Note 150:1 — Chapter X
Reading edition
It is a curious exception, if it is indeed an exception, that the one Christian colony that shows no record of early Indian missions should be that of William Penn. Could this be due to the Quaker faith in the sufficiency of "the Light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world"?
The type of theology and method of instruction used by some of the earliest laborers in this field left something to be desired in point of adaptedness to the savage mind. Without irreverence to the great name of Jonathan Edwards, there is room for doubt whether he was just the man for the Stockbridge Indians. In the case of the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of Branford, in New Haven Colony, afterward founder of Newark, we have an illustration both of his good intentions and of his methods, which were not so good, in "Some Helps for the Indians: Shewing them how to Improve their Natural Reason, to Know the True God and the Christian Religion." This catechism is printed in the Indian language with an English version interlined.
"Q. How do you prove that there is but one true God?
"An. Because the reason why singular things of the same kind are multiplied is not to be found in the nature of God; for the reason why such like things are multiplied is from the fruitfulness of their causes: but God hath no cause of his being, but is of himself. Therefore he is one." (And so on through secondly and thirdly.)
Per contra, a sermon to the Stockbridge Indians by the most ponderous of the metaphysical preachers of New England, Samuel Hopkins, is beautifully simple and childlike. It is given in full in Park's "Life of Hopkins," pp. 46-49.