_April 5, 1844._—“The children here (at Sitka) between the ages of one and eighteen are very numerous. In the Theological School, in the Company’s School, and in two girls’ schools, there are about one hundred and forty, and yet I gathered about one hundred and fifty others.” He reports four hundred children under instruction, and thirty-five adults baptized at their own request. 1845.—The Kwichpak Church numbered two hundred and seventy natives and thirty foreigners. Priests visited the Kenai and Koetchan tribes, staying with them some months and baptizing several converts. And so the good bishop went on from year to year, as the Russian Mouravieff says, “Sailing over the ocean, or driving in reindeer sledges over his vast, but thinly settled diocese, thousands of miles in extent, everywhere baptizing the natives, for whom he has introduced the use of letters and translated the gospel into the tongue of the Aleutines.”
“The good bishop has little to say of himself. We are told he became master of six dialects, spoken in the field committed to his charge. He himself translated, or assisted others in translating, large parts of God’s Word and the liturgy of his church for the use of the natives. For forty-five years, ten of them as Bishop of Kamchatka, eighteen more as its archbishop, he labored on, in season and out of season.” (Hale’s “Innocent of Moscow.”) And when, in 1867, Philaret died and Innocent was chosen Patriarch of Moscow, one of the first works he undertook was the organization of the Orthodox Missionary Society, which was the cause of as much good at home in awakening the spirit of missions in the church as it was abroad in supporting the work in distant fields. This society in 1877 raised and expended 141,698.65¾ roubles in missionary work.
The following statistics are taken from a report in the _Mission Journal_ of Irkútsk: “There are in the diocese of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, including about two hundred Sclaves and Greeks at San Francisco, eleven thousand five hundred and seventy two members of the Eastern Church. The church buildings are nine—viz., at San Francisco, at Sitka (where there are about three hundred orthodox), at Kadiák, at Renai, at Bielkoffsky, at Ounalashka, at Nonschatchak, on the Island of St. Paul, and at the Michaeloffsky Redoubt at Kwichpak. There are two vacancies among the clergy at Sitka and at the Kenai Mission.”