Pioneers and Founders | Page 2

we had designed as the purpose of our present introduction;
namely, to supplement the information which the biographical form of
our work has necessitated us to leave imperfect, respecting the
Missions as well as the men.
Of the Red Indians who first stirred the compassion of John Eliot, there
is little that is good to tell, or rather there is little good to tell of the
White man's treatment of them. Self-government by the stronger people
always falls hard on the weaker, and Mission after Mission has been
extinguished by the enmity of the surrounding Whites and the
corruption and decay of the Indians. A Moravian Mission has been
actually persecuted. Every here and there some good man has arisen
and done a good work on those immediately around him, and at the
present time there are some Indians living upon the reserves in the
western part of the continent, fairly civilized, settled, and Christianized,
and only diminishing from that law of their physical nature that forbids
them to flourish without a wilderness in which to roam.
But between the long-settled States of America and those upon the
shores of the Pacific, lies a territory where the Indian is still a wild and
savage man, and where hatred and slaughter prevail. The Government
at Washington would fain act a humane part, and set apart reserves of
land and supplies, but the agents through which the transactions are
carried on have too often proved unfaithful, and palmed off inferior
goods on the Indians, or brought up old debts against them; and in the
meantime mutual injuries work up the settlers and the Red men to such
a pitch of exasperation, that horrid cruelties are perpetrated on the one
side, and on the other the wild men are shot down as pitilessly as beasts
of prey, while the travellers and soldiers who live in daily watch and
ward against the "wily savage" learn to stigmatize all pity for him as a
sort of sentimentalism sprung from Cooper's novels.
Still, where there is peace, good men make their way, and with blessed
effect. We wish we had room for the records of the Bishopric of
Minnesota, and the details of the work among the Indians; more
especially how, when a rising was contemplated to massacre the White

settlers all along the border, a Christian Indian travelled all night to
give warning; and how, on another occasion, no less than four hundred
White women and children were saved by the interposition of four
Christian Indian chiefs. Perhaps the Church has never made so
systematic an effort upon the Indians as in Minnesota, and it is to be
hoped that there may be some success.
For the need of system seems to me one of the great morals to be
deduced from the lives I have here collected. I confess that I began
them with the unwilling belief that greater works had been effected by
persons outside the pale of the Church than by those within; but as I
have gone on, the conviction has grown on me that even though the
individuals were often great men, their works lacked that permanency
and grasp that Church work, as such, has had.
The equality of rank in the ministry of other bodies has prevented the
original great founders from being invested with the power that is
really needed in training and disciplining inferior and more
inexperienced assistants, and produces a want of compactness and
authority which has disastrous effects in movements of emergency.
Moreover, the lack of forms causes a deficiency of framework for
religion to attach itself to, and this is almost fatal to dealing with
unintellectual minds.
On the whole, the East Indian Missions have prospered best. Schwartz
was the very type of a founder, with his quiet, plodding earnestness,
and power of being generally valuable; and the impression he made had
not had time to die away before the Episcopate brought authority to
deal with the difficulties he had left. Martyn was, like Brainerd before
him, one of the beacons of the cause, and did more by his example than
by actual teaching; and the foundation of the See of Calcutta gave
stability to the former efforts. Except Heber, the Bishops of the Indian
See were not remarkable men, but their history has been put together as
a whole for the sake of the completion of the subject, as a sample of the
difficulties of the position, and likewise because of the steady progress
of the labours there recorded.
The Serampore brethren are too notable to be passed over, if only for

the memorable fact that Carey the cobbler lighted the missionary fire
throughout England and America at a time when the embers had
become so extinct that our Society for the Propagation of the