Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/465

Rh Church estate.” He and they looked longingly forward to that crowning result. The most earnest of his converts were anxious to be put upon the same level with the English in the coveted enjoyment of all ecclesiastical rights and ordinances. He was himself naturally deliberate and scrupulous in avoiding all haste and in making sure of his ground. There were additional reasons also for hesitancy and delay in the case, furnished by the jealousy, the lingering prejudices, and the still unreconciled opposition of some of his own brethren. English pride and self-respect, and watchfulness for the dignity of the Puritan institutions, would keep careful guard over all the preliminaries for the recognition of a Church composed of natives. Stragglers and groups of them occasionally attended upon the Sabbath assemblies of the whites, with uncertain edification, understanding but little, and not always welcome, — though invited, and even constrained to come. The best of them might well realize that any good they were to derive from such services could be secured only when they met to worship by themselves, with “exercises” in their own language. Perhaps curiosity, novelty, and the love of imitation had their influence. As the Indians became impatient at the deferring of the consummation of their wishes, Eliot most wisely improved the opportunity by efforts to keep them steadfast, and to reconcile them to the delay by making sure of the gains already reached. It was hard to wean them from a roaming life and to accustom them to that fixed residence, “cohabitation,” which was the prime essential to religious discipline and a covenanted religion. They must dwell together if they would be “a people with whom the Lord would delight to dwell.” One stage in the tedious and responsible work had been secured in the measure already noticed, by which the families occupying the fifty lots in the new town had entered into a civil compact, after the model of the Jewish Theocracy. One of the laws which they had themselves made, of course under Eliot's