Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/397

Rh it. The count of a number of persons who individually, one by one, have been converted and “found salvation,” a church, a Sunday-school, native teachers, prayer-meetings, etc., established among a tribe or settlement of Indians, are satisfactory evidence to one class of Christianization. Other observers look on. They ask this question: Suppose the white man and all his influence, supplies, and helps were withdrawn to-day from that Indian community, and it were left wholly to itself, would not the surviving element of ignorance and barbarism in it very soon overbear and kill out its feeble stage of Christian civilization?

The case is presented thus: The Christian missionary comes to the savages with the evangel, the gospel, the glad tidings of great joy. His first intelligible message to them is that they are a wrecked and ruined race, born under a curse, and destined to an appalling doom, to live forever in suffering; and he offers them a way of escape, one by one. Now the Indians certainly had no previous knowledge that they were in such an awful condition, with such a dreadful destiny before them; and so far as they bring a questioning, reasoning mind to bear upon the subject, the explanation given to them of how they came to be in such an awful plight — of a race cursed for the sin of the first man — may be wholly unsatisfactory. So far, the announcement made to them cannot be called “good news,” whether coming, as it did alike, from Jesuit or from Protestant. The gospel quality of the message came in afterwards, as applied to the means of escape, the way of relief, from their curse and doom. Here the Jesuit and the Protestant were found by the Indians to part company. The one held up a book as the means of deliverance; the other, the mediation of the Church. The priest himself, not only as the teacher of simple lessons, but as a personal medium of sacramental graces, was the essential agent for securing salvation to the Indians. In the nature of things it was utterly impossible for the savage