Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/394

374 the training of the French priests. Our people told these natives that their priests, though calling themselves Christians, were deceivers and idolaters, and were luring them to everlasting perdition. The priests taught their converts to reply that the New Englanders were wicked heretics, children of hell themselves, into which they would carry all who trusted in them. Occasions there doubtless were in which an Indian trained by a French Jesuit, and one trained by a Dutch Dominie or a New England Puritan, might have rested in the woods to discuss or quarrel over their creeds, — affording us a reduced copy of Milton's angels, when they “reasoned high, and found no end, in wandering mazes lost.”

This is no place or occasion for polemical discussions or for entering into religious controversies. Our concern is only with facts and incidents which present themselves as we engage with that profoundly interesting subject in its historical relations, — the attempts to Christianize our savages. Let us go back for a moment to first principles.

The Author and Teacher of the Christian religion gave utterance to the most sublime and august conception which has ever had expression on this earth for all time: it was the conception of one world-wide and universal religion, comprehensive of the whole human race; independent of time, place, or condition. His commission and promise to his messengers were: Go out over all the world and preach the gospel to every creature: go and teach all nations. I will be with you as you do it. No unanointed lips ever spoke forth such an utterance as that. And the message was described as one of “Glad tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” As that religion would comprehend all people, it would unite and benefit them all.

Three very simple but most essential conditions are implied in that commission: first, that the religion taught should be intelligible to all persons of our average humanity; second, that it should be practicable, so as to be