Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/536

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528 ELIOT of people if they were all once drowned in the flood. The conference lasted three hours, and was followed by others in which similar queries were propounded by the Indians, one of whom, very aged, inquired whether it was too late for such an old man as lie to repent and be saved. Eliot was strongly opposed by some of the sachems and conjurers, who threatened him with violence if he did not desist from his labors; but his answer was : "I am about the work of the great God, and he is with me, so that I neither fear you, nor all the sachems in the country. I will go on; do you touch me if you dare." A settlement of "praying Indians" was soon formed at No- nantum, which in 1651 was removed to Natick, where in 1660 an Indian church was organized, and the community flourished for many years. Eliot travelled extensively, planted a number of churches, visited all the Indians in the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies, and once preached the gospel to the famous King Philip, who rejected it in disdain. He induced large bodies of Indians to give up their savage cus- toms and form themselves into civilized com- munities, led many persons to engage in the missionary work among them, and lived to see 24 of them become preachers of the gospel to their own tribes. His influence over the Indians was almost unbounded. He protected them in 1675, during Philip's war, when some of the people of Massachusetts had resolved to extirpate them ; and though he suffered much abuse for the part he took, nothing could shake his friendship for them. At the age of 80 he offered to give up his salary from the church in Roxbury, and desired to be released from his labors as their teacher ; and when, from increasing infirmities, he could no longer visit the Indians, he persuaded a number of fam- ilies to send their negro servants to him every week, that he might instruct them in the word of God. He gave to the Indians most of his annual salary of 50, which he received from the society for propagating the gospel ; and it is related that on one occasion, wnen the parish treasurer was paying him, he tied the ends of the handkerchief into which he put the money in as many hard knots as possible, to prevent Mr. Eliot from giving it away before he should reach home. Calling at once, however, on a family suffering from sickness and want, he told them God had sent them relief, and began to untie the knots; but becoming impatient, he gave handkerchief and all to the mother, saying: "Here, my dear, take it; I believe the Lord designs it all for you." Eichard Baxter said of Mr. Eliot, "There was no man on earth that I honored above him." All New England bewailed his death, and Cotton Mather tells us, " We had a tradition that the country could never perish as long as Eliot was alive." A list of the published works of Eliot may be found in his life, in Sparks's "American Biography." Among them are accounts of the progress of the gospel among the Indians; the "Christian Commonwealth," published in England about 1660, which when received in Massachusetts was regarded as so seditious, that the governor and council re- quired Eliot to retract its teachings, because opposed to the monarchy of their native coun- try; an Indian grammar (1664); the psalms translated into Indian metre (1664); and a harmony of the gospels, in English (1678). His great work, however, was the translation of the Bible into the Indian tongue ; the New Testament was first published at Cambridge in 1661, and the Old in 1663 ; and both were is- sued in subsequent editions. This was the only Bible printed in America until a much later period. Copies of it are very rare, and have been sold at 170 and 210.. In a late Lon- don catalogue a copy is quoted at 225. A copy was sold in New York in 1868 for $1,130. The language in which it is written has ut- terly perished, and only one or two persons in modern times have been able to read it. II. Jared, grandson of the preceding, minister of Killingworth, Conn., born Nov. 7, 1685, died April 22, 1763. He was a preacher, a botanist, and a scientific agriculturist, intro- duced the white mulberry tree into Connec- ticut, and discovered a process of extracting iron from ferruginous sands. He was also the first physician of his day in the colony, was sometimes sent for to Newport and Bos- ton, and was more extensively consulted than any other physician in New England. He pub- lished "Agricultural Essays" (1735, several times reprinted), " Religion supported by Rea- son and Revelation " (1738), and sermons. ELIOT, John, an American clergyman, born in Boston, May 31, 1754, died there, Feb. 14, 1813. With Dr. Belknap he cooperated in establishing the Massachusetts historical so- ciety, and in 1809 published the "New Eng- land Biographical Dictionary." He also pub- lished sermons and biographies. ELIOT, Samuel, an American author, born in Boston, Dec. 22, 1821. He graduated at Har- vard college in 1839, and passed two years in a counting room and four years in foreign travel and study. While in Rome in 1845 he conceived the plan of writing a history of lib- erty, the first portion of which he published in Boston in 1847, under the title " Passages from the History of Liberty." In tins work he re- viewed the career of Arnold of Brescia, Gio- vanni di Vicenza, Savonarola, and other early Italian reformers. In 1849 appeared "The Liberty of Rome " (2 vols. 8vo, New York). A revised edition was published in 1853, under the general title, "The History of Liberty," with two additional volumes : parti., "The Ancient Romans;" part II., "The Early Christians." These constitute a portion of an extensive his- tory, the remaining three parts of which the author intends to devote to the papal ages, the monarchical ages, and the American nation. In 1856 he was appointed professor of history and political science in Trinity college, Hart-