severed
against oppositions and difficulties that to ordinary mortals would have
been insurmountable, and would have filled them with despair.

The difficulties that John Eliot had to overcome ere he was able to give
the Bible to the Indians of New England, were numerous and exasperating;
but his indomitable will carried him through to ultimate success. Sad
indeed is it to think, that there is not a man, woman or child of them
left to read his Bible. All the tribes for whom, at such a cost of
tears and difficulties, he translated the Book, are gone. The greed for
land and the cruelties of the early settlers, were too much for the poor
Indian. From his different reservations where Eliot, Brainard, Mayhews,
and other devoted friends tried to save him, he was driven back, back,
with such destruction and loss at each move, that ultimately he was
simply wiped out. And so to-day, in the library of Harvard University
and in a very few other places, there are to be found copies of Eliot's
Bible; sealed books, which no man can read; a sad evidence of "Man's
inhumanity to man."

One of the most signal triumphs in giving the Bible to a people in their
own language, and printed in a way so simple as to be very easily
acquired by them, is that of the translation and printing of the Book in
the syllable characters. These syllabic characters were invented by the
Rev James Evans, one of the early Methodist missionaries to the
scattered tribes of Indians in what were then known as the Hudson Bay
Territories. For some years Mr Evans had been employed as a missionary
among the Indians who resided on different reservations in the Province
of Ontario, then known as Upper Canada. At the request of the parent
Wesleyan Missionary Society, and at the solicitation of the Hudson Bay
Fur-trading Company, Mr Evans, accompanied by some devoted brother
missionaries went into those remote northern regions to begin missionary
operations. Mr Evans and some of his companions travelled all the way
from Montreal to Norway House, on the Nelson River, in a birch-bark
canoe. A look at the map will give some idea of the length and
hardships of such a journey in those days. But they succeeded in
accomplishing it; and with glad hearts began their blessed work of the
evangelisation of the natives.

Missionary methods must necessarily differ in different lands. The
missionary to succeed must be a man who can adopt himself to his
surroundings; and h