Through their influence, orphanages have been founded, schools
established, and hospitals opened. Creeds take a secondary place to
deeds in this land, and when you discuss a man, be he cleric or layman,
the last thing you ask is, "To what church does he belong?"
Incidentally, it does seem rather odd that with Scottish blood running
through the veins of nine-tenths of the people of this North as yet no
Presbyterian missionary has penetrated beyond the latitude of Edmonton.
The great Churches of England and Rome, north of the Athabasca, divide
the field between them.
The records of the whole missionary world show no more striking figure
than that of Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church. We have already had
two glimpses of this young Cockney curate; once, hoisting his homemade
Union Jack on the ox-cart at St. Cloud, and, again, passing north as the
wild-fowl flew south in October, 1865, chronicled by the Chipewyan
scribe merely as "a Protestant missionary coming in a canoe from the
Portage." In the forty years of missionary life which intervened between
his coming into the North and his death in the Yukon just two years ago,
only twice did the Bishop emerge from these Northern fastnesses.
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