THE BEGINNINGS 



MORAVIAN MISSION IN ALASKA. 



God in His providence lights the torch of missionary 

 zeal in ways unforeseen by men. Count Zinzendorf is 

 present at the Capital of Denmark for the Coronation of 

 King Christian VI, and a negro, Anthony by name, a 

 Christian slave, gives the impulse which leads to the estab- 

 lishrnent of the first foreign mission of the Moravian 

 Church — that on the Island of St. Thomas. John Eliot is 

 possessed of the idea that the Indians of North America 

 are the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel ; and this in- 

 ner conviction is for him a call constraining him to become 

 their apostle. The British and Foreign Bible Society, a 

 mighty engine for generating the electric light of gospel 

 knowledge, takes its start from an overpowering hunger for 

 the Word on the part of a poor girl in an obscure village 

 of Wales. And so, too, the commencement of a 'Mora- 

 vian Mission in Alaska was quite unforeseen by the mem- 

 bers of that Church until within a year of its actual incep- 

 tion ; and the call came from an unexpected quarter, was a 

 Macedonian cry from another denomination of Protestant 

 Christians. 



At the annual meeting of the Moravian "Society for 

 Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen," held on 

 August 23, 1883, at Bethlehem, Penna., its President, the 

 late Bishop Edmund de Schweinitz, communicated a letter 

 from the Rev. Sheldon Jackson, D.D., of New York, then 

 Secretary of the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian 

 Church,' in which he urged the establishment by the 



'Now Territorial Superintendent of Education in Alaska. 



