The
neighbour who hears the dreadful story is quick to feel likewise, for
the same thing may happen to him, and there is nothing so pitiless as
fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage passions seemed to find
justification in the sacred text from which he drew his rules of life.
To suppose that one part of the Bible could be less authoritative than
another would have been to him an incomprehensible heresy; and bound
between the same covers that included the Sermon on the Mount were tales
of wholesale massacre perpetrated by God's command. Evidently the
red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but rather
Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of hell,
demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the
earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were
completely callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted
upon Indians, and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who
did not risk their own persons were more truculent in tone than the
professional fighters. Of the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest
toward the Indian is the doughty Captain Church, while none is more
bitter and cynical than the Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [Sidenote:
Warfare with savages likely to be truculent in character]
While the overthrow of the Narragansetts changed the face of things, it
was far from putting an end to the war.
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