Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/488

468 for poor fishermen on islands and headlands. The only knowledge of the ancient race which young persons in Massachusetts have by actual eyesight is when their summer sojourns bring them to the waters of the Penobscot, the great hostleries near the mountains and the lakes, and the borders of Canada. Here are still humiliated and taciturn specimens of full-blooded Indians. Such religion as they have is the legacy of the Jesuit missions.

As we view the devoted and zealous laborers in those first Indian missions, we have to say that the task with which the Jesuit charged himself was intellectually far lighter than that assumed by the Puritan; that is to say, it was a lesser task to turn an Indian into a Christian by the Jesuit than by the Puritan method. It is not easy for us to learn with any minuteness or fulness of detail exactly how and what, in the nature of intellectual instruction in religious and Christian truths and duties, — their authority, scope, and consistent influence, — the Jesuit taught the Indian disciple. We have but slight information on this point in the earliest records of their missions. The authority of the Church passed for very much, and the recognition of this, in an assent to whatever its priest should teach or require, seems to have been the great comprehensive demand of the missionary. The savages who came with most docility or with the least resistance on their part under the training of the priest, seem to have done so without argument or much explanation. Those who resisted the appeal, and who in any way tried to justify their rejection of the proffered blessing, were able and ready in some cases to give reasons — of weight with themselves — for so doing. We have to judge that the Jesuit method was the easier and the more compliant one, because he was much more readily satisfied than the Puritan would have been as to the evidences of Christian conversion required of and manifested by one of the heathen. This easier work of the Jesuit applies only to the strain upon his own intellect and