Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/94

74 the one offsetting the other. The natives certainly had not the slightest conception whatever that because they were brought into existence outside the Christian fold, or for any other reason, they were all destined to endless miseries and torments hereafter; and probably they had as vague an appreciation of the doctrine as they had of the method of relief from the fate to which it assigned them.

Roger Williams, in one of those flashings of his keener insight which anticipated as axioms what it cost persecutors and formalists many years of painful and baffled effort to learn as proved truths, while on a visit to England in 1643, wrote and left for publication there a little tract with the title, “Christenings make not Christians; Or a brief Discourse concerning that name Heathen, commonly given to the Indians. As also concerning that great point of their conversion.” In this tract the writer, referring to the Spanish and French religious dealings with the natives, says: —

The claim has been set up, and to a certain extent allowed, that the Mexicans and Aztecs may be regarded as having reached a stage of actual civilization. It is scarcely probable that the obscurity which invests our prehistoric times and people will ever be removed. The theme and