376 NEW FRANCE AND NEW ENGLAND. [1690-97. 



The French missionaries are said to have made 

 nse of singular methods to excite their flocks 

 against the heretics. The Abenaki chief Bomaseen, 

 when a prisoner at Boston in 1696, declared that 

 they told the Indians that Jesus Christ was a 

 Frenchman, and his mother, the Virgin, a French 

 lady; that the English had murdered him, and 

 that the best way to gain his favor was to revenge 

 his death. 1 



Whether or not these articles of faith formed 

 a part of the teachings of Thury and his fellow- 

 apostles, there is no doubt that it was a recognized 

 part of their functions to keep their converts in 

 hostility to the English, and that their credit with 

 the civil powers depended on their success in doing 

 so. The same holds true of the priests of the mis- 

 sion villages in Canada. They avoided all that 

 might impair the warlike spirit of the neophyte, 

 and they were well aware that in savages the war- 

 like spirit is mainly dependent on native ferocity. 

 They taught temperance, conjugal fidelity, devotion 

 to the rites of their religion, and submission to the 

 priest ; but they left the savage a savage still. In 

 spite of the remonstrances of the civil authorities, 

 the mission Indian was separated as far as possible 

 from intercourse with the French, and discouraged 



1 Mather, Magnolia, II. 629. Compare Dummer, Memorial, 1709, in 

 ^[a$s. Hist. Coll., 3 Ser., I., and the same writer's Letter to a Noble Lord 

 concerning the Late Expedition to Canada, 1712. Dr. Charles T. Jackson, 

 the geologist, when engaged in the survey of Maine in 1836, mentions, as 

 an example of the simplicity of the Acadians of Madawaska, that one of 

 them asked him "if Bethlehem, where Christ was born, was not a town 

 in France." First Report on the Geology of Maine, 72. Here, perhaps, is 

 a tradition from early missionary teaching. 



