oler and calmer thoughts, to
consider what I was going to engage in; what authority or call I had to
pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom
Heaven had thought fit, for so many ages, to suffer, unpunished, to go
on, and to be, as it were, the executioners of his judgments one upon
another. How far these people were offenders against me, and what right
I had to engage in the quarrel of that blood which they shed
promiscuously upon one another, I debated this very often with myself,
thus: How do I know what God himself judges in this particular case? It
is certain these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against
their own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them; they
do not know it to be an offence, and then commit it in defiance of
divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it
no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war, than we do to kill an
ox; nor to eat human flesh, than we do to eat mutton.

When I considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I was
certainly in the wrong in it; that these people were not murderers in
the sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more than
those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners
taken in battle; or more frequently, upon many occasions, put whole
troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they threw
down their arms and submitted. In the next place, it occurred to me,
that although the usage they gave one another was thus brutish and
inhuman, yet it was really nothing to me; these people had done me no
injury: that if they attempted me, or I saw it necessary, for my
immediate preservation, to fall upon them, something might be said for
it; but that I was yet out of their power, and they really had no
knowledge of me, and consequently no design upon me; and therefore it
could not be just for me to fall upon them: that this would justify the
conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America,
where they destroyed millions of these people: who, however they were
idolaters and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous rites in
their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were
yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting
them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and
detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all
other Ch