The history of the past few months, and the famous order with regard to the use of the vernacular, ought to arouse the church to new efforts.  The probable instigators of it are known to friends of the Indian, and it shows the necessity of increased activity on our part.  The order was despotism itself, and would have done credit to a Russian Czar.  It was a blow aimed at the Indian’s highest religious interests, and the President of the United States, instead of explaining and translating it, should have recalled it as an act unworthy of Christian civilization in the nineteenth century.  Everything is still done to hamper the Protestant missionary work.  The A.M.A. has a theological school, and the Government allows (?) it to teach a theological class; but, when the students are chosen and ready to come, the Government agents prohibit their coming.  We have a young man who has been waiting for a year for a permit from Washington.  The same obstructive policy meets us when we try to get pupils under the Government school contracts.  And even after we have obtained the order from the Government to procure the pupils from a given agency, the Government will, at the same time, instruct the Agent to let no pupils go till the Government schools are full.  In this way the Christian Indian parent has taken from him the right to send his child where he desires, for the Government stops his rations and annuities if he refuses to send to the Government school.  The vote recently passed at the General Association of Congregational Churches in South Dakota ought to be taken up and echoed through the land, protesting against the assumption, by the Administration, of the right to control our missionary operations, dictating what pupils may attend our schools, or what language may be used in them.

In conclusion, let us gird ourselves anew for the struggle that is before us, to fight the enemies of Protestant Christianity, entrenched as they are in our Government, the Indian ring, the cattle kings, the land grabbers and the thousands whose selfish interest it is to keep the Indian ignorant.  This is no holiday affair; it means earnest, determined work.  We must give the Indian the Gospel of the Son of God as his only safeguard for the life that now is as well as that which is to come.  Civilization, education alone can never lift the Indian to his true position.  You may take a rough block of marble and chisel it never so skillfully into some matchless human form, and it is marble still, cold and lifeless.  Take the rude Indian and educate him, and he is still an Indian.  He must be quickened by the breath of the Almighty before he will live.  It is religion alone which can lead him to the truest manhood, which will quicken his slumbering intellectual faculties and prevent him from being an easy prey to the selfishness and sinfulness of men.  Let us support this society in its grand work, by our money, our sympathy and our prayers.  Let us join in the fight, and by-and-by