Eliot, JOHN, 'the Indian Apostle,' was born probably at Widford in Hertfordshire in 1604, the son of a yeoman, graduated at Cambridge in 1622, and, after taking orders in the Church of England, quitted his native country for conscience' sake, and landed at Boston in New England in 1631. For some months he 'exercised' in the church there, but being fore-engaged to friends who had settled at Roxbury, he repaired thither in the summer of 1632. In 1646, after two years' study of the language, he delivered a long sermon in the native dialect at Nonantum, about five miles from Roxbury; and other meetings soon followed. He shortly after began to establish his converts in regular settlements, his work meeting with approval both in the colony and at home; in England a corporation was founded in 1649 'for the promoting and propagating the Gospel among the Indians of New England,' which defrayed the expenses of the preachers and the cost of printing translations. At one time there were over a dozen townships of 'praying Indians' within the bounds of Massachusetts, and many more outside these limits, with numbers estimated in 1674 at 3600; but, although the organisation survived until the death of the last native pastor in 1716, the decay of the 'praying towns' was rapid after the war with a native king, Philip (1675), in which the converts suffered equal cruelties at the hands of their countrymen and of the English, whom they are nevertheless believed to have saved from extinction. Eliot died at Roxbury, 21st May 1690; there are monuments to his memory in the Indian burying-ground at South Natick, and at Newton, near the scene of his first Indian sermon. A man of earnest piety and devotion to evangelisation, warm-hearted, and of a singularly attractive manner, he has left a memory that is honoured among the first in the history of New England. Along with his colleague Thomas Weld, and Richard Mather, Eliot prepared an English metrical version of the Psalms, the 'Bay Psalm-book' (Camb. 1640), which was the first book printed in New England. He was also the author, among other works, of The Christian Commonwealth (Lond. 1659; suppressed by the general court, and now extremely rare), of The Communion of Churches (Camb. 1665; the first book privately printed in America), of several tracts, and of translations into the Indian tongue of Baxter's Call, Bayly's Practice of Piety (abridged), and Shepard's Sincere Convert. But the great work and the noblest monument of his devoted life was the translation of the Bible into the tongue of the Indians of Massachusetts (Algonquin), of which the New Testament appeared in 1661, and the whole work, with a version of the Psalms in metre, and a page of 'catechism,' in 1663. His Indian Grammar Begun was printed in 1666, his Indian Primer in 1669; a reprint of the only known copy of the latter, now in the library of the Edinburgh University, was issued in 1880, along with a reprint of one of the only two extant copies (not alike) of A Christian Covenanting Confession. The finest collection of unique and scarce copies of Eliot's works is in the Lenox Library, New York; many of them have been reprinted.
The best Life of Eliot is that by C. Francis in vol. v. of the first series of Sparks's American Biography (1836), the earliest that by Cotton Mather (1691); see also two careful articles in the Cyclopædia of Amer. Biog. (vol. ii. 1887) and the Dict. of Nat. Biog. (vol. xvii. 1889).