Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/490

470 that ‘God hath made of one blood,’ etc., should so early and upon every occasion take care to preserve this distinction. Perhaps nothing has more effectually defeated the endeavors for Christianizing the Indians. It seems to have done more, — to have sunk their spirits, led them to intemperance, and extirpated the whole race.”

Wilson, the pastor of the Boston Church, writing to the Missionary Society in England, refers to the visit to the town, in 1651, of “Humanequim, a grave and solemn man,” ordained by Mayhew as pastor of an Indian church in Martha's Vineyard. Wilson says he was “a great proficient in knowledge and utterance, and love and practice of the things of Christ.” “On the Lord's Day, in the Assembly,” Wilson said he asked one of the brethren “to receive that good Indian” into his pew, which he did. Why did he not share the pulpit? It stands, however, to the credit of the Puritans that they raised up native preachers, which the Jesuits did not. And yet candor requires the acknowledgment that one may easily read between the lines of many contemporary writings, that to the stiffer and sterner of the Puritans, both clerical and lay, such imitative approaches to the ways and manners of the whites as were reached by a few of the educated natives only made them more repulsive. Their “civility and humanity” seemed but a parody of the bearing into which ages of softening and refining processes, with the decencies and sanctities of home life, had trained the colonists. The official and clerical services of Indian preachers, and the ecclesiastical proceedings of their flocks, — rude and even ludicrous as for the most part they must have been, — must on occasion have tried the spirits and pride of grim-faced observers. Cotton Mather betrays the disgust working in his own feelings in this sentence of his Life of Eliot: “To think of raising a number of these hideous creatures unto the elevations of our holy religion, must argue more than common or little sentiment in the undertaker.” Too often