am Penn. Could this be due to the Quaker faith in
the sufficiency of "the Light that lighteneth every man that cometh into
the world"?

The type of theology and method of instruction used by some of the
earliest laborers in this field left something to be desired in point of
adaptedness to the savage mind. Without irreverence to the great name of
Jonathan Edwards, there is room for doubt whether he was just the man
for the Stockbridge Indians. In the case of the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of
Branford, in New Haven Colony, afterward founder of Newark, we have an
illustration both of his good intentions and of his methods, which were
not so good, in "_Some Helps for the Indians: Shewing them how to
Improve their Natural Reason, to Know the True God and the Christian
Religion_." This catechism is printed in the Indian language with an
English version interlined.

"_Q._ How do you prove that there is but one true God?

"_An._ Because the reason why singular things of the same kind are
multiplied is not to be found in the nature of God; for the reason why
such like things are multiplied is from the fruitfulness of their
causes: but God hath no cause of his being, but is of himself. Therefore
he is one." (And so on through _secondly_ and _thirdly_.)

_Per contra_, a sermon to the Stockbridge Indians by the most ponderous
of the metaphysical preachers of New England, Samuel Hopkins, is
beautifully simple and childlike. It is given in full in Park's "Life of
Hopkins," pp. 46-49.

[151:1] McConnell, "History of the American Episcopal Church," p. 7. The
statement calls for qualification in detail, but the general fact is
unmistakable.

[153:1] H. C. Lodge, "English Colonies," p. 67 _et seq._

CHAPTER XI.

THE GREAT AWAKENING

It was not wholly dark in American Christendom before the dawn of the
Great Awakening. The censoriousness which was the besetting sin of the
evangelists in that great religious movement, the rhetorical temptation
to glorify the revival by intensifying the contrast with the antecedent
condition, and the exaggerated _revivalism_ ever since so prevalent in
the American church,--the tendency to consider religion as consisting
mainly in scenes and periods of special fervor, and the intervals
between as so much void space and waste time,--all these have combined
to deepen the dark tints in which the former state is set before us in
history.

The power of godliness was manifest in the earlier days b