Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/380

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364
COLONIZATION

same fate as her neighbours. For a long time she refused, but at length fear entered her mind, and she went with them. In the fort, however, she became wretched. She considered that she had abandoned the principles of peace by putting herself under the protection of arms. She felt that she had cast a slander on the hitherto inviolate faith of the Indians, which might bring most dissistrous consequences on other Friends who yet lived in the open country on the faith of the Indian integrity. She therefore determined to go out again, and return to her own house. She went forth, but had scarcely reached the first thicket when she was shot by the Indians, who now looked upon her as an enemy, or at least as a spy.

These are the only exceptions to the perfect security of Friends through all the Indian devastations in America; for wherever there were Friends, any tribe of Indians felt bound to recognize the sons of Father Onas: they would have been ashamed to injure an unarmed man, who was unarmed because he preserved peace as the command of the Great Spirit. It was during this war that the very treaty made with Penn was shewn by the Indians to some British officers, being preserved by them with the most sacred care, as a monument of a transaction without a parallel, and equally honourable to themselves as to the Friends.

What a noble testimony is this to the divine nature and perfect adaptation of Christianity to all human purposes; and yet when has it been imitated? and how little is heard of it! From that day to the present both Americans and English have gone on outraging and expelling the natives from their lands;