Those hapless, harmless folk, as innocent of God and devil, right and wrong, and all the other things which by all rights they should have known, as they are said to be implanted in the mind of man, no matter what his state, seem to have lived quite happily in their involuntary sin.[248] But Dobrizhoffer, in his simple faith and zeal for what he thought was right, wept bitter tears when he thought upon their unregenerate state.
A sycophantic Guaraní from the reductions then took up his parable, and said: ‘God save ye, brothers; we are come to visit you as friends. This father-priest is God’s own minister, and comes to visit you, and pray for your estate.’ An aged Indian interrupted him, saying he did not want a father-priest, and that St. Thomas in the past had prayed sufficiently, as fruits of every sort abounded in the land. The Indian, in his unsophisticated way, seems to have thought the presence of a priest acted but as manure on the ground where he abode; but the Jesuit, almost as simple-minded as himself, took it in kindliness, and journeyed with the Indian to a large village about three days away. Arrived there, all the inhabitants of the place sat in a circle round the missionary. They appeared (he says) in so much modesty and silence ‘that I seemed to behold statues, and not live Indians.’ To awaken their attention he played upon the viol d’amore, and, having thus captured their ears, began to preach to them. The good priest probably believed all that he said, for, after dwelling on the perils of the road, he said: ‘My friends, my errand is to make you happy.’ It did not seem to him that their free life in woods, in which abounded maize, fruits, and tobacco, with game of every kind, could possibly have induced content. Content, as Christians know, comes but with faith, and a true knowledge of the dogma is above liberty. Kindly, but muddle-headedly, he deplored their lot, their want of clothes, their want of interest in their God, their lack of knowledge of that God’s commands. Then, coming to the point, he spoke of hell, and told the astonished Indians that it was quite impossible for them to avoid its flames, unless, taught by a priest, they came to know God’s law. He then briefly (as he says) explained the mysteries of our faith. They listened rapt, except that ‘the boys laughed a little’ when he spoke of hell.[249] Nothing more painful than to see a child laughing unconscious of its peril in the traffic of a crowded street, and we may well believe that the kind-hearted Dobrizhoffer shuddered at the laughter of these children when he reflected that had he taken the wrong path, crossing the marshes or in the woods, the laughers had been damned. Much more he said to them after exhausting hell, and, to ‘add weight’ to his oration, presented each of them with scissors, knives, glass beads, axes, small looking-glasses, and fishing-hooks, for he knew well that sermons which end in ‘give me’ have but a small effect.
He says himself quite frankly, ‘I seemed to have borne down all before me because I had mingled my oration with a copious largess.’[250] Glass beads and looking-glasses have from the time when the first Christian missionary preached to the Indians been potent factors in conversion, and still to-day do yeoman service in the great work of bringing souls to God.
Seated around the fire ‘smoking tobacco through a reed’, and pondering perchance over the mysteries of the new expounded faith, the cacique of the Itatines took up his parable.
‘I have’ (said he) ‘conceived an affection for the father-priest, and hope to enjoy his company throughout my life. My daughter is the prettiest girl in the whole world, and I am now resolved to give her to the father-priest, that he may always stay with me, and with my family, here in the woods.’
The Indians from the missions broke into laughter, after the fashion of all those who, knowing but a little, think that they are wise. The cacique, who knew nothing, was astounded that any man, no matter what his calling, could live without a wife, and asked the Jesuit if the strange thing was true. His doubts being satisfied, they fell discoursing on the nature of the Deity, a subject not easy of exhaustion, and difficult to treat of through the medium of an interpreter. ‘We know’ (the cacique said) ‘that there is someone who dwells in heaven.’ This vagueness put the missionary upon his mettle, and he set out at once to expatiate upon the attributes of God. They seemed to please the cacique, who inquired, ‘What is it that displeases, then, the dweller in the skies?’
Lies, calumnies, adulteries, thefts, all were enumerated, and received the Indian’s assent; but the injunction not to kill provoked a bystander to ask if it was not permitted to a man to slay those who attacked his life. He added, ‘I have endeavoured so to do since the first day I carried arms.’
‘Fanatical casuist’ is a stout argument in the mouth of a man nurtured upon Suarez and Molina, but no doubt it did good service, and Dobrizhoffer uses it when speaking of the chief. But Dobrizhoffer did better work than mere theological disputation, for he prevailed upon eighteen of the Indians to accompany him to the settlement of San Joaquin; and after having ‘for some months tried the constancy’ of a youth called Arapotiyu, he admitted him to the sacrament of baptism, and ‘not long afterwards united him in marriage according to the Christian rites.’ It is evident that baptism should precede marriage; but it is an open question as to the duration of the interval between the two ceremonies, and we may be permitted to wonder whether, after all, both might not be advantageously dispensed at the same time. In the case of Arapotiyu the system worked satisfactorily, for he ‘surpassed in every kind of virtue, and might have been taken for an old disciple of Christianity.’ Even ‘old Christians’ occasionally, despite their more laborious induction into the rites and customs of their faith, have fallen from grace, perhaps from the undue prolongation of the term between the ceremonies.
In the case of another youth (one Gato) things did not go so smoothly, for though he, too, by his conduct obtained both baptism and Christian wedlock, Dobrizhoffer adds without comment, ‘not many months after he died of a slow disease.’[251] The slow disease was not improbably the nostalgia of the woods, from which the efforts of the good missionary had so successfully withdrawn him.
The labours of the Jesuits in the three isolated missions in the north of Paraguay[252] seem to have been as successful as those in the Chaco were unfortunate. In dealing with the wild equestrian tribes of the Gran Chaco, the system of the Jesuits was not so likely to achieve success as amongst the peaceful Guaranís. That of the Spanish settlers was entirely ineffectual, and has remained so down to the present day, when still the shattered remnants of the Lules, Lenguas, Mocobios, and the rest, roam on their horses or in their canoes about the Chaco and its rivers, having received no other benefits from contact with the European races but gunpowder and gin.