Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/473

Rh in Roger Williams's Key, or in Eliot's Grammar, it seems to us as if an Indian word began little and compact, like one of their own pappooses, and then grew at either extremity, and thickened in the middle, and extended in shape and proportion in each limb and member, and was completed with a feathered head-knot, — thus assimilating each acquisition of knowledge and experience as well as of food and ornament. Such we feel sure must have been the history of the genesis and development of a word before us in forty-three letters.

The Jesuit Biard, in Acadia, says he was satisfied with translating into Indian “the Lord's Prayer, the Salutation of the Virgin, the Creed, the Commandments of God and of the Church, with a short explanation of the Sacraments, and some Prayers, for this is all the theology they need.” But Eliot, true to the Puritan idea that the Bible ought to be to all Christians what the Church was to the Romanists, considered that the seal of his life's work and the pledge of its continuity and security would be found only in a complete translation of the Holy Scriptures, of both Testaments. The Puritan made no discrimination as to the divine authority or edifying use of one or another portion of those writings. The Bible was one book, — a whole in itself. What in it was not of present application had value as authenticating its most vital and essential teachings. So the devoted and laborious Apostle gave himself to the task of transferring the details of the patriarchal history, of the wars in Canaan, of the Levitical institutions and the tabernacle worship, of the genealogical tables of Kings and Chronicles, and of the burdens of the Prophet, as well as the Psalms of aspiration and the sweet benedictions and parables of Christ, into an equivalent in the barbarian tongue. An unskilled person, in turning over the pages of the Indian Bible, will see that he found relief from what would have been an impossibility had he felt himself bound to give an Indian equivalent for proper names and