reached from the sands of Cape Cod to the rocky hillsides of Brookfield.  But he soon found that single-handed he could achieve but little over so wide an area, and accordingly he adopted the policy of colonizing his converts in village communities near the English towns, where they might be sequestered from their heathen brethren and subjected to none but Christian influences.  In these communities he hoped to train up native missionaries who might thence go and labour among the wild tribes until the whole lump of barbarism should be leavened.  In pursuance of this scheme a stockaded village was built at Natick in 1651 Under the direction of an English carpenter the Indians built log-houses for themselves, and most of them adopted the English dress.  Their simple government was administered by tithing-men, or “rulers of tens,” chosen after methods prescribed in the book of Exodus.  Other such communities were formed in the neighbourhoods of Concord and Grafton.  By 1674 the number of these “praying Indians,” as they were called, was estimated at 4000, of whom about 1500 were in Eliot’s villages, as many more in Martha’s Vineyard, 300 in Nantucket, and 700 in the Plymouth colony.  There seems to be no doubt that these Indians were really benefited both materially and morally by the change in their life.  In theology it is not likely that they reached any higher view than that expressed by the Connecticut sachem Wequash who “seeing and beholding the mighty power of God in the English forces, how they fell upon the Pequots, ... from that time was convinced and persuaded that our God was a most dreadful God;” accordingly, says the author of “New England’s First Fruits,” “he became thoroughly reformed according to his light.”  Matters of outward observance, too, the Indians could understand; for we read of one of them rebuking an Englishman “for profaning the Lord’s Day by felling of a tree.”  The Indian’s notions of religion were probably confined within this narrow compass; the notions of some people that call themselves civilized perhaps do not extend much further. [Sidenote:  Villages of Christian Indians]

From such facts as those above cited we may infer that the early relations of the Puritan settlers to the Algonquin tribes of New England were by no means like the relations between white men and red men in recent times on our western plains.  During Philip’s War, as we shall see, the Puritan theory of the situation was entirely changed and our forefathers began to act in accordance with the frontiersman’s doctrine that the good Indians are dead Indians.  But down to that time it is clear that his intention was to deal honourably and gently with his tawny neighbour.  We sometimes hear the justice and kindness of the Quakers in Pennsylvania alleged as an adequate reason for the success with which they kept clear of an Indian war.  This explanation, however, does not seem to be adequate; it does not appear that, on the whole, the Puritans were less just and kind than the Quakers