It was well for Eliot that he had friends, for in the first flush of the tidings of the successes of the Puritans in England, he had written a set of papers upon Government, entitled the "Christian Commonwealth," which had been sent to England, and there lay dormant for nine or ten years, until in the midst of all the excitement on the Restoration, this speculative work, the theory of a scholar upon Christian democracy, was actually printed and launched upon the world at home, whether by an enemy or by an ill-advised friend does not appear, and without the author's consent. Complaints of this as a seditious book came out to New England, and John Eliot was forced to appear before the court, when he owned the authorship, but disowned the publication, and retracted whatever might have declared the Government of England, by King, Lords, and Commons, to be anti-Christian, avowing it to be "not only a lawful but eminent form of government, and professing himself ready to conform to any polity that could be deduced from Scripture as being of Divine authority." The court was satisfied, and suppressed the book, while publishing Mr. Eliot's retractation. Some have sneered at his conduct on this occasion as an act of moral cowardice; but it would be very hard if every man were bound to stand to all the political views expressed in an essay never meant for the general eye, ten years old, and written in the enthusiasm of the commencement of an experiment, which to the Presbyterian mind had proved a grievous disappointment. He had a much more important work in hand than the defence of old dreams of the reign of the saints--for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England had just finished printing his translation of the New Testament, _Wusku Wuttestermentum_ as it was called, and in two years more the Old Testament was finished. A copy was presented to Charles II., to the Chancellor Clarendon, and to the two Universities in England, as well as to Harvard College. It was in the Mohican dialect, which was sufficiently like that of the neighbouring tribes to serve for them, and had all the correctness that the scholarship and philology of the time could furnish. There is a story that Eliot wrote the whole with a single pen. It went through a good many editions, but is now very rare, and with Eliot's Catechism, and translations of Baxter's chief works, and a metrical version of the Psalms, remains the only vestige of the language of the Mohicans.