superstitions, than exchanged one faith for another; they are baptized,
and even submit to what they themselves call the _yoke_ of
confession, and worship according to the outward forms of the Romish
church, the drapery of which cannot but strike minds unused to
splendor; but their belief is very little changed, except that the
women seem to pay great reverence to the Virgin, perhaps because
flattering to the sex. They anciently believed in one God, the ruler
and creator of the universe, whom they called _the Great Spirit_
and the _Master of Life_; in the sun as his image and representative;
in a multitude of inferior spirits and demons; and in a future
state of rewards and punishments, or, to use their own phrase,
in _a country of souls_. They reverenced the spirits of their
departed heroes, but it does not appear that they paid them any
religious adoration. Their morals were more pure, their manners more
simple, than those of polished nations, except in what regarded the
intercourse of the sexes: the young women before marriage were indulged
in great libertinism, hid however under the most reserved and decent
exterior. They held adultery in abhorrence, and with the more reason
as their marriages were dissolvable at pleasure. The missionaries are
said to have found no difficulty so great in gaining them to
Christianity, as that of persuading them to marry for life: they
regarded the Christian system of marriage as contrary to the laws of
nature and reason; and asserted that, as the _Great Spirit_ formed
us to be happy, it was opposing his will, to continue together when
otherwise.

The sex we have so unjustly excluded from power in Europe have a
great share in the Huron government; the chief is chose by the matrons
from amongst the nearest male relations, by the female line, of him he
is to succeed; and is generally an aunt's or sister's son; a custom