The speaker described the Indians themselves; their first characteristic was the deep religious nature which swayed their whole life.  They prayed oftener and more fervently than Christians, worshipping everything that was unknown and mysterious; of which the saddest thing was that the Indian’s gods were all gods of anger, involving sacrifices.  To show the extent to which the Indians would sacrifice themselves to appease their god’s anger, a very touching story was told of a boy torturing himself for the recovery of his sick mother.  At the close of the Mohonk Conference, two years ago, our committee went to President Cleveland to petition in regard to methods.  He said that he sympathized with all our methods and ideas.  “But,” he said, “gentlemen, you may do all you can at Mohonk, I may do all I can here in the White House, and Congress may do all that they can over there, but,” and he turned and picked up a Bible, “gentlemen, after all, that book has got to settle the Indian problem.”  (Applause.) And the President was right.  Before you can do anything for the preservation of the Indian you’ve got to give him a new hope, a new salvation.  I have studied many tribes, and have never found a tribe or village of Indians or a single Indian civilized before he was Christianized.

The speaker next considered the question whether the Christianization of the Indians was possible.  This he answered by the case of the 400 Indians taken captive in the Sioux war which followed the Minnesota massacre of 1862.  In the fall of that year, a missionary went to their prison, and in the next six months taught 392 to read and established a church with 295 members.  Subsequently President Lincoln pardoned all but 39 and the survivors went among the Sioux, and the speaker considered the ten Christian churches and 2,000 Christians among the 40,000 Sioux to be owing to this church of prisoners.  In Dakota, every one of the 40,000 Indians was ready to receive the gospel.

On Mr. Moody’s asking how much he wanted, he said that it took $400 to start a station, and $300 a year to keep it up.  He then related a very pathetic story of an old Indian who traveled 150 miles across the Territory seven times to get a missionary sent among his people.  The difficulty in getting one arose from the society sending the missionaries, whose debt was so large that the executive board had refused to send out any more. ("Board wants more faith,” put in Mr. Moody.) The old man finally went back to his people, saying sadly:  “They must die in their darkness; the Christian people of America haven’t interest enough in the poor dying Indian to try and help him.”