ARE SECOND THOUGHTS BEST ¢ 228

to be all the while in a suitable form for so outrageous an execu-
tion as the killing twenty or thirty naked savages, for an offence
which T had not at all entered into a discussion of in my thoughts,
any further than my passions were at first fired by the horror I
conceived at the unnatural custom of that people of the country,
who it seems had been suffered by Providence, in his wise disposi-
tion of the world, to have no other guide than that of their own
abominable and vitiated passions; and consequently were left, and
perhaps had been so for some ages, to act such horrid things, and
receive such dreadful customs, as nothing but nature entirely
abandoned of Heaven and acted by some hellish degeneracy, could
have run them into. But now, when, as I have said, I began to
be weary of the fruitless excursion which I had made so long, and
so far, every morning in vain, so my opinion of the action itself
began to alter, and [ began with cooler and calmer thoughts to
consider what it was I was going to engage in;— what autho-
rity or call [ had to pretend to be judge and executioner upon
these men as criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many
ages tu sufler unpunished, to go on, and to be, as it were, the execu-
tioners of his judgments one upon another. How far were these
people offenders against me, and what right had I to engage in the
quarrel of that blood, which they shed promiscuously one upon
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 either 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 com-
mit. hey think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in
war, than we do to kill an ox; nor to cat human flesh, than we do
to eat mutton.

When | had 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 fre-
quently, upon many occasions put whole troops of men to tha