“You may be assured, sir, that we shall do all in our power, consistent with the claims of our other missions, to send some person to Mackinack; but we cannot promise to succeed immediately.  Mr. Ferry, we hope, will remain the next spring.

“Some embarrassment is felt by our Board, from the fact that foreign fields, offering access to densely populated districts, where millions speaking the same language, can be easily approached—­are more attractive to the candidates for the missionary work than the small, scattered, and migratory bands of our Indians.

“I fear that a preference of this nature will cause our friends—­the Indians—­to be neglected, if not forgotten.  As Providence seems, in so many ways, to be against the Indians, I often fear that no considerable portion of them are ever to enjoy the blessings of civilization and Christianity.  But we must leave them in the hands of God, after using faithfully the means which he places at our disposal.”

“We are glad to hear that you still approve of the course pursued by our missionaries in the north-west, and that the advancement of the cause of Christ, in that quarter, is still a subject of care with you, and truth, and divine grace, will enable you rightly to bear the responsibility in this respect, which rests on you.”

I have put in italics, in the above letter, a high moral truth, which accords with all my observation and experience on the frontiers; and upon the due appreciation and carrying out of which, the success of the missionary cause over the world, in my judgment, depends.  It is a sentence that should be inscribed in letters of gold in every missionary room in America.  It is certainly a mistake to send feeble men on the frontier, who are not deemed to have sufficient energy, talents, and sound discretion to enter foreign fields.  Our frontiers are full of cavillers, and shrewd and bold gainsayers of Christianity, men of personal energy and will, who generally stand aloof from such efforts, and who, when they come into contact with missionary laborers, judge them by common rules of judgment—­who are, indeed, not the best fitted to estimate “devoted piety and zeal,” but who are, nevertheless, disposed to respect it, in proportion as it is joined with “high intellectual character, and judgment, and enterprise.”  In the frequent want of this—­we do not include Mackinack in this category—­is to be sought the true cause of our failures with the Indians, to whom the strange and intense story of the Gospel appears at first in something as wild and marvelous as some of their own relations; and who are, at any rate, firmly fixed in their heathenish rites and devotions to a subtil system of deism, and the invocation of gods of the elements and demons.