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CORRESPONDENCE 307

the field of our former labors. With it we cheerfully re- linquished the prospect of enjoying those almost inestimable privileges of religious publications of all description, as we supposed, for one year, hoping that a few months after our arrival we should occasionally be greeted by those welcome visitors. But Alas ! the Mexican war and the inf requency of arrivals by water direct from our eastern ports has held us in banishment up to this present. When I look to the people and see them left in ignorance of all the great religious movements in the world, except for a few packages sent to the Methodist and Presbyterian missions, my feelings are often left to wander between despair and that indifference occasioned by the care and fatigue incident to meeting our temporal needs. Our whole country is oppressed by an excessive mon- opoly of our merchants, so that most of the people are unable to meet the pressing wants of their families. If they could sit down at night as they come in from their daily labor, take up a religious periodical and read their half-clad families some interesting accounts of the triumphs of grace over depravity instead of meditating and teaching the principles of revenge, how would the family circle be cheered and the lowering cloud of our Western solitude be dissipated ! The question is settled that Oregon is destined to be numbered among the states of our great American Republic ; the scenes of our early sufferings and privations will soon be known only as they are engraved on the memory of the sufferers, or recorded on the pages of history. A brighter day is before us and we fancy that we already descry the first dawning light breaking over the tops of the eastern mountains. We must look to the older and more gifted states to aid in giving us a religious as well as a political and commercial character. Will not our Baptist churches aid in this work? Romanism is making strong attempts at planting deep its root in Oregon soil and availing itself of every inefficient effort of Protestant- ism to bring into disrepute the vital godliness of both it and its ministry. So long as our ministers are unsustained, the