“The religion of Porto Rico, Jamaica, and Hispaniola, was the same as that of Cuba; for the inhabitants were of the same race, and spoke the same language. The Caribbean Islands, on the other hand, were inhabited by a very fierce and savage people who were continually at war with the milder natives of Cuba and Hispaniola, and were regarded by them with the utmost terror and abhorence. Yet ‘the Charaibeans,’ to use the language of the elegant historian of the West Indies, ‘while they entertained an awful sense of the one great Universal Cause, of a superior, wise, and invisible Being of absolute and irresistible power, admitted also the agency of subordinate divinities. They supposed that each individual person had his peculiar protector, or tutelar deity; and they had their laws and penalties, gods of their own creating.’ Hughes, in his history of Barbadoes, mentions many fragments of Indian idols, dug up in that island, which were composed of the same materials as their earthen vessels. ‘I saw the head of one,’ says he, ‘which alone weighed above sixty pounds. This, before it was broken off, stood upon an oval pedestal, about three feet in height. The heads of all the others were very small. These lesser idols were, in all probability, made small for the ease and conveniency of being carried with them in their several journeys, as the larger sort were perhaps designed for the stated places of worship.’”[41] “Thus, in this vast extent of country, from Hudson’s Bay, to the West Indies, including nations whose languages are radically different, nations unconnected with, and unknown to, each other, the greatest uniformity of belief prevails, with regard to the supreme Being, and the greatest harmony in their system of polytheism. After this view, it is impossible not to remark, that there is a similar departure from the original religion among the Indians of America, as among the more civilized nations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The idea of the Divine Unity is much more perfectly preserved; the subordinate divinities are kept at a much more immeasurable distance from the Great Spirit; and, above all, there has been no attempt among them to degrade to the likeness of men the invisible and incomprehensible Creator of the universe. In fact, theirs is exactly that milder form of idolatry which ‘prevailed everywhere from the days of Abraham, his single family excepted,’ and which, after the death of that patriarch and of his son Isaac, infected, from time to time, even the chosen family itself.”[42] “The belief of a future state of rewards and punishments, has been kept alive among all heathen nations, by its connection with the sensible enjoyments and sufferings, and the consequent hopes and terror of men.