296 REVEREND EZRA FISHER
as soon as we shall be so situated as to be able to do much permanently for the cause. We feel a strong assurance that we shall soon enjoy a stability of government which will give an impulse to emigration and commerce, and we trust that in the emigration we shall find some who care for the cause of Christianity, and will co-operate with us for the promotion of the Kingdom of Christ on these shores. We have three Baptist sisters about ten miles from us on the Clat- sop Plains, who have moved there since we came to this place, with whom we had a slight acquaintance in the states. 111 We are in expectation of other members in the spring or summer, and hope by that time to constitute a feeble church in this county. If we shall be able to do this, and to awaken in the community an interest in substituting religious order on the Sabbath for visiting, hunting and transacting worldly busi- ness, we shall feel that we have not lived in vain in Oregon. We feel the strongest conviction that ours is a very important position, although at present we labour under the greatest inconveniences of any of your missionaries. Your Board is my witness that I have not in years past made the privations of a missionary the burden of my communications with you. The duty I owe to Him who bought us with His own blood and ever lives to intercede in our behalf, as well as the relation I sustain to the Home Board of Missions, and to our new and promising territory, demands of me, however humiliating the task, a disclosure of facts. Before I proceed, I will state that to me, and I doubt not to the other two Baptist ministers labouring in Oregon, the work of the ministry is desirable above all other works, and I know of no field for which I have any desire to abandon Oregon. But what can a man do without his bread and his tools? To be sure, under the most adverse circumstances, something may be done for God every day, but we know it is not God's plan that Zion's teachers shall be removed into a corner, but that they shall be brought into sight and hearing, that she may hear the word: "This
iii These were Mrs. Robinson and her two daughters, Mrs. Motley and Mrs. Thompson.
