now how to use
them. He is in the midst of white enemies, who want his land. He has
turned his back upon all the traditions of his ancestors. He has turned
his face toward the whites, and his friends of the past are now his
enemies. He is in the midst of his reservation. His homestead is his
own, yet no American citizen has a right there. If you and I go to teach
him, we can be ordered off by the agent; and if we do not go he can put
us in prison.

If we do not give protection and Christianity to them, there is no hope
for these Indians. Their fate will be the same as Indians on the
reservation in the State of New York, who have been for one hundred
years in the midst of our best civilization, but are still lazy and
shiftless, their reservation being permeated through and through with
unmentionable vices. They have no interest in the civilization of the
present. They are living in the past, dreaming over the glory of their
ancestors. They cannot be reached through civilization without religion.
To an Indian there is nothing secular. Everything pertains to his
religion. When he goes on a hunt, if he has no success, it is because
the gods are opposed to him; and if he is successful, the gods were in
it. When we go to an Indian and seek to change him, we must first change
his gods. We must Christianize him if we would civilize him. There is
where many of our experiments have been wrong.

Is it not laid upon us, who know something of this work, to do this? I
believe if we will not do it, that in the last great day, as we stand
with the Indian before the judgment bar of God, our position will be
worse than that of the Indian. It seems to me that I can hear what the
Judge would say to him at that time. The Indian comes before God, a
pagan from a Christian land; he comes having improved none of the powers
that God gave him. The Lord might say to him: "Did I not give you as
good opportunities and as good capacities as the white man in whose
midst you were? This Christian nation is the foremost for missions. It
has sent to all the lands of the earth, and yet here you come a pagan,
not knowing God, uncivilized, a barbarian." Might not this Indian say:
"I was in prison. I was surrounded by a reservation around whose outside
lines were the soldiers of the United States, and I would be shot if I
went off this reservation. I had no business with which to support
myself; I had no chance for trade or commerce; I had to buy of and sell