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.