Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/458

438 they solemnly, after prayer and counsel and exhortation, entered “into covenant with God and each other to be the Lord's people, and to be governed by the word of the Lord in all things.” In the mean time diligent efforts were in progress for the primer and catechetical training of children, for their education in English, and for the preparation in school, and even in college, of promising natives for teaching and preaching.

From the first tokens of hopeful promise and possible ultimate success in his arduous work, Eliot began to cheer himself with the joy which he should realize in setting before him, as a crowning result, the establishment in exclusive Indian towns of the perfected idea of the Puritan church. This required a company of covenanted believers, men and women, “saints by profession and in the judgment of charity,” keeping strictly the Sabbath and the ordinances, with teachers of their own race, educated, consecrated, and duly ordained, and in communion with sister churches. The pastor of an Indian church should be such, in attainment, ability, and piety, as would put him on an equality, certainly for all official functions and regards, with the ministers of the English. Communicants should be received, as among the whites, on giving satisfactory evidence of their conversion, their conviction of sin, their spiritual experience and renewal, and their sincere purpose to lead a consistent, godly life, observing all the then requisite conditions and methods, — prayer and Bible-reading daily in their families, grace at meals, and the religious training of their children and households. The brethren and sisters thus covenanted together were to have a rigid watch and ward over each other, jealously guarding themselves against reproach or scandal, keeping all wrong-doers in awe, attracting the well-disposed, and proving themselves a body of the elect. Only the children of covenanted parents should be baptized, and the gifted of the flock were to be encouraged “to exercise in prayer and exhortation.”