g embers of his homestead and gazes upon the mangled bodies
of wife and children, are feelings that he shares with the most
bloodthirsty savage, and the primary effect of his higher intelligence
and greater sensitiveness is only to increase their bitterness. The
neighbour who hears the dreadful story is quick to feel likewise, for
the same thing may happen to him, and there is nothing so pitiless as
fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage passions seemed to find
justification in the sacred text from which he drew his rules of life.
To suppose that one part of the Bible could be less authoritative than
another would have been to him an incomprehensible heresy; and bound
between the same covers that included the Sermon on the Mount were tales
of wholesale massacre perpetrated by God's command. Evidently the
red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but rather
Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of hell,
demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the
earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were
completely callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted
upon Indians, and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who
did not risk their own persons were more truculent in tone than the
professional fighters. Of the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest
toward the Indian is the doughty Captain Church, while none is more
bitter and cynical than the Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [Sidenote:
Warfare with savages likely to be truculent in character]

While the overthrow of the Narragansetts changed the face of things, it
was far from putting an end to the war. It showed that when the white
man could find his enemy he could deal crushing blows, but the Indian
was not always so easy to find. Before the end of January Winslow's
little army was partially disbanded for want of food, and its three
contingents fell back upon Stonington, Boston, and Plymouth. Early in
February the Federal Commissioners called for a new levy of 600 men to
assemble at Brookfield, for the Nipmucks were beginning to renew their
incursions, and after an interval of six months the figure of Philip
again appears for a moment upon the scene. What he had been doing, or
where he had been, since the Brookfield fight in August, was never
known. When in February, 1676, he re-appeared it was still in company
with his allies the Nipmucks, in their bloody assault upon Lanc