346 ANNUAL REPORT 



Isaiah i., 3-15. — "When ye come to appear before me who has required 

 this at your hands to tread my courts. Bring no more vain oblations — 

 incense is an abomination unto me, the new moons and Sabbaths, the 

 calling of assemblies. I cannot, away with it, it is iniquity even the 

 solemn meeting. Your new moons and appointed feasts my soul hateth. 

 They are a trouble unto me. I am weary to bear them. And when ye 

 spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you ; yea, when ye 

 make many prayers I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood," 



The rehearse is sweeping, including every syllable of modern piety. It 

 was full of blood then, and its counterpart is full of blood to-day. The 

 God of the prophet has told us how he hated their appeal from injured 

 man to him, and now let us hear what he held to be their duty in tiie 

 next two verses. " Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your 

 doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do well, seek 

 judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the wid- 

 ows." Here we have man's duty summed up, instead of a bankrupt ap- 

 peal, and in that moral code there is no fraud, no steals, no slaughter, nor 

 a shadow of a God-forgiving religion. 



Or in other words the whole duty of man is to man to do to others as 

 we would they should do to us, and anything more is a fraud in the judg- 

 ment of Jesus Christ and the God of the Prophet, and that same fraud is 

 the code taught the Indian, and how it has taken, the loss of native 

 moral, and the taking on of vices, prostitution, theft and drunkenness, 

 tell tlie extent of its adoption. The excesses with them as with us is only 

 a slopping over. 



The fact is, an attempt to civilize the Indians has never been made, the 

 fruit grower and farmer with seeds, trees and vines — the luxuries of life, 

 and the only civilizing elements of society, have not been sent among 

 them. 



Civilization with the great mass of our nation is as truly a failure as it 

 is with the Indian, and what little civilization we have owes nothing to 

 the creeds ; not a reform for the last 1500 years but what has had to run 

 a church gauntlet, pelted by all the piety of the land, and the reform only 

 adopted, as the outside world laughed them to shame, and then not 

 adopted as essentials, but merely as church ornaments. 



The great essential is in the appeal, as we have seen, and as I contem- 

 plate, my soul sickens, my blood chills at the enormity of the delusion 

 and its results. A creed that has a sail for every breeze, a passport to 

 every folly, a balm to every lust, a chart to every crime — a delusion the 

 origin of which is a wonder, the God of the Prophet denies being author. 



Tlien he loathed and hated it— its hands were full of blood, and nearly 

 a thousand years later the same psalm singing, public praying, God-for- 

 giving religion confronted Jesus of Nazereth, who termed its worshippers 

 serpents, hypocrites, whited sepulchers full of dead men's bones, who 

 devour widows' homes, and for a pretense make long prayers to be heard 

 of men — thieves climbing into heaven by some other way than the door— 

 a generation of vipers deserving the damnation of hell, and yet in their 



