Conversion from Indian to Puritan

AT the ideological level, New England Puritan society in the seventeenth century renewed itself, not through birth as had been true for most of humanity in its earlier existence, but through rebirth experienced as religious conversion. Membership in the community of living saints was determined through an analysis of the preparation of one's soul for salvation, and not by kinship, territorial, or class relationships. What the convert experienced as an emotional transition in the construction of his or her identity was simultaneously a passage from one sphere of traditional social relationships perceived as sinful, into a new sphere perceived as saintly. Some New England clergymen, notably John Eliot of Roxbury, and Thomas Mayhew, Jr. of Martha's Vineyard, took seriously the responsibility which many Puritans felt to impart the means of salvation to the Indians they encountered in the New World. In their hands, conversion became the instrument for the total reconstitution of Indian cultures. Al-