At a funeral, on the 7th of October, 1647, a change in the usages and
prejudices of the Indians was evinced in a striking manner. The deceased
was a man of some consequence. Their custom had been to mourn much for
the dead, and to appear overcome with grief, especially when the earth
shrouded them from their sight. The departed was borne to the grave on
a light bier, and interred in a sitting posture; in his hand was placed
a calumet and some tobacco, that he might present the ensigns of peace
to the people of another world. If the corpse was that of a warrior, his
quiver full of arrows, a bow, and a hatchet, were placed by his side,
and also a little mirror, that he might see how his face looked after
passing through the region of death; and a little vermilion to take
away its extreme paleness. His was a bold hand that could at once tear
aside these loved usages, and make the dust of the warrior of no more
consequence than that of the meanest of his followers. The cemetery of
the new town was in the woods, and the procession of all the inhabitants
moved slowly beneath their shadow, in deep and solemn silence, with the
missionary at their head: no wail was heard—no wild gush of sorrow. To
estimate this sacrifice, it is necessary to recur to the Indian belief,
“that after death they should go to a very fertile country, where they
were to have many wives, and, above all, lovely places for hunting:”
often, no doubt, the shadowy chase of the bear and the stag came on the
dreams of the dying man; and afterwards, beautiful women would welcome
him, weary to his home. When the dead was laid in the grave, Eliot read
the funeral service over him, and then told the many people, that in
heaven they neither married nor were given in marriage; that the passions
of this world, the wild chase or the warrior’s joy, could never come
there; _there_ was neither chieftain nor slave; that in the love of
Christ, who was the resurrection and the life, all these things would be
lost. And they believed him—those fierce and brutal men—and wept, not
for the dead, but for themselves; “so that the woods,” says a gentleman
who was present, “rang with their sighs and prayers;” he also adds these
words,—“God was with Eliot, and the sword of his word will pierce deep,
in the hand of the mighty.” His opinion of the mental powers of this
people was not a very low one:—“There is need,” he says, in one of his
letters, “of learning, in ministers who preach to Indians, much more than
to Englishmen and gracious Christians; for these had sundry philosophical
questions, which some knowledge of the arts must help to give answer to,
and without which they would not have been satisfied. Worse than Indian
ignorance hath blinded their eyes, that renounce learning as an enemy
to gospel ministers”. So acute were many of the questions proposed by
the Indians, and so deeply expressive of a gentler and better nature,
that more than one educated stranger was induced to attend regularly the
assemblies of the missionary.