"Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63,
translated the Bible into the Algonquin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled
a life-time for the conversion of those "salvages," "tawnies,"
"devil-worshipers," for whom our early writers have usually nothing but
bad words. They have been destroyed instead of converted; but his (so
entitled) _Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone
Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament_--the first Bible printed in
America--remains a monument of missionary zeal and a work of great
value to students of the Indian languages.

A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the history of
old New England, it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there, and
the landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is the impression which
one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's and
Winthrop's Journals, or Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_--an
impression of gloom, of flight and cold, of mysterious fears besieging
the infant settlements scattered in a narrow fringe "between the
groaning forest and the shore." The Indian terror hung over New
England for more than half a century, or until the issue of King
Philip's War, in 1670, relieved the colonists of any danger of a
general massacre. Added to this were the perplexities caused by the
earnest resolve of the settlers to keep their New-England Eden free
from the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in
religion. The Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and
conservative Puritanism. The later and more grotesque out-crops of the
movement in the old England found no toleration in the new. But these
refugees for conscience' sake were compelled in turn to persecute
Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and
later, Quakers, and still later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into their
precincts and troubled the churches with "prophesyings" and novel