From these things I began to instruct him in the knowledge of the true God. I told him, that the great Maker of all things lived there, pointing up towards heaven; that he governs the world by the same power and providence by which he made it; that he was omnipotent, could do every thing for us, give every thing to us, take every thing from us; and thus, by degrees, I opened his eyes. He listened with great attention, and received with pleasure the notion of Jesus Christ being sent to redeem us, and of the manner of making our prayers to God, and his being able to hear us even in heaven; he told me one day, that if our God could hear us up beyond the sun, he must needs be a greater God than their Benamuckee, who lived but a little way off, and yet could not hear, till they went up to the great mountains, where he dwelt, to speak to him. I 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 Oowookakee; that is, as I made him explain it 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 among the most blinded ignorant Pagans in the world; and the policy of making a secret of religion, in order to preserve the veneration of the people to the clergy, is to be found 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 strategems 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 own 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 directing 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.
I had been talking a great deal to him of the power of God, his omnipotence, his dreadful aversion to sin, his being a consuming fire to the workers of iniquity; how, as he had made us all, he could destroy us, and all the world, in a moment; and he listened with great seriousness to me all the while. After this, I had been telling him how the devil was God’s enemy in the hearts of men, and used all his malice and skill to defeat the good designs of Providence, and to ruin the kingdom of Christ in the world, and the like. “Well,” says Friday, “but you say God is so strong, so great, is he not much strong, much might as the devil?” “Yes, yes,” said I, “Friday, God is stronger than the devil; God is above the devil; and therefore we pray to God to tread him under our feet, and enable us to resist his temptations, and quench his fiery darts.” “But,” says he again, “if God much strong, much might, as the devil, why God not kill the devil, so make him no more wicked?”