ligion, and to endeavour all that in them lay to abate and take off the animosity and displeasure that they perceived was enkindled in some English against them; and hence it was that they were always found ready to comply cheerfully with all commands of the English authority. But such was the unhappiness of their affairs, or rather the displeasure of God in the case, that those counsels were rejected, and on the contrary a spirit of enmity and hatred conceived by many against those poor Christian Indians, as I apprehend without cause, so far as I could ever understand, which was, according to the operation of second causes, a very great occasion of many distressing calamities that befell both one and the other.
The great God who overruleth and ordereth all counsels and actions for the bringing to pass his own purpose and desire, was pleased to darken this counsel from such as had the power to put it in practice; and although there was a demonstration, near hand, in the colony of Connecticut for the benefit of such a course as was before proposed and desired, in keeping a fair correspondence with their neighbour Indians, the Mohegans and Pequods, who were not only improved by the English in all their expeditions, but were a guard to the frontiers, whereby those Indians, upon the account of their own interest (for they had no principles of Christianity to fix them to the English), proved very faithful and serviceable to the English, and under God were instrumental for the preservation of that Colony which had but one small deserted village burnt in this war,[1] and very little of their other substance destroyed by the enemy. I have often considered this matter and come to this result, in my own thoughts, that the most holy and righteous God hath overruled all counsels and affairs in this, and other things relating to this war, for such wise, just, and holy ends as these;
1st. To make a rod of the barbarous heathen to chastise and punish the English for their sins. The Lord had, as our faithful minister often declared, applied more gentle chastisements (gradually) to his New England people; but those proving in great measure ineffectual to produce effectual humiliation and reformation, hence the righteous and holy Lord is necessitated to draw forth this smarting rod of the vile and brutish heathen,
- ↑ "All the buildings in Narraganset, from Providence to Stonington, a tract of about 50 miles, were burned, or otherwise destroyed." — Trumbull, Hist. Con. I. 351, note. The place destroyed was doubtless included in this tract, but its name is not given.
