Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/144

124 as much of physical torture as he himself inflicts. Lafitau writes: —

To this is to be added the profound admiration, as for a consummate virtue, which they have for a tortured warrior whose nerves do not flinch under his agonies, and who raises cheerily the pæan of his scornful triumph. It does not appear that any one of the Jesuit Fathers who have admiringly related, in all their horrifying details, this more than Spartan firmness and defiance of the savages under protracted tortures, had suggested to himself the thought that the terrors of hell, which he regarded as the most potent agency in the work of conversion, might have at least but a qualified dread for those who could thus triumph over agonies inflicted by their fellow-men. All unconscious as the savages were that such a doom awaited them, or that they had done anything to expose themselves to it, the most sceptical and philosophic among them may have resolved to meet it if they must, and to find their comfort as some Christian people, unawed by the terrific threat, have avowed that they should do, in a stout confidence that the doom was unjust.