Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/398

378 to understand how the drops of baptismal water on his forehead, and the fragment of the holy wafer, remedied his foredoomed subjection to the eternal pit of woe. He accepted the relation between the evil and its relief on the word of the priest. And we may recognize, in effect, the same perplexity for the savage in trying to apprehend the curative process wrought by the Puritan creed as drawn from a most mysterious book, which, though held in the hand of a man, was made and given by the infinite spirit above.

Loskiel, in his “History of the Moravian Mission in North America,” gives the following as the address of the Missionary Rauch to a tribe of Indians in Shekomeko, on the borders of New York and Connecticut, in 1740: —

“I came hither from beyond the great ocean, to bring unto you the glad tidings that God, our Creator, so loved us that he became a man, lived thirty years in this world, went about doing good to all men, and at last for our sins was nailed to the cross, on which he shed his precious blood, and died for us, that we might be delivered from sin, saved by his merits, and become heirs of everlasting life. On the third day he rose again from the dead, ascended into Heaven, where he sits upon his throne of glory, but yet is always present with us, though we see him not with our bodily eyes; and his only desire is to show his love unto us,” etc.

The missionary says he perceived to his sorrow that his words “excited derision,” and that his hearers “openly laughed him to scorn.” Yet persevering steadfastly upon this doctrinal or dogmatic interpretation of the gospel as the basis for preaching and the work of conversion, the Moravians soon began to have such a measure of success as gratified them. Less than any class of Indian missionaries holding in substance the same dogmatic creed, did they attempt to deal with its metaphysical or perplexing elements. They tried not to overtask the intelligence of their rude and simple hearers. From their church register, under date of 1772, it appears that they had baptized