builded in the garden of the Lord are ever taken away, it will be by
hearty, believing work for our Saviour. The history of the North
American Indians is a sad story of wrongs. You may begin far back in the
days of our Puritan fathers, when Christian men marched to the music of
a fife and drum, with the head of King Philip on a pole, and then after
prayer, decided that the sins of the father ought to be visited on the
children, and therefore sold his son as a slave to Bermuda; and you may
follow down to where the saintly Worcester, a Congregational missionary,
was tried, sentenced, and went to the Penitentiary in Georgia for
teaching Indians to read; and so on to where a Moravian church of
Christian Indians were cruelly tortured and murdered; and so on to the
last of our Indian wars, and it is a dark story of robbery and
wrongs--we have spent five hundred millions on Indian wars, and have
killed ten of our own people to every one killed of the Indians. Thank
God that by the efforts of Christian men, the heart of the Nation has
been touched, and to-day willing hands and hearts are laboring for their
Christian civilization.

When I went to my diocese thirty years ago, there were over twenty
thousand Indians in Minnesota. They had sunk to a depth of degradation
their heathen fathers had not known. Friends told me it was hopeless,
that they were a perishing race. I said if they are perishing, the more
reason to make haste to give to them the gospel. The picture was dark,
but not darker than that drawn by the pen of divine Inspiration in the
first chapter of Romans. I carried it where I have learned to take all
which troubles me, and at my blessed Saviour's feet I promised I would
never turn my back on the Indian whom God had placed at my door, and I
have tried to keep the vow.

I can tell you the story of Indian missions by relating one incident.