“‘And you would not remain there?’ The motion of Phillip’s head answered my question sufficiently. ‘But what induced you,’ continued I, ‘to become what you call a savage?’ “‘I don’t know,’ said he—‘instinct.’ “This expression put an end to my doubts and questions. I remained ten days with Phillip, in order to observe him, and never saw him swerve for a single moment from the assertion he had made. His soul, free from the conflict of the social passions, appeared, in the language of the Indian, calm as the field of battle, after the warriors had smoked together their calumet of peace.” How many a trapper has become wed to a forest life. I never yet heard of one who voluntarily returned to the plough and the anvil. Why, then, should we expect an Indian to seek them? The same necessity must be laid upon him as upon us, ere he will toil, and he must be inspired with the same motives, ere he will prefer knowledge to ignorance. If there had been no wars in our country, except between the colonists and the Indians, Christianity might have been taught by example as well as precept. But three times since the settlement of America, the red man has been obliged to witness, and take part in bloody conflicts, between the very nations who professed to come to him with the religion which condemned war; and these nations were fighting about the very lands which they were constantly telling the Indian it was wrong for him to defend at the expense of life, though they were his birthright, and dear to him, as the inheritance of his fathers. Their invaders fought to defend what was not their own; why should not he defend what was his all? It is strange that there have been so many, rather than that there have been so few, who were willing to receive Christianity, and the arts of civilization, from their oppressors. The proud lord of the forest never consented to become subject or slave. When he yielded, it was to stern necessity; and when we remember what he had to give up, and that when we had taken from him his possessions, and all he held most dear, giving him nothing in return, but the privilege of living as best he could, never calling him, or treating him as brother, or freeman; we cannot fail to see that he has done exactly as we should have done in the same circumstances. As it was, the labors of Eliot and Mayhew, of Kirkland and Brainard, and many more in modern times, have not been without their reward. Mayhew wrote the lives of between one and two hundred “Christian men and women, and godly ministers,” and there is exhibited no difference between Indian Christians, and Christians of other nations.