id not give proof of its sincerity. In
Virginia, the Puritans Whitaker and Thomas Dale; in Maryland, the
earliest companies of Jesuit missionaries; Campanius among the Swedish
Lutherans; Megapolensis among the Dutchmen, and the Jesuit martyr Jogues
in the forests of New York; in New England, not only John Eliot and
Roger Williams and the Mayhews, but many a village pastor like Fitch of
Norwich and Pierson of Branford, were distinguished in the first
generation by their devotion to this duty.[150:1] The succession of
faithful missionaries has never failed from that day to this. The large
expectations of the churches are indicated by the erection of one of the
earliest buildings at Harvard College for the use of Indian students. At
William and Mary College not less than seventy Indian students at one
time are said to have been gathered for an advanced education. It was no
fault of the colonial churches that these earnest and persistent efforts
yielded small results. "We discover a strange uniformity of feature in
the successive failures.... Always, just when the project seemed most
hopeful, an indiscriminate massacre of missionaries and converts
together swept the enterprise out of existence. The experience of all
was the same."[151:1]

* * * * *

It will be a matter of growing interest, as we proceed, to trace the
relation of the American church to negro slavery.

It is a curious fact, not without some later analogies, that the
introduction into the New World of this "direful spring of woes
unnumbered" was promoted, in the first instance, by the good Las Casas,
as the hopeful preventive of a worse evil. Touched by the spectacle of
whole tribes and nations of the Indians perishing under the cruel
servitude imposed upon them by the Spanish, it seemed to him a less
wrong to transfer the infliction of this injustice to shoulders more
able to bear it. But "man's inhumanity to man" needed no pretext of
philanthropy. From the landing of the Dutch ship at Jamestown in 1619,
with her small invoice of fourteen negroes, the dismal trade went on
increasing, in spite of humane protest and attempted prohibition. The
legislature of Massachusetts, which was the representative of the
church, set forth what it conceived to be the biblical ethics on the
subject. Recognizing that "lawful captives taken in just wars" may be
held in bondage, it declared among its earliest public acts, in 1641,
that, with this