Good was accomplished, and that was the great reward for all the risks run and sufferings endured. Many for whom Christ died, would never up to the present hour, have heard the Gospel or have seen the Book, if it had not been for the missionary carrying it to them by the canoe in summer, and the dog-train in winter. Thank God, many of them have heard and have accepted gladly the great salvation thus brought to them. With its reception into their hearts and lives, marvellous have been the transformations. Where the devil-dance, and ghost-dance, and other abominations, performed to the accompaniment of the conjurer’s rattle or the monotonous drumming of the medicine man, once prevailed and held the people in a degrading superstition, the house of prayer has now been erected, and the wilderness has become vocal with the sweet songs of Zion. Lives once impure and sinful have been transformed by the Gospel’s power, and a civilisation real and abiding, has come in to bless and to add to their comfort for this life, while they dwell in a sweet and blessed assurance of life eternal in the world to come.
Chapter Five.
God on the Rock, or how the Indians are taught to read the Book.
The British and Foreign Bible Society, the American Bible Society, and other kindred institutions that print and scatter the Word of God, have been, and are, of incalculable benefit to the missionaries.
Long ago the Psalmist said: “The entrance of thy words giveth light;” and blessedly and gloriously is this truth being realised.
No matter where a missionary goes, he feels much hampered if he has not the Book in the language of the people. It is a matter of thankfulness, that in these later years—thanks to these glorious Bible Societies—there is hardly a land or nation where a missionary can go, but he will find the Bible printed in the language or languages of that nation, and offered to the people at rates so reasonable, that the poorest of the poor may have it if they will. But it was not always so, and we need not go back to Wickliffe or Tyndal to read of difficulties in the way of presenting to the common people the Word of God in their own tongue. All the great missionary societies in their earlier days had their Careys, and Morrisons, and Duffs, who struggled on, and persevered against oppositions and difficulties that to ordinary mortals would have been insurmountable, and would have filled them with despair.
The difficulties that John Eliot had to overcome ere he was able to give the Bible to the Indians of New England, were numerous and exasperating; but his indomitable will carried him through to ultimate success. Sad indeed is it to think, that there is not a man, woman or child of them left to read his Bible. All the tribes for whom, at such a cost of tears and difficulties, he translated the Book, are gone. The greed for land and the cruelties of the early settlers, were too much for the poor Indian. From his different reservations where Eliot, Brainard, Mayhews, and other devoted friends tried to save him, he was driven back, back, with such destruction and loss at each move, that ultimately he was simply wiped out. And so to-day, in the library of Harvard University and in a very few other places, there are to be found copies of Eliot’s Bible; sealed books, which no man can read; a sad evidence of “Man’s inhumanity to man.”
One of the most signal triumphs in giving the Bible to a people in their own language, and printed in a way so simple as to be very easily acquired by them, is that of the translation and printing of the Book in the syllable characters. These syllabic characters were invented by the Rev. James Evans, one of the early Methodist missionaries to the scattered tribes of Indians in what were then known as the Hudson Bay Territories. For some years Mr Evans had been employed as a missionary among the Indians who resided on different reservations in the Province of Ontario, then known as Upper Canada. At the request of the parent Wesleyan Missionary Society, and at the solicitation of the Hudson Bay Fur-trading Company, Mr Evans, accompanied by some devoted brother missionaries went into those remote northern regions to begin missionary operations. Mr Evans and some of his companions travelled all the way from Montreal to Norway House, on the Nelson River, in a birch-bark canoe. A look at the map will give some idea of the length and hardships of such a journey in those days. But they succeeded in accomplishing it; and with glad hearts began their blessed work of the evangelisation of the natives.