Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/157

Rh and most effective part of religion is not that which is characteristic and peculiar to one, but that which is common to them all.

The severest trial to which a religion can be subjected is in the effort to displace by it and to substitute it for another. We shall have to recognize, further on, many interesting facts bearing upon this point. The excellent and accomplished Lafitau exercised a discernment and a candor in forming and expressing his views upon the religious range, character, intelligence, and susceptibility of the aborigines, in which he was not followed by all of his brethren. He recognized not only the exceeding difficulty found in the imperfect vehicle of language, but the more perplexing and embarrassing obstruction offered in the lack of mental furnishing for all the processes of reasoning and spiritual conception in the savage. It was almost provokingly characteristic of these really irresponsive pupils, that, though they would assent spontaneously and as if with full appreciation and approval to some lesson or assertion of their teacher, their minds were utterly destitute of any answering idea. They caught no more of meaning from it than they would have appropriated from a page of the most abstruse mathematical or algebraical formulas. When, in rare cases, they did apprehend a gleam of some doctrinal teaching or religious lesson from the missionary which was in direct antagonism with a belief or opinion of their own, they could stand on the defensive and decline what, though it might be very good for the white man's religion, was not suited for the Indian.

That was indeed an astounding and appalling announcement which the missionary made the starting-point of his instruction to them, — that in their natural state they were under the doom of an awful and unending subjection to unutterable woe after this life, and that the only relation which the Great Spirit then sustained to them was as waiting for their passing from this troubled existence that he