that “the reverend elders propose means to bring the natives to the knowledge of God and his ways, and to civilize them as speedily as may be.”
President Dunster, of Harvard College, seems to have been regarded as eccentric because he urged that the Indians were to be instructed through their own language rather than through the English. In November, 1646, the Court, admitting that the Indians were not to be compelled to adopt Christianity, decreed that they were to be held amenable to what it regarded as simple natural religion, and so should be punished for blasphemy, and should be forbidden to worship false gods, and that all “powwowing” should at once be prohibited. “Necessary and wholesome laws for reducing them to the civility of life” should be made and read to them once in a year by some able interpreter.
The conspicuous and ever-honored representative of Puritan zeal and labor in civilizing and Christianizing the Indians, who with his co-worker Mayhew can alone “match the Jesuit” in this work, was the famous John Eliot. Edward Winslow, in his “Glorious Progress of the Gospel among the Indians” (London, 1649), had spoken of Eliot as “the Indian evangelist.” The modest saint, writing to Winslow at the close of the year, after he had seen the above tract, expresses a wish that that sacred word “could be obliterated, if any of the books remain” unsold; because Winslow had seemed to use the title “for that extraordinary office mentioned in the New Testament.” “I do beseech you,” he adds, “to suppress all such things, if ever you should have occasion of doing the like. Let us speak and do and carry all things with humility.” What would Eliot have said to the title of “the apostle,” which he has long borne and will ever bear unchallenged; or even to that of “the Augustine of New England,” which M. Du Ponceau attached to his name?
John Eliot, born near Nasing, in Essex, England, in 1604, graduated A. B. at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1623,
