ELIOT, Jonx, 1604-90; " the apostle of the Indians;" b. at Nasing, Essex, Eng. He graduated at Cambridge in 1623, and entering the non-conformist ministry, emigrated iu 1631 to Boston, Mass., where he officiated for a year in the church of Mr. Wilson, who was then iu England, and, in 1632, he was settled over the church in Roxbury. He soon began preaching to the Indians, acquiring their language by the help of a young. Pequot, taken prisoner in 1637. He translated the commandments, the Lord's prayer, and many texts, and first preached without an interpreter in 1646, at Nonantum, now Brighton, on the border of Newton. A settlement of Christian Indians was established, and a missionary society was organized in England, of which Robert Boyle was a lead ing member. This society sent Eliot £50 per annum to supplement his salary of £60 at. Roxbury. In 1651, the settlement was removed to Natick, where an Indian church was. formed in 1660. In 1653, E. published a catechism for their use, said to have been the first work published iu the Indian language: no copy is known to exist. In the same. year accounts of Eliot's labors were published by the corporation in London, and in 1655, a tract containing the doctrinal and experimental confession of these Indians who• had been baptized and admitted to church fellowship. In 1660, E. published in London The Christian Commonwealth, or the Civil Policy of the rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ, which was criticised as containing seditious principles. The governor and council of Massachusetts required him to retract some of its utterances. About this time he com pleted his great work, the translation of the Bible into the Indian tongue. The New
Testament was published at Cambridge, Mass., in 1661, the Old in 1663. A second edition of the New Testament was printed in 1680, and of the Old in 1685. Both of these editions are now very rare; the language in which it was written has ceased to be spoken, and only one or two persons in recent times are able to read it. E. was assisted in the translation by the Rev. John Cotton, of Plymouth, Mass. A new edition was printed at Boston, 1822. E. published many other works in the Indian and in the English tongue. His well-known Indian Grammar Begun, printed at Cambridge, Mass., 1666 (reprinted 1822), has at the end these memorable words: "Prayers and pains, through faith in Jesus Christ, will do anything." Of his Indian Primer (1669), the only complete copy known to exist is preserved in the library of the university of Edinburgh. It was reprinted, 1877. In 1671, E. printed in English, at Cambridge, Indian Dia logues, etc.; and in 1672, The Logick Primer. Of the former the only known copy is in a private library in New York; of the latter work there is a copy in the British museum, and another in the Bodleian library. Even in his old age the pen of E. was not idle. He died at Roxbury, Mass., at the age of 86, having won all hearts by his simplicity of life and manners, and his evangelical sweetness of temper, whether in the villages of the English colonists, or in the huts and wigwams of the Indians. His Indian publications are still of value for the light which they throw upon the structure and character of unwritten dialects.