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Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia, a non-fiction book by Samuel G. Goodrich |
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_ I have now told you all that my present limits will admit, of those interesting portions of the globe, called America and Australia, and I wish you to read again all that I have said, and I wish you also to view the inhuman conduct of the first discoverers of the former with proper feelings of aversion. If you have read an account of William Penn's first colony of Pennsylvania, you will see that his was the only just way of establishing himself among the Indians. You must rejoice within yourselves on this occasion, that they were not Englishmen who practised these acts of cruelty and treachery towards the unoffending Mexicans and Peruvians. The workings of Providence are full of mystery, and I cannot help thinking that the state of anarchy and civil war in which Spain and Portugal are now and ever have been engaged, is an act of retribution awarded to their barbarity in the great scheme of God's providence. It makes one blush for the sake of Christianity, to think that the perpetrators of the outrages upon the original possessors of the Americas were persons professing that sublime religion,--and that in the midst of their slaughter and plunder, they impiously held forth the cross of Christ. The confiding but dignified nature of the idolatrous Mexicans, did much more honour to the purity of the Christian religion than did the base treachery of their invaders, who professed Christ but knew him not. Had they by mildness, perseverance, and reason convinced the inhabitants of the truth of the Christian religion, they might have become faithful converts, but it was unreasonable to expect that they should cast off the religion which their forefathers had professed, for a religion which they knew not at all, and the professors of which came with the sword to deprive them of their lives and their property. I wish you, my young friends, to weigh all these circumstances whenever you read. It will impress the different subjects more thoroughly upon your memory; and if your minds be properly constituted, it will cultivate the good and eradicate the bad. I will again ask you to read this book a second time, and refer occasionally to the maps. And now good-bye! [THE END] _ |
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