Abstract
HE English, like their French rivals, began their colonizing ventures in North America with a sincere interest in converting the Indians to Christianity and Nearly all the colonial charters granted by the English monarchs in the seventeenth century assigned the wish to extend the Christian Church and to redeem savage souls as a principal, if not the principal, motive for colonization.1 This desire was grounded in a set of complementary beliefs about savagism and civilization. First, the English held that the Indians, however benighted, were capable of conversion. It is not the nature of they believed, but the education of men, which make them barbarous and uncivill.2 Moreover, the English were confident that the Indians would want to be converted once they were exposed to the superior quality of English life. The strength of these beliefs was reflected in Cotton Mather's astonishment as late as I72I that
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