As long as I kept my daily tour to the hill, to look out, so long
also I kept up the vigour of my design, and my spirits seemed to be
all the while in a suitable frame for so outrageous an execution as
the killing twenty or thirty naked savages, for an offence which I
had not at all entered into any discussion of in my thoughts, any
farther than my passions were at first fired by the horror I
conceived at the unnatural custom of the people of that country,
who, it seems, had been suffered by Providence, in His wise
disposition 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 by Heaven, and actuated 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 I began, with cooler and calmer thoughts, to consider
what I was going to engage in; what authority or call I had to
pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals,
whom Heaven had thought fit for so many ages to suffer unpunished
to go on, and to be as it were the executioners of His judgments
one upon another; how far these people were offenders against me,
and what right I had to engage in the quarrel of that blood which
they shed promiscuously upon one another.
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