dence of the genuineness and the benign tendency
of that spirit which God has been pleased to pour out upon his
people."

In New England the like result had already, several years before,
followed upon the like antecedent. In the year 1798 the "Missionary
Society of Connecticut" was constituted, having for its object "to
Christianize the heathen in North America, and to support and promote
Christian knowledge in the new settlements within the United States";
and in August, 1800, its first missionary, David Bacon, engaged at a
salary of "one hundred and ten cents per day," set out for the
wilderness south and west of Lake Erie, "afoot and alone, with no more
luggage than he could carry on his person," to visit the wild tribes of
that region, "to explore their situation, and learn their feelings with
respect to Christianity, and, so far as he had opportunity, to teach
them its doctrines and duties." The name forms a link in the bright
succession from John Eliot to this day. But it must needs be that some
suffer as victims of the inexperience of those who are first to take
direction of an untried enterprise. The abandonment of its first
missionary by one of the first missionary societies, leaving him
helpless in the wilderness, was a brief lesson in the economy of
missions opportunely given at the outset of the American mission work,
and happily had no need to be repeated.[247:1]

David Bacon, like Henry Martyn, who at that same time, in far different
surroundings, was intent upon his plans of mission work in India, was
own son in the faith to David Brainerd. But they were elder sons in a
great family. The pathetic story of that heroic youth, as told by
Jonathan Edwards, was a classic at that time in almost every country
parsonage; but its influence was especially felt in the colleges, now no
longer, as a few years earlier, the seats of the scornful, but the homes
of serious and religious learning which they were meant to be by their
founders.

Of the advancement of Christian civilization in the first
quarter-century from the achievement of independence there is no more
distinguished monument than the increase, through those troubled and
impoverished years, of the institutions of secular and sacred learning.
The really successful and effective colleges that had survived from the
colonial period were hardly a half-dozen. Up to 1810 these had been
reinforced by as many more. By far the greater number of them wer