oldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it would be untrue, to charge
upon their religion the grievous actions of men who called themselves
the armed missionaries of Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and
bishops were the loudest in the indignation with which they denounced
them. But we are obliged to charge upon it that slow and subtle
influence so inevitably exercised by any religion which is divorced from
life, and converted into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or
system--which could permit the same men to be extravagant in a sincere
devotion to the Queen of Heaven, whose entire lower nature, unsubdued
and unaffected, was given up to thirst of gold, and plunder, and
sensuality. If religion does not make men more humane than they would be
without it, it makes them fatally less so; and it is to be feared that
the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers, which had oscillated to the other
extreme, and had again crystallised into a formal antinomian fanaticism,
reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the Spaniards had
set them their unworthy precedent. But the Elizabethan navigators, full
for the most part with large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty,
bear names untainted, as far as we know, with a single crime against the
savages of America; and the name of England was as famous in the Indian
seas as that of Spain was infamous. On the banks of the Oronoko there
was remembered for a hundred years the noble captain who had come there
from the great queen beyond the seas; and Raleigh speaks the language of
the heart of his country, when he urges the English statesmen to
colonise Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driving the white
marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the Incas to the throne of
Peru.

Who will not be persuaded (he says) that now at length the great
Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans, and lamentations,
hath seen the tears and blood of so many millions of innocent men,
women, and children, afflicted, robbed, reviled, branded with hot
irons, roasted, dismembered, mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked,
scalded with hot oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in
sport, drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by
mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed, and purposeth
to scourge and plague that cursed nation, and to take the yoke of
servitude from that distressed people, as free by nature as any
Ch