still many who in youth had listened to the awful news from Magdeburg or turned pale over the horrors in Piedmont upon which Milton invoked the wrath of Heaven. [Sidenote: Growth of humane sentiment in recent times] When civilized men are removed from the safeguards of civilization and placed in the wilderness amid the hideous dangers that beset human existence in a savage state of society, whatever barbarism lies latent in them is likely to find many opportunities for showing itself. The feelings that stir the meekest of men, as he stands among the smouldering embers of his homestead and gazes upon the mangled bodies of wife and children, are feelings that he shares with the most bloodthirsty savage, and the primary effect of his higher intelligence and greater sensitiveness is only to increase their bitterness. The neighbour who hears the dreadful story is quick to feel likewise, for the same thing may happen to him, and there is nothing so pitiless as fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage passions seemed to find justification in the sacred text from which he drew his rules of life. To suppose that one part of the Bible could be less authoritative than another would have been to him an incomprehensible heresy; and bound between the same covers that included the Sermon on the Mount were tales of wholesale massacre perpetrated by God's command. Evidently the red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but rather Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of hell, demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were completely callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted upon Indians, and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who did not risk their own persons were more truculent in tone than the professional fighters. Of the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest toward the Indian is the doughty Captain Church, while none is more bitter and cynical than the Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [Sidenote: Warfare with savages likely to be truculent in character]