protecting power of Christianity. Would that this influence had been more earnest, efficient, and universal! We must not overlook, in this connection, the efforts of our Moravian brethren. As early as 1740, Christian Henry Bauch commenced a mission among the Indians in Eastern New York, near Sharon, Conn. He had great success; but causes which have proved fatal to most other missions among the aborigines compelled him to remove. Rum sellers, land speculators, and such other bad men as hang on the skirts of civilization and barbarism, conspired against him. These drew to their aid such legislative authority and such persecutions that the Moravians were obliged to retire to Bethlehem, in the deeper forests of Pennsylvania. They also had establishments at Gnadenhütten, above the present borough of Easton, where, as is well known, their converts suffered a dreadful massacre in 1755, by Indians in the French interest. The Moravian brethren retreated deeper and deeper into the forest. They had successively missions at Friedenhütten, on the Susquehanna, at Friedenstadt, on the Ohio, at Gnadenhütten, on the Muskinghum, and finally near Detroit, in Michigan. They first and last numbered hundreds of sincere converts; but, followed everywhere by the same bad men who broke up their first mission, and subjected to constant interruption by political jealousy and the wars of the period, they finally settled, in 1792, on twentyfive thousand acres of land assigned them by the British Government on the river Thames, in Canada. |