The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Topic 2

Life in America during the 1600s was far from easy; in fact, each day was filled with many dangers one can hardly imagine in this day and age. Not only did the British people have to adapt to a new, freshly discovered and hardly understood land still—for the most part—unmolested by human progress, they were moving to a land filled with a people whose culture was very different, and seemingly barbaric. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, a narrative by Mary Rowlandson, tells of a very frightening time for the colonists, and gives an account of what it was like to live among the natives.
For years, since the colonists had first arrived in the new land, the colonists and the Native Americans had been living in a mostly peaceful relationship. This was also true in Lancaster, Massachusetts. But as the Lancaster colonists took more and more land, and tried converting more Native Americans to their Puritan religion, the Natives became more fearful of their culture being stolen as well as their land. This growing fear eventually led to “King Phillip’s War,” which was a collection of raids by the Natives, and the fights between the Natives and the colonists.
This is how Rowlandson’s story comes to be. As the natives raided the colonial towns, they not only killed those they found, but they kept prisoners as well. Mary Rowlandson, the mother of three (her fourth and oldest boy died as a child), was at home in Lancaster, Massachusetts with her children on February 10, 1675. On this day, the Native Americans came into town and raided the village, leaving many dead and taking a wounded Mary Rowlandson and her children with them as prisoners. “It was a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out; yet the Lord by His almighty power preserved a number