tion. The influence of a well-instructed child in the home circle. may be regenerative or reformatory. The children should be encouraged to a "Friday Night at Home"-a night in which they are to endeavor to make home specially attractive. This can be done by their kind attentions, their little thoughtful courtesies, and particularly by showing their programs and by outlining at table or in the later evening the address or object lesson of the afternoon.

May not the Children's Hour idea have a broader development in the future? It is with reference to this possibility that the author of this paper has been induced to exploit its helpfulness thus far. It has been conceded already that other means of reaching children, so far from being neglected or depreciated, are to be the more generally respected and adopted. Anything reputable, tactful, and pleasurable which is not in contravention of Scripture teaching, and which is adapted to waken the moral sense and to recommend the religion of Christ to the respect and affection of the child, is always to be welcomed. But it is to be said again, in favor of the Children's Hour idea, it is distinctively an undenominational, unsectarian idea. It is a pedagogic idea. It is a patriotic, temperance, evangelistic, missionary idea. The question is now at last raised, Why should there not be such an "Hour" observed weekly in every town in the country? Why should not scores of such "Hours" be held in every city of the land? If held in the right place, at the right time, by the right man, with the right motive, and in the right way, it will form a seed-sowing agency of inestimable value for the moral and spiritual improvement of the young, for the betterment of society, and for the protection of the most sacred institutions in patriotic American life.

51

John J. Breed

ART. X.-"THAT FAMOUS INSTRUMENT OF THE LORD, MR. JOHN ELIOT."

SOME one wrote an ingenious book a few years ago in which he showed that, since light travels only at the rate of something less than two hundred thousand miles a second and the stars are separated from the earth by very considerable distances, a person who could see the earth from a star would see things not as they are, but as they were when the ray of light that enters his eye started on its journey from the earth. If, therefore, you could sit upon a star of just the right magnitude to bring October 28, 1646, before your eye you would see the enaction of a memorable scene in and near Roxbury, in the colony of Massachusetts. You would first notice that instead of the wearisome monotony of stone pavements and dreary alleys of brick tenements, with here and there a church spire pointing heavenward for a blessed relief, there were rolling, breezy pasture lands, winding alleys of stately trees, and the groves that were God's first temples, with a little settlement in the middle, and one church, set down on the edge of the great wilderness. But if you should look then for the thing that made that particular day illustrious you would see four men set out from the little town and strike into the wilderness upon a high and holy mission. You would see them after a journey of several miles reach an Indian settlement, where they are received with manifestations of great pleasure. And finally you would see the leader of the little band stand forth and address the savages. This was the man whom Edward Winslow called "that famous Instrument of the Lord, Mr. John Eliot," and this was the first time that he preached the Gospel to the Indians in their own tongue. The three who were privileged to be with the great apostle on this day of days were probably Elder Heath and Daniel Gookin, of Roxbury, and the Rev. Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, whose name and fame are now recalled by the Shepard Memorial Church of that university city.

The text that Eliot chose for this first mission was in the thirty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, ninth and tenth verses: "Then

said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army." As the preacher began by repeating and then explaining the Ten Commandments, went on to show how all men had broken them and were children of disobedience, set forth at length the wrath of God and the fearfulness of his judgment, expatiated upon the lost condition of the Indians, declared God's provision of salvation through Jesus Christ his Son, and finally called upon the Indians to repent and seek the favor of God, occupying an hour and a quarter in the doing of all this, the sermon might be considered a fairly comprehensive one. He then asked the Indians if they understood, and spent an hour and three quarters in answering their questions.

This scene took place at Nonantum, near what are now Brighton and Watertown, in the wigwam of Waauban, or Waban, an important man among the Indians. The savages expressed great interest in what they had heard, and at other visits which quickly followed they listened to the sermons and the answers to questions with both tears and repentance. Before very long positive results were seen, and Eliot was obliged to make broad plans and undertake large ventures for his converts.

The man who was so quietly, but so zealously and so wisely, undertaking this difficult task was born in England, in a little village not very many miles from London. He was baptized on August 5, 1604, at Widford, in Hertfordshire, but had his boyhood home in Nazing, Essex County. He was educated at Cambridge University, and then taught for a while in a school kept at Little Baddow by the Rev. Thomas Hooker, afterward pastor of a church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and leader of the band that went to Hartford, Connecticut, and the illustrious great-grandfather of the Constitution of the United States. Hooker had a great influence over young Eliot, and doubtless had much to do with his entering the Congregational ministry and emigrating to America. Eliot came to Boston in 1631, when he was twenty

seven years old, on the ship that brought Governor Winthrop's wife and children. He first joined himself to the church at Boston, and in the absence of Mr. Wilson, the pastor, he supplied his place. In 1632 a company of his friends from Nazing came to America and settled in Roxbury. These were substantial people, and many of their names have clung to Roxbury ever since: such names as Brewer, Crafts, Curtis, Dudley, Heath, Seaver, Peacock, Payson, Ruggles. Drake, the historian, says that "outside of Boston no New England town can show such a roll of distinguished names as have illustrated the annals of Roxbury." Many of the streets of Roxbury are memorials of these settlers. Among those who came to Roxbury was Eliot's betrothed, and his marriage to her, on September 4, 1632, was the first marriage recorded in Roxbury. Cotton Mather says of her that "her name was Ann [which means 'grace'], and gracious was her nature," and certain it is that she made him a faithful, loving, sensible, practical wife. The Roxbury church at once claimed Eliot, on the basis of an agreement that he had made with them before leaving the old country, and though the Boston church made eager efforts to retain him as Mr. Wilson's colleague he was established as "teacher" of the church at Roxbury on November 5, 1632. Eliot at once entered upon a life remarkable for its devotion to religious duties, its fervid evangelistic spirit, its breadth of sympathies and interests, its high public spirit, its range of activities, and its general strenuousness in a day when most men lived more moderately than they do now. His work—as a pastor, a missionary, a scholar, and a citizen -places him in the very front rank of the remarkable men who founded this new nation, and though his story has often been told it needs to be often told still.

It seems strange that the Puritans were so tardy about beginning to work for the Christianization of the Indians. The French and the Spaniards had long labored for this end. The Jesuit missionaries had gone out into the wilderness alone, in peril and with great toil, and identified themselves with the life of the savages in order to save their souls. But though the charter of the Massachusetts Company declared that the Christianizing of the Indians was "the principal cause of this plantation," and the

seal given to the colony contained the figure of an Indian with hands outstretched uttering the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us," the Puritans permitted almost a generation to go by before they made anything but slight and sporadic efforts to bring their savage neighbors to the light and joy of the Gospel. The matter, however, was in the air, and when Eliot took it up the whole thing crystallized into a general movement that soon came to be backed up, both morally and financially, by a missionary society that was formed in England during Cromwell's protectorate. Eliot's great heart seems to have begun to yearn over his savage neighbors very soon after his arrival. As Cotton Mather says, with his "accustomed but agreeable quaintness," "It very powerfully moved his holy bowels to hear that imprecation over the heads of our naked Indians, 'Pour out thy fury upon the heathen that know thee not;' and, thought he, 'What shall I do to rescue these heathen from that all-devouring fury?'"

The result was that Eliot began to make plans for the uplifting of the savages. He encouraged himself in this by the belief that the Indians were the ten lost tribes of Israel. He made much broader and wiser and more thorough plans than the Jesuits had followed. For they did not try to change the habits or lives of the Indians, but lived with them on equal terms, adopted their habits, endured their filth, vermin, and immodesty, avoided crossing their inclinations, and taught them but little; considering a few simple things-such as repetition of a prayer or chant, formal assent to a few dogmas, baptism, and a very little and very strange catechising-quite sufficient to make beautiful Christians out of savages. But Eliot thought it necessary to civilize the Indians in order to Christianize them. "I find it absolutely necessary," he wrote, "to carry on civility with religion;" and his ambition was to change the Indians into self-respecting, sober, industrious, civilized, moral, devout men and women, living in houses in fixed communities. His first step was to learn the Indian language, and we therefore find him at the age of forty, in spite of the laborious and taxing duties of a large parish, hiring a native to live with him and undertaking to learn a language which had never been reduced to writing, and which contained words so long that, as