This last summer he made that promise with you, that
he would sell no land in seven years' time, for that he would have no
English trouble him before that time. He has not forgot that you
promise him."
The apostle Eliot, in a letter to the Massachusetts government, dated
in 1684, asking that certain fraudulent purchases of the Indians might
be annulled, puts this suggestive inquiry: "Was not a principal cause
of the late war about encroachments on Philip's land at Mount Hope?"
The third disturbing cause was the desire of our ancestors to convert
the Indian chiefs and tribes to Christianity. This was a primary and
chief object of the settlement of the country. Governor Craddock, in
a letter of February, 1629, to Endicott and his Council, says: "You
will demean yourselves justly and courteously toward the Indians,
thereby to draw them to affect our persons, and consequently our
religion." And the Governor of Massachusetts colony by his oath was
required to use his "best endeavor to draw on the natives of New
England to the knowledge of the true God." The company in England also
expressed the hope that the ministers who were sent out would, by
faithful preaching, godly conversation and exemplary lives, in God's
appointed time, reduce the Indians to the obedience of the Gospel of
Christ. And there is no fact in the history of the colonists
inconsistent with an earnest purpose to accomplish so desirable a
result.
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