Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/462

442 To the communications made from time to time by Eliot for the sake of their being printed by the Society in England, in order to draw confidence and funds to the mission work, he generally attached some interesting matter indicating the active intelligence of his Indian disciples. As has been said, one of the exercises in Eliot's religious services on his visits to Natick was his allowing and prompting his hearers to ask him any questions which seriously sprung up in their own minds, as they tried to understand and appropriate his teachings. We know how fruitful the creed of Calvin, and doctrines drawn from the Puritan estimate and mode of using the Bible — the Jewish and Christian Scriptures — have been in puzzles for the brains of civilized and well-trained men and women. It is not strange that the savages found in them riddles and perplexities. The Jesuit put foremost to his more docile disciples the creed, the authority, and symbols of his church, thus leaving to a reduced and secondary place of importance the promptings of the reasoning faculty on speculative and didactic points. But the Puritan stirred a spirit of disputation, with which he found it difficult to deal. Eliot, however, with kind and honest frankness indulged the liberty which he had offered. So he was wont to append to his communications to his English patrons some of the questions which came to his mind when he wrote, as having been put to him by the Indians. He says: “They are fruitful that way,” though some of them ask “weak questions, which I mention not; you have the best.” The excellent Gookin, who was often present, writes: “Divers of them had a faculty to frame hard and difficult questions, touching something then spoken, or some other matter in religion, tending to their illumination; which questions Mr. Eliot, in a grave and Christian manner, did endeavor to resolve and answer to their satisfaction.” It was altogether natural that the Indians, being so positively told by those who seemed to have knowledge in the