[Pioneers and Founders by Charlotte Mary Yonge]@TWC D-Link book
Pioneers and Founders

INTRODUCTION
4/11

We wish we had room for the records of the Bishopric of Minnesota, and the details of the work among the Indians; more especially how, when a rising was contemplated to massacre the White settlers all along the border, a Christian Indian travelled all night to give warning; and how, on another occasion, no less than four hundred White women and children were saved by the interposition of four Christian Indian chiefs.
Perhaps the Church has never made so systematic an effort upon the Indians as in Minnesota, and it is to be hoped that there may be some success.
For the need of system seems to me one of the great morals to be deduced from the lives I have here collected.

I confess that I began them with the unwilling belief that greater works had been effected by persons outside the pale of the Church than by those within; but as I have gone on, the conviction has grown on me that even though the individuals were often great men, their works lacked that permanency and grasp that Church work, as such, has had.
The equality of rank in the ministry of other bodies has prevented the original great founders from being invested with the power that is really needed in training and disciplining inferior and more inexperienced assistants, and produces a want of compactness and authority which has disastrous effects in movements of emergency.

Moreover, the lack of forms causes a deficiency of framework for religion to attach itself to, and this is almost fatal to dealing with unintellectual minds.
On the whole, the East Indian Missions have prospered best.

Schwartz was the very type of a founder, with his quiet, plodding earnestness, and power of being generally valuable; and the impression he made had not had time to die away before the Episcopate brought authority to deal with the difficulties he had left.

Martyn was, like Brainerd before him, one of the beacons of the cause, and did more by his example than by actual teaching; and the foundation of the See of Calcutta gave stability to the former efforts.


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