Wesley Corpus

Neither have they (whatever accounts some have given) any such thing as a regular civil government among them. They have no laws of any kind, unless a few temporary rules made in and for the time of war. They are likewise utter strangers to the arts of peace, having scarce any such thing as an artificer in a nation. They know nothing of building; having only poor, miserable, ill-contrived huts, far inferior to many English dog-kennels. Their clothing, till of late, was only skins of beasts, commonly of deer, hanging down before and behind them. Now, among those who have commerce with our nation, it is frequently a blanket wrapt about them. Their food is equally delicate, -pounded Indian corn, sometimes mixed with water, and so eaten at once; sometimes kneaded into cakes, meal and bran together, and half-baked upon the coals. Fish or flesh, dried in the sun, is frequently added to this; and now and then a piece of tough, fresh-killed deer. Such is the knowledge of the Americans, whether in things of an abstruser nature, or in the affairs of common life. And this, so far as we can learn, is the condition of all, without any considerable difference. But, in point of religion, there is a very material difference between the northern and the southern Indians: Those in the north are idolaters of the lowest kind. If they do not worship the devil appearing in person, (which many firmly believe they do, many think in credible,) certainly they worship the most vile and contempt ible idols. It were more excusable if they only “turned the glory of the incorruptible God into the image of corruptible man;” yea, or “of birds, or four-footed beasts, or reptiles,” or any creature which God has made. But their idols are more horrid and deformed than anything in the visible cre ation; and their whole worship is at once the highest affront to the divine, and disgrace to the human, nature. On the contrary, the Indians of our southern provinces do not appear to have any worship at all. By the most diligent inquiry from those who had spent many years among them, I could never learn that any of the Indian nations who border on Georgia and Carolina have any public worship of any kind, nor any private; for they have no idea of prayer.