"THE GREAT LONE LAND."

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXXI, Issue 12508, 21 October 1904, Page 4

"THE GREAT LONE LAND."

■ ♦ A SUCCESSFUL MISSIONARY. A large gathering of peop'e, though not the church full, were entertained and instructed, both in an eminent degree, by a lecture given in the Wesleyan Church last "k g i£ the EeVl E g erton Young, who about 35 years ago, a young man with a young wife as his companion, travelled some 3000 miles from his home in Eastern ™P ada to a P°mt far north of Manitoba. 400 miles from the next white family, as a missionary to the Indians. The tale he had to tell, of many years of hard and courageous and successful work, under conditions that might well have appalled the man, to say nothing of his wife, was clearly told by means of graphic sketches enlivened by a plentiful current of humour Many missionaries have had a hard life

in the performance of their self-sacrificing duty; but to live for years on the food of the forest Indian, fish, flesh and fowl only, often with no choice of the kind of flesh, until one acquires an aesthetic taste in the fatness of dogs; and to endure temperatures down to 60 below zero in winter, must be about as low down the scale of hardship as any have survived. And such were the experiences cf Mr and Mrs Young. But they were well repaid by the success of their efforts. The moral, domestic, social and industrial condition of the Indians amongst whom they laboured was as bad almost as it could be, quite as bad in some respects. And Mr and Mrs Young brought them out of it; out of utterly savage and pagan brutality, into a decent, industrious, moral, Christian mode of life; out of their forests into farms; out of their wigwams and log huts into houses, out of. dirt and squalor into the use of soap, starched shirt*, and modern millinery—a thoroughly successful Christianising and civilising "effort. A number of excellent lantern pictures brought out the difference between the wild 'and the civilised Indian in a. most instructive manner, yet not a whit more so than the word pictures of the lecturer, which evoked frequent applause. One point that appears very clearly from the whole of this stovy, is that the America Indian of the north is much better now, more intelligent, and with more backbone than even that "finest of brown races," the Maori; much better material for civilising influences to work upon than those we have more frequently been told about by missionary lecturers in Timaru. The Rev. Mr Serpell presided, and * Tote <rf thanks was carried by acclamation.