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dwelt, to speak to him. J asked him if ever he went thither to
speak to him? He said, “ No, they never went that were young
men;” none went thither but the old men, whom he called their
Oowokakee—that is, as I made him explain to me, their religious,
or clergy; and that they went to say O (so he called saying prayers),
and then came back and told them what Benamuckee said. By
this I observed that there is priestcraft even amongst the most
blinded ignorant pagans in the world; and the policy of making a
secret religion, in order to preserve the veneration of the people to
the clergy, is not only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps
among all religions in the world, even among the most brutish and
barbarous savages.

I endeavoured to clear up this fraud to my man Friday, and told
him that the pretence of their old men going up to the mountains
to say O to their god Benamuckee was a cheat, and their bringing
word from thence what he said was much more so; that if they
met with any answer, or spoke with any one there, it must be with
an evil spirit. And then I entered into a long discourse with him
about the devil—the original of him, his rebellion against God, his
enmity to man, the reason of it, his setting himself up in the dark
parts of the world to be worshipped instead of God, and as God;
and the many stratagems he made use of to delude mankind to
their ruin—how he had a secret access to our passions, and to our
affections, to adapt his snares so to our inclinations as to cause us
even to be our own tempters, and to run upon our destruction by
our own choice.

I found it was not so easy to imprint right notions in his mind
about the devil as it was about the being of a God. Nature
assisted all my arguments to evidence to him even the necessity of
a great first Cause and overruling governing Power, a secret direct-
ing Providence, and of the equity. and justice of paying homage to
him that made us, and the like. But there appeared nothing of
all this in the notion of an evil spirit, of his original, his being,
his nature, and, above all, of his inclination to do evil, and to
draw us in to do so too; and the poor creature puzzled me once
in such a manner, by a question merely natural and innocent, that
I scarce knew what to say to him. [ had been talking a great

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