Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/93

Rh it recommended, or from the consequent orders of the king. The natives must be made to consent to be converted; they must work for their masters; they must be kindly treated, and after a fashion might receive something to be called wages. The most grateful result from the mission of the two priests representing the two sides of a bitter strife was that the Dominican, by his grace and skill of heart and zeal in private conferences, earnest and continued, completely won over to sympathy and co-operation with him his Franciscan brother.

The natives, however, had become thoroughly alienated by hatred and dread from the Spaniards, and kept aloof from them. What indeed had these Spaniards, with the proffer of their “holy faith,” to tempt and draw to them these children of Nature? What of help or blessing, of human pity and tenderness, came from them? Yet the more the natives shunned their tormentors, and sought to keep as far as possible from them, their aversion was accounted as only an obdurate resistance to being converted.

When Cortes, in his second expedition, was preparing for his siege of Montezuma's capital, he issued to his soldiers a paper of elaborate instructions. In this he said “conversion” was the great aim which made his enterprise a holy one, and that “without it the war would be manifestly unjust, and every acquisition made by it a robbery.”

In the enlightenment and free-thinking of our own age, which have relieved it from what are regarded as the bugbear superstitions and dreads fostered by the old priestcraft, there are many who will frankly say that the easy method offered to the heathen by which they might escape the fearful doom of hell, was just as rational as was the teaching them that they were really under such a doom. The doctrine of hell, and the rite of baptism as the symbol of full salvation from it, were well adjusted to each other, — both being irrational, superstitious, and