Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/73

Rh gave over the enterprise under the belief that the colony was coming to its own speedy end.

We must define to our minds as clearly as possible the fixed and positive conviction held by all Christendom at the era of transatlantic discovery, anticipatory of any actual knowledge of a new race or people, as to what should be the relation between Christians and all other men and women, wherever found and whatever their condition. All who were not in the fold of the holy Roman Church were heathens. Heathen people had no natural rights, and could attain no rights even of a common humanity, but through baptism into the fold. The great Reformation was then about stirring in its elemental work; but as yet there had been no outburst. It had asserted its energy and wrought out its radical changes in human belief and practice, in season to have secured a most powerful influence in deciding the conditions under which what is now our national domain was actually settled by colonies of Europeans in the seventeenth century. But the era of discovery was when the old Church held an unbroken sway, and the Pope was the lord of Christendom. Protestants and Catholics, as we shall see, differed fundamentally as to their primary relations and duties towards our aborigines; but the matter in many vital respects had been prejudiced by the course of the first comers as Catholics. The assumption, held as a self-evident truth by the Roman Church, was that a state of heathenism imposed a disablement which impaired all human rights of property, liberty, and even of life; while the possession of the true faith conferred authority of jurisdiction over all the earth, with the right to seize and hold all heathen territory, and to subjugate and exterminate all heathen people who would not or could not be converted. As to what was meant by conversion, its means, methods, and evidences, the champion of the faith being the sole judge and arbiter in the case, there would be little satisfaction in raising any discussion. However