Eliot. I. John, commonly called the " Apostle of the Indians," born at Nasing, England, in 1604, died at Roxbury, Mass., May 20, 1690. He was educated at Cambridge, and in 1631 came to Boston, Mass., where he preached to the church of Mr. Wilson, who was then in England. In 1632 he was settled as teacher of the church in Roxbury. Being impressed with the benighted condition of the Indians, whom he fancied to be the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, he commenced preaching to them in their own language at Nonantum, now a part of Newton. He had acquired their language through the assistance of an Indian servant in his family who had learned English. The first service was held Oct. 28, 1646. After prayer he stated the leading doctrines of Christianity, and applied them to their condition, inviting his hearers at the close to ask any questions. One asked whether God could understand prayers in the Indian language; another, how could there be an image of God since it was forbidden in the second commandment; another, how the Indians could differ so much from the English in their views of religious truth if they all at first had but one father; another, how came the world so full 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 he 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 customs and form themselves into civilized communities, 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 families 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, when 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." Richard 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 required Eliot to retract its teachings, because opposed to the monarchy of their native country; 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 issued 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 London 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 utterly 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, introduced the white mulberry tree into Connecticut, 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 Boston, and was more extensively consulted than any other physician in New England. He published "Agricultural Essays" (1735, several times reprinted), "Religion supported by Reason and Revelation" (1738), and sermons.