon them of the whites, and their increasing dependence upon the helps of civilization. Let us take the testimony of two Jesuit missionaries in quite recent years.
​Here is Father De Smet's description “of the deplorable condition of the poor petty tribes, in 1846, scattered along the banks of the Columbia, of which the numbers visibly diminish from year to year:” —
“Imagine their dwellings, a few poor huts, constructed of rush, bark, bushes, or of pine branches, sometimes covered with skins or rags. Around these miserable habitations lie scattered in profusion the bones of animals and the offal of fishes of every tribe, amidst accumulated filth of every description. In the interior you find roots piled up in a corner, skins hanging from cross-poles, and fish boiling over the fire, — a few dying embers, an axe to cut wood being seldom found among them. The whole stock of kitchen utensils, drinking-vessels, dishes, etc., are comprised in something like a fish-kettle, made of osier and besmeared with gum. To boil this kettle stones are heated red-hot and thrown into it. But the mess cooked in this way, can you guess what it is? No, not in twenty trials; it is impossible to divine what the ingredients are that compose this outlandish soup!
“But to pass from the material to the personal: what strange figures! Faces thickly covered with grease and dirt; heads that have never felt a comb; hands — but such hands! a veritable pair of Jack-at-all-trades, fulfilling in rapid succession the varied functions of the comb, the pocket-handkerchief, the knife, fork, and spoon. While eating, the process is loudly indicated by the crackling and discordant sounds that issue from the nose, mouth, throat, etc., — a sight the bare recollection of which is enough to sicken any person. Thus you can form some idea of their personal miseries, — miseries, alas! that faintly image another species infinitely more saddening; for what shall I say in attempting to describe their moral condition?”
Upon this unpromising field of labor, and others like it in a wide neighborhood, Father De Smet with several of his brethren planted themselves. Never was there a more serene, hopeful, and joyous spirit than is manifested on the pages of his book. His eye and skill, in observing and ​describing the scenery and life of the region, mark him as a man of a refined spirit, of delicate tastes, of broad culture, and of an artistic genius. But his enthusiasm over the promise and success of his work, his doting fondness for his “good Indians,” his relations of the almost womanly affection which they manifest to him, and his exultant record of conversions, of baptisms of infants and adults, of first communions, and of the gushing joy on the church festivals with their rude resources, would hardly have been edifying reading for an old Puritan.
The aim and method of the Roman Catholic system of dealing with the natives are well set forth, though scarcely with any breadth of charity for other workers, by the Abbé Em. Domenech, a missionary among them: —
“In general the Americans, above all, only consider civilization, not as a blessing which might polish savages, preserve their natural good qualities, extend the elements of well-being they already possess, reform their faults and vices, and modify their inclinations and character, but rather as a means of clearing this rich and fertile country of an independent, jealous, cruel, or at least useless, embarrassing, and degraded population. Religion, whose solicitude extends over all mankind, has shown that what human philanthropy would not or could not achieve, from impotency, was to her quite possible; and that the civilization of the Indians was a problem easy to expound, and a work equally useful to humanity and the general interests of nations. Missionaries — with no aid but their faith, their zeal, and their love of all the souls redeemed by the divine blood shed on the Mount of Calvary — have gone forward, crucifix in hand, among the great deserts of the New World; and far from attempting to annihilate savages and destroy their natural character, have raised them to the rank of Christians and men regenerated by an eminently civilizing religion. They have preserved the customs and dress rendered necessary by climate and habit to the rude industry of the desert. They have added elements of European industry, useful or indispensable in regions where wants are so few, and have softened the social feelings to ​that degree that wars have become rare among tribes over whose territories the missionaries' influence has not been paralyzed by the advice and instigation of white people; so that civilization produced by Christianity for these unfortunate people is not a destructive and demoralizing work, but one of happiness and improvement.”
As was remarked on a previous page, the Moravians — taking up their residences with Indian communities, and devoting themselves in schools, workshops, and fields to the joint objects of civilizing and Christianizing the natives — found in their early zeal and efforts more rewarding results than have been attained by any other Protestant fellowship. Men that are justly entitled to the epithets “saintly” and “apostolic,” coming from a pietistic communion in Germany, gathered considerable bodies of the natives in communities, — first in New York and Pennsylvania, and afterwards in Ohio. These gave such promise of full success as gratified, if they did not reward, the devotion and hopefulness of the missionaries. But the same tragic fate, from similar causes and agencies, befell most of these communities at a critical stage of their training, as was visited upon Eliot's Indian towns in Massachusetts. Except that in the case of the Moravian settlements not only Indians hostile to their objects, but whites also, were the agents of their destruction in the closing years of the French war, and in the distracting strifes of our own Revolution.
Only in the most summary terms can we recognize here the continuance, under various modifications and adaptations, of missionary efforts devised by Protestants for the benefit of the Indians. They have never been neglected or intermitted up to our time. Humane and generous sentiments instigating a work of obligation, with funds supplied to sustain the work, have devised a succession of schemes of local or general operation in the service of the Indians. Very many of such among them as showed promise of ​being efficient helpers of their own race have been educated by the whites in academies and colleges, on farms and in manufactories, that they might impart to others, in their own way, some share of their own attainments and experience. Zealous missionaries, with or without families of their own, and supported by their various religious denominations, have resided and labored among several of the tribes. These have sometimes proved to have more zeal than practical good sense or aptitude for the work. As might naturally have been expected, in conformity with what was said on an earlier page of this volume, such missionaries report to us different views of the Indians than do soldiers or frontiersmen whose relations with the savages are so unlike. But discouragement and failure have not infrequently disheartened even these missionaries. We may say of the Indians, as indeed we may also of the whites, that religious dogmas avail but little for the sterner work of life.
The most promising measures and methods for the relief and the elevation of the natives are those which are just now on vigorous trial as a part of the “Peace Policy” of our Government. This matter will engage our attention in the concluding chapter of this volume. Here it needs only to be said that all the most hopeful interest of our present efforts centres upon the principle, adopted as an axiom, that the Indian must be rid of all his savage qualities and habits by being, even compulsorily, subjected to civilizing processes, before he can receive any real benefit from our religion or humanity. This alone can protect him from the hostilities of his own race, and from the aggressions of the whites. In connection with the agencies supported by the Government among the Indians, the various religious denominations are invited at their own charges to send missionaries to reside among them. So far as these devote themselves to secular education also, and to teaching and aiding industrial pursuits, the Government furnishes them aid in funds and materials.
* ↑ P. 349-51.
* ↑ P. 344.
* ↑ In his “Vingt Années de Missions dans le Nord Ouest de l'Amerique.”
* ↑ Quoted in Joseph James Hargrave's “Red River” Appendix.
* ↑ I am indebted to the studies and the references of Mr. Parkman, in his “Pioneers,” etc., for my principal information and guidance to authorities, in this brief notice of the first Roman Catholic missions in Acadia.
* ↑ Mr. Parkman devotes one of the volumes in his series upon his grand theme, so ably wrought by him, to the subject of “The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century.” The volume, in its narration of events, its delineation of scenes, its condensed summaries of incidents and experiences, and in its generous appreciation of the characters and work of heroic men acting under the inspiration of high motives, is all the more faithful to its purpose because the author's respect and sympathies go with the sincerity of the men rather than with the methods of their mission.
* ↑ Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses.
* ↑ Memoir of Father Bressani, by Father Martin.
* ↑ A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time. London, 1645.
* ↑ See note, p. 74.
* ↑ The Further Progress of the Gospel, etc.
* ↑ History of Massachusetts, i. 156.
* ↑ The series of publications reporting the progress of Eliot's work, under titles indicative of the advance from dawn and daylight towards full noon, are, in their original issue, exceedingly rare, and are rated at extravagant values by bibliophilists. Most of them have been reprinted in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and they make together a unique class of literature.
* ↑ Collection of Papers, p. 151.
* ↑ Oregon Missions and Travels over the Rocky Mountains in 1845-46, pp. 236-37. By Father P. J. De Smet, S. J. New York, 1847.
* ↑ See his “Seven Years' Residence in the Great Deserts of North America.” 1860. Vol. ii. p. 441.