Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/155

Rh a religion, and what filled the place and exercised the profound and august power over them which the purest and loftiest form of religion has and effects for the most advanced human being. Whether the sort of religion which the red men were found to have and to recognize were in the white man's view better or worse than no religion, was a matter for difference of opinion. But the red man's heart and thought were by no means empty or unengaged on the spells and mysteries, the shadows and the revealings, associated with religion. He who humbly and devoutly holds what represents the very loftiest, purest, and most spiritual form of religion in its tenets, its conceptions, and believings may be grateful if he can intelligently assure himself that any considerable portion of his creed or hope is adequate to the subject of it, — is free from superstition, credulity, limitation of view, imperfection of thought. Of those component elements of religion which awe and enthrall thought, which exercise the imagination, which quicken hopes, which strike dread, and which compel offerings, exercises, and real sacrifices, the Indian unmistakably showed that he was the possessor and the subject. In Eastern realms the monarch or chief was the priest of his tribe or people. It was not so here. The office of priest — magician, sorcerer, as the Europeans regarded it — was here filled by the doctor, the physician for bodily ills. In the idea which underlies this combination of functions, we certainly can find something likely to win our approval. The physician of the body was the minister of sacred rites to the Indian, and the chief of the tribe was both his patient and disciple. Certainly Christians, remembering the touch of healing and the word of power combined in their Master, must favorably regard the custom among our Indians in uniting the functions of the “powwow,” or enchanter, with those of the medicine-man.

True, the incantations and the professional ministrations of the Indian functionary may have been barbarous and