ish, 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.”[1] In this tract the writer, referring to the Spanish and French religious dealings with the natives, says: —
“If the reports (yea some of their own Historians) be true, what
monstrous and most inhumane conversions have they made! —
baptizing thousands, yea ten thousands, of the poore Natives; sometimes
by wiles and subtle devices, sometimes by force, compelling them
to submit to that which they understood neither before nor after
their monstrous Christning of them.”
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
- ↑ This tract, known only by quotations referring to it, was long supposed to have been irrecoverably lost, no copy of it being known as in existence. A copy was accidentally discovered, uncatalogued, in the British Museum in 1880, by that most diligent, indefatigable, and thoroughly furnished literary antiquarian, Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter, and has been reprinted in Providence, R. I., 1881.
