It is said the Indian was cruel to the captive, and inflicted unspeakable tortures upon his enemy taken in battle. But, from what we know of them, it is not to be inferred that Indian chiefs were ever guilty of filling dungeons with innocent victims, or slaughtering hundreds and thousands of their own people, whose only sin was a quiet dissent from some religious dogma. Towards their enemies they were often relentless, and they had good reason to look upon white men as their enemies. They slew them in battle, plotted against them secretly, and in a few instances—few comparatively—subjected individuals to torture, burnt them at the stake, and, perhaps, flayed them alive. But who knows any thing of the precepts and practice of Roman Catholic Christendom, and quotes these things as proofs of unmitigated barbarity? At the very time that Indians were using the tomahawk and scalping-knife to avenge their wrongs, peaceful citizens in every country in Europe, where the Pope was the man of authority, were incarcerated for no crime whatever, and such refinements of torture invented and practised as it never entered in the heart of the fiercest Indian warrior that roamed the wilderness, to inflict upon man or beast. We know very little of the secrets of the Inquisition, and this little chills our blood with horror; yet these things were done in the name of Christ, the Saviour of the world—the Prince of Peace; and not savage, but civilized, Christian men looked on, not coldly, but rejoicingly, while women and children writhed in flames and weltered in blood! Were the atrocities, committed in the Vale of Wyoming and Cherry Valley unprecedented among the Waldensian fastnesses and the mountains of Auvergne? Who has read Fox’s Book of Martyrs and found any thing to parallel it in all the records of Indian warfare? The slaughter of St. Bartholomew’s day, the destruction of the Jews in Spain, and the Scotch Covenanters, were in obedience to the mandates of Christian princes, aye, and some of them devised by Christian women, who professed to be serving God, and to make the Bible the man of their counsel. It is said also the Indian was treacherous, and in compliance with the conditions of no treaty was ever to be trusted. But our Puritan fathers cannot be wholly exonerated from the charge of faithlessness; and who does not blush to talk of Indian traitors when he remembers the Spanish invasion and the fall of the princely and magnanimous Montezuma? “Indians believed in witches and burned them too!” Did not the sainted Baxter, with the Bible in his hand, pronounce it right? and was not the Indian permitted to be present, when a quiet, unoffending woman was cast into the fire by the decree of a Puritan council?