ffed with
moss. The roof was covered with bark. The window was merely a hole cut
through the logs. In storms a piece of cloth hung over it, which
partially kept out wind and rain. The fireplace was one corner of the
room, with a hole in the roof through which the smoke ascended. Often
the state of the atmosphere was such that the cabin was filled with
smothering smoke. A few mats, woven coarsely from bulrushes, covered a
portion of the earth floor. A mat was his bed. A log, covered with a
mat, was his chair; his food was pounded corn, and fishes and flesh of
animals, broiled on the coals; his companions, savages. Such was the
home which this noble man had cheerfully accepted in exchange for the
baronial splendors of his ancestors. It was two hundred years ago.
Father Marquette has received his rewards. His earthly labors and
sacrifices were for but about twenty years. For two hundred years he
has occupied a mansion, which God reared for him in heaven. There he is
now, with his crown, his robe, and his harp, with angel companionship.
And there he is to dwell forever.

There is something exceedingly beautiful in the simplicity of the
Gospel of Christ. God, in the person of his Son, came to earth and
suffered and died to make atonement for human sin. All who will abandon
sin, and try to live doing nothing wrong, and endeavoring to do
everything that is right, He will forgive, and make forever happy in
heaven.

This is the Gospel; the Good News. God is no respecter of persons; but
in every nation, he that feareth him and worketh righteousness, is
accepted with him. The loitering Indians, ignorant, degraded, wicked,
gathered in constant groups around the fire, in the cabin of the sick
Christian teacher. And when he told them of that happy world where they
shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, and where God shall wipe
away all tears from their eyes, the truth came home to their hearts,
and became its own witness.

And yet here, as elsewhere, the Gospel of Jesus found its bitter
antagonists. With the Indians, as in every city and town in
Christendom, there were those who did not wish to be holy. They hated a
Gospel which demanded the abandonment of sin. These men, with bloody
tomahawks and gory scalping knives, and who, from infancy, had been
practising the hideous war-whoop; who consider the glory of their
manhood to depend upon the number of enemies they had slain, and whose
greatest delight consisted in listeni