The white people, (I had almost said christians) who have become Indian proselytes of justice, by living according to the Indian religious system, assure us, that the Indian men observe the daily sacrifice both at home, and in the woods, with new-killed venison; but that otherwise they decline it. The difficulty of getting salt for religious uses from the sea-shore, and likewise its irritating quality when eaten by those who have green wounds, might in time occasion them to discontinue that part of the sacrifice. {115} They make salt for domestic use, out of a saltish kind of grass, which grows on rocks, by burning it to ashes, making strong lye of it, and boiling it in earthen pots to a proper consistence. They do not offer any fruits of the field, except at the first-fruit-offering: so that their neglect of sacrifice, at certain times, seems not to be the effect of an ignorant or vicious, but of their intelligent and virtuous disposition, and to be a strong circumstantial evidence of their Israelitish extraction. Though they believe the upper heavens to be inhabited by _Ishtohoollo Aba_, and a great multitude of inferior good spirits; yet they are firmly persuaded that the divine omnipresent Spirit of fire and light resides on earth, in their annual sacred fire while it is unpolluted; and that he kindly accepts their lawful offerings, if their own conduct is agreeable to the old divine law, which was delivered to their forefathers. The former notion of the Deity, is agreeable to those natural images, with which the divine penmen, through all the prophetic writings, have drawn YOHEWAH ELOHIM. When God was pleased with Aaron’s priesthood and offerings, the holy fire descended and consumed the burnt-offering on the altar, &c. By the divine records of the Hebrews, this was the emblematical token of the divine presence; and the smoke of the victim ascending toward heaven, is represented as a sweet savour to God. The people who have lived so long apart from the rest of mankind, are not to be wondered at, if they have forgotten the end and meaning of the sacrifice; and are rather to be pitied for seeming to believe, like the ignorant part of the Israelites, that the virtue is either in the form of offering the sacrifice, or in the divinity they imagine to reside on earth in the sacred annual fire; likewise, for seeming to have forgotten that the virtue was in the thing typified.