the summer. He had also published a “little additional discourse . . . of the name Heathen,” treating of these natives of New England “and that great point of their conversion.” Of this latter work no copy was known to be in existence until one was discovered last year.[1] Baylie quotes from it the following sentences: —
“For our New England parts, I can speak it confidently, I know
it to have been easy for myself, long ere this, to have brought
many thousands of these natives — yea, the whole country — to a
far greater antichristian conversion than ever was heard of in
America. I could have brought the whole country to observe one
day in seven: I add, to have received baptism; to have come to a
stated church meeting; to have maintained priests, and forms of
prayer, and a whole form of antichristian worship, in life and
death. . . . Woe be to me if I call that conversion to God which is
indeed the subversion of the souls of millions in Christendom from
one false worship to another!”
He says, “God was pleased to give me a painful, patient
spirit to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes to
gain their tongue.” Baylie exempts from his censure
Williams alone, who “in the time of his banishment did essay
what could be done with those desolate souls.” It is
possible that the publication of Williams's Key, with the interest
which it awakened in England, may have prompted the
action of the General Court of Massachusetts in some
further enactments for the Indians. At the Court in March,
1644, some of the sachems, with their subjects, had been
induced to come under a covenant of voluntary subjection
to the Government, and into an agreement to worship the
God of the English, to observe the commandments, and to
allow their children to learn to read the Bible, etc. An
order of the Court in the November following provided that
the county courts should care for the civilization of the
Indians and for their instruction in the knowledge and
worship of God. Again, in October, 1645, the Court desired
