Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/373

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AND CHRISTIANITY.
357

and therefore he did not believe these assertions. He believed the Indians to be men, and that they were, therefore, accessible to the language and motives of humanity. He believed in the omnipotence of justice and good faith, and disbelieved all the sophistry by which wars and violence are maintained by an interested generation. He resolved to try the experiment of kindness and peace: it was a grand and a momentous trial: it was no other than to put the truth of Christianity to the test, and to learn whether the World's philosophy or that of the Bible were the best. It was attempted to alarm him by all kinds of bloody bugbears: he was ridiculed as an enthusiast, but he calmly cast himself on his conviction of the literal truth of the Gospel, and the result was the most splendid triumph in history. He demonstrated, in the face of the world, and all its arguments and all its practice, that peace may be maintained when men will it; and that there is no need, and therefore no excuse, for the bloodshed and the violence that are perpetually marking the expanding boundaries of what is oddly enough termed civilization.

William Penn received a grant of the province to which he gave the name of Pennsylvania, as payment for money owing to his father, Admiral Penn, from the government. He accepted this grant, because it secured him against any other claimant from Europe. It gave him a title in the eyes of the Christian world; but he did not believe that it gave him any other title. He knew in his conscience that the country was already in the occupation of tribes of Indians, who inherited it from their ancestors by a term of possession, which probably was unequalled by anything