in wild Animals of various kinds; with more food at their command than many years could consume, and the prospect of their provision multiplying rather than diminishing; numberless will have been the modifications of character which they assumed, and incalculable the distance--I mean in manners and in thoughts-from which families and tribes will have receeded from one another. And yet these wandering tribes of Indians, spreading during the space of two thousand years, over an extent of country ninety degrees in length with a proportionate spread, have preserved so many essential parts of an original plan of divine worship, and so many primitive doctrines, as to satisfy enquirers, that they have descended from one family, and to point us with a sufficient clearness to that family; while yet they have almost, and in some parts wholly, forgotten their meaning and their

end.

It has been no uncommon thing for ignorant people to charge them with being idolaters; the occasion of which charge is well explained. Good men, from a want of the knowledge of their language, and from an intimacy with the most worthless of them, residing near the European settlements, without making any allowance for situation and circumstances, have given terrific accounts of these children of nature. Some zealous and pious men, deeply affected with a sense of what they considered their unhappy state, have gone into the woods to them, to preach the Gospel, without a preparatory education for so important an undertaking; without understanding their language well, and knowing their customs, habits and prejudices.

Among some of these people it has been said there was a talk of many Gods; yet to this was added the declaration, that there is one great and good God, who is over all the rest: by the many gods may be meant the lesser spirits or angels, in which they all believe.

To persons so ignorant of what they ought first to have known, and trusting to a heathen interpreter who was unable to feel or express the nature of spiritual things, and having to deal with a jealous and artful people, rendered so by a suffering experience of more than a century, by imposition and oppression, what may we imagine would happen, but that they should be despised by the Indians, and then made a butt of to laugh at and to frighten. They have dressed themselves, for the sake of a frolic, in a terrific manner, and made frightful images, with extravagant emblems about them, to alarm the weak minds of the white people of whom they thought but lightly.

It is a well known fact that a preacher of this insignificant class went among them before the revolutionary war, and in his discourse began to tell them; "that there is a God who created all things; that it is exceedingly sinful and offensive to him, to get drunk, or lie or steal :" which they should carefully avoid." They answered him. "Go about your business, you fool! Do not we know there is a God as well as you! Go to your own people and preach to them; for who gets drunk, and lies and steals more than you, white people?" Indeed, if the Indians form their ideas of us from the common traders and land speculators, and common people, with whom alone they associate, they will not run into a greater error than the

Europeans do, when they form their ideas of the character of Indians, from those that keep about the settlements and traffic with the frontier inhabitants.

Respectable as the character of Robertson is generally as a historian, he appears to have been deceived by the Spanish Writers to whom he trusted, though not implicitly. In his account of the Mexican religion there is much truth, mixed, as it appears from more recent investigation, with much error.

"Among the Mexicans religion was formed into a regular system, with a complete train of priests, temples, victims and festivals. From the genius of their religion we may form a just conclusion with respect to its influence on the character of the people. The aspect of superstition was with them gloomy and attrocious; its divinities clothed with terror and delighting in vengeance: they were exhibited under detestable forms which created horror. The figures of serpents, vipers, and other destructive animals decorated their temples: fear was the only principle which inspired their votaries; fasts, mortifications and penance were employed to appease the wrath of their Gods, and the Mexicans never approached their altars but with blood sprinkled upon them from their own bodies. Human sacrifices were deemed most acceptable; every captive in war was devoted as a victim, and sacrificed with rites no less solemn than cruel. The head and the heart were the portions consecrated to the Gods: the warriors who had made the prisoners, carried off the bodies to feast upon them with their friends. The Spirit of the Mexicans was therefore unfeeling, and the genius of their reli

gion so far counteracted the influence of policy and the arts, that, notwithstanding their progress in both, their manners, instead of softening, became more fierce.”

"In Peru, the whole system of civil policy is founded on religion. The Inca is not only a legislator but the messenger of heaven: his precepts are not received as the injunctions of a superior but as the mandates of a God : his race is held sacred and not intermixed with mean. blood: he is the child of the Sun, and is deemed under the protection of the deity from whom he descended: his power is absolute, and all crimes committed against him are violations of heaven's decrees. The genius of religion was with the Peruvians quite opposite to that of the Mexicans. The Sun, the great source of light and joy and fertility in the creation, attracted their principal homage; the moon and stars, co-operating, were entitled to secondary honours." So the commands of Moses were those of God.

"There were no imaginary beings in Peru presiding over nature to occasion gloom; but real objects, mild and generous, made their religion gentle and kind. They offered to the sun part of those productions which his genial warmth had called forth from the bosom of the earth and reared to maturity. These people never stained their altars with human blood, but were formed to mildness by correcting all that is adverse to gentleness of character." Here is a thread of Persian theology woven into the theocracy of Israel. As their ancestors caught the Egyptian distemper, which burst out in the golden calf; so a tribe or family of the Israelites blended the Persian fire in their worship.

The Indians are filled with a spiritual pride, especially their chief and best men. They consider themselves under a theocracy, and that the Great Spirit whom they worship is in an especial manner their governor and head. They pay their worship, as Mr. Adair assures us, and he had the best opportunity of knowing, to the Great, Beneficent, Supreme, Holy Spirit of Fire, who resides above the clouds, and on earth with unpolluted, holy people. Spanish writers on their first arrival among them declared, that in Mexico they paid adoration to images or dead persons, or to the celestial luminaries or to evil Spirits ; but Adair assures us, that the charge is totally false, although it may not have appeared to them altogether groundless.

Some

Their religious ceremonies approach much nearer to the Mosaic than to Pagan institutions, but it is easy for observers to be deceived in these. Mistakes, and they very great, have arisen from the difficulty of a stranger obtaining correct information from a people who are jealous of the object of his enquiry, and extremely secret in performing their religious duties; and from the well known mischievous designs or avaricious views of strangers. A man who becomes a historian, if he be of a narrow mind and contracted view of things, delights in the marvellous, and makes up strange stories to answer private purposes or cover base designs: which has been fully exemplified in the false and base accounts which have been published by Spaniards of the inhabitants of Mexico.

Adair assures us, that from the experience of fortyyears he can say, that none of the many nations from