CONFERENCE II 449 or opinion, and think it is civility to leave every man to his own sentiment ; therefore they will believe, or pretend to believe, all you say. So that a man must not go to America to become a martyr for his faith. They never kill any body for -a different opinion : And when they tell you their tales of the woman and the tortoise, they reprove you of incivility if you contradict them, and say they believed all you said, and therefore you ought to believe all they say. If any manner of impressions of religion have been made upon themselves or their children, yet when the seasons of hunting come, away they go with their tribe, for many months together, and lose all that they liad learned, and make the laboursof a missionary endless and vain. At last this missionary, the author, laments and declares That this people are still so savage, that in all the many years labours that I spent among the Iroquois, besides my great expe- dition among several others of the nations, I did very little good besides one or two infants that I baptized. One among the Issati, and for want of accommodation, I did it without any cere- mony, taking one christian for the witness of the baptism, only spilling the water on the head of the little savage, saying, Crea- ture of God, I baptise thee in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, then I took half myaltar -cloth and spread over the body of the infant : A little after it died ; and I was glad, says this poor friar, it pleased God to take this little christian Out of the world ; for it is to be feared, if it had lived; it would have trod in its father's steps. I have often attributed my preserva- tion, amidst the ,greatest dangers, to the care I took for its bap- tism. Thx greatest things, he says, that missionaries can yet do, is to baptise a few infants, and dying adult persons, who de- sire it. But after all the cares and entire sacrifice of a mission- ary's life, it would bea happy recompence, if they had the glory to convert one single soul. But they must cry out, it is beyond their force, and only the Spirit of God can do it. Thus far my epitome of the religion of these North Americans. The other manuscript is an abstract of the religious affairs of the several nations of the l3ottentots, at the Cape of Good- Hope, which I took out of a very entertaining book, written ori- ginally in high German, by Peter Kolben, translated into Eng- lish, and published in the year 1731. The author was pardon- lady employed to collect the 'materials of his history, and had a long residencethere, in a Dutch settlement, for that purpose, and . often made excursions for foil information of all their affairs. The account he gives of their religion is this : They believe a supreme Being, Creator of the heaven and earth, and of every thing in them. They call him Gounja-Gounja, or the God of gods, and say he is a good man; that he does nobody anyhurt, and fromwhomnone needbe apprehensive of'any ; and that he dwells Vox.. au. F r
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