Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/139

Rh The Father remarks, however, that though the savages had so many different languages, they had nearly the same range of mind and view, the same style of thought, and the same modes for expressing themselves. Their languages had a dearth of such terms as the missionaries needed to use in conveying to them religious lessons and abstract truths. This difficulty the Father says was not surmounted by missionaries who had lived among the savages for very many years, and who candidly confessed, that though their disciples perfectly understood them on other subjects, they could not satisfy themselves that their religious instruction was really apprehended.

Fettered and obstructed by such disabling conditions, we can perhaps appreciate the almost overwhelming difficulties of the task by which missionaries among the Indians have sought to construct vocabularies of the various native tongues for the purpose of mastering forms of speech, not merely for holding common intercourse with them, but for conveying to them the knowledge of the truths of revealed religion, instruction in spiritual things, in virtues, in transcendant verities, and in ecclesiastical obedience. References to further experiences of toil and ill success in this devoted work will engage our attention under another subject in this volume. Our imaginations hardly need any quickening or stimulating to bring before us the patient forms of the old missionaries, as in such hours as they could rescue from the tumults and annoyances of Indian village life, they crawled into their lonely lodges, and, when paper was too precious a luxury for such use, took their prepared sections of birch-bark, and, with ink extemporized from forest juice or moistened charcoals, essayed to construct a vocabulary of a savage dialect. Vast numbers of these tentative essays in a rude philology have perished. Primers, prayers, Church offices, the Pater Noster, the Creed, and the Commandments have, after a fashion, been set forth in these vocabularies in sounds which have long since died on the