went thither to speak to him? He said, No;
they never went that were young men; none went thither but the old men,
whom he called their Oowokakee; that is, as I made him explain it to me,
their religious, or clergy; and that they went to say O (so he called
saying prayers,) and then came back, and told them what Benamuckee said.
By this I observed, that there is priestcraft even among the most
blinded, ignorant pagans in the world; and the policy of making a secret
of religion, in order to preserve the veneration of the people to the
clergy, is not only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps among all
religions in the world, even among the most brutish and
barbarous savages.

I endeavoured to clear up this fraud to my man Friday; and told him,
that the pretence of their old men going up to the mountains to say O to
their god Benamuckee was a cheat; and their bringing word from thence
what he said was much more so; that if they met with any answer, or
spake with any one there, it must be with an evil spirit: and then I
entered into a long discourse with him about the devil, the original of
him, his rebellion against God, his enmity to man, the reason of it, his
setting himself up in the dark parts of the world to be worshipped
instead of God, and as God, and the many stratagems he made use of to
delude mankind to their ruin; how he had a secret access to our
passions and to our affections, and to adapt his snares to our
inclinations, so as to cause us even to be our own tempters, and run
upon our destruction by our own choice.

I found it was not so easy to imprint right notions in his mind about
the devil, as it was about the being of a God: nature assisted all my
arguments to evidence to him even the necessity of a great First Cause,
and over-ruling, governing Power, a secret, directing Providence, and of
the equity and justice of paying homage to him that made us, and the
like; but there appeared nothing of this kind in the notion of an evil
spirit; of his original, his being, his nature, and, above all, of his
inclination to do evil, and to draw us in to do so too: and the poor
creature puzzled me once in such a manner, by a question merely natural
and innocent, that I scarce knew what to say to him. I had been talking
a great deal to him of the power of God, his omnipotence, his aversion
to sin, his being a consuming fire to the workers of iniquity; how, as
he had made us all, he could destroy us and all the world i