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.