Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/393

Rh and even embittered parties differences of conviction have driven them, needs no recognition here.

And if the question, “What is Christianity, in the substance of its teaching as vital truth, and in the effect to be produced by it upon life?” has proved a puzzling and a distracting one to the most intelligent and cultivated of our race, what must be its perplexity when an attempt is made to teach it to barbarians, and, as the word is, to convert them to it? If, while progress appears to be making here or there in Christianizing a tribe by one school of missionaries, the barbarians come to learn that another class of missionaries, professing the same religion, condemn their first teachers as false deceivers, and offer quite different lessons and doctrines, what must be the consequence? Over and over again has that perplexity been visited upon the heathen in various regions, but especially here among our Indians. As to sincerity in belief and purpose, it would be a simple piece of impertinence to attempt to decide which had the most of it or the more of it, the Jesuit Father or the Puritan and Moravian missionary. They were both alike sincere to the very core of their hearts; and yet they looked upon each other as fatally deceived and as misleading and endangering their converts. Frequent references are to be found in our missionary literature to the intense dislike and disapprobation, and the dread and horror, and even hate, which the Catholic and the Protestant missionaries among our Indians have felt and expressed towards each other. Evidently each party thought that the other might better have left the Indians in their natural heathenism than have taken them out of it into deadly heresy. As between the parties themselves, of course not a word is to be said here; it is the natural and inevitable effect upon the Indians of such distracting teaching that we have in view. When our New England fishing-smacks went to trade or our soldiers to fight with Indians on our Eastern coasts, they fell in with natives who were under