It does not seem doubtful but that the work done by Fathers Ortega and Filds[53] had borne some fruit. Perhaps not quite after the fashion that the Jesuits believed; but when Maceta and Cataldino arrived at Guayrá and founded the Reduction of Loreto, their success at first was of a nature that almost justified the epithet ‘miraculous’, an epithet which indeed all men apply to any enterprise of theirs which meets success. Almost from the first inception of the missions, the Jesuits found themselves in the strange position of, though being hated by the Spanish settlers, yet recurred to as mediators when any of the wild tribes proved too powerful for the Spanish arms. Thus, far from cities, far from even such elementary civilization as Paraguay should show, almost upon the edge of the great cataract of the Paraná, the Jesuits founded their first reduction; to which the Indians flocked in such numbers that a second was soon necessary, to which they gave the name of San Ignacio, in memory of the founder of their rule. For the first few years all went well with the Jesuits. The Indians, happy to escape the persecutions of the Spaniards on the one hand, and the incursions of the Paulistas[54] on the other, flocked to the reductions, mission after mission was soon formed, and the wild Indians gathered up into townships and taught the arts of peace. But though the Guaranís at first entered into the Jesuit reductions as a refuge against their persecutors, the Portuguese and Spaniards, soon, as was only natural to men accustomed to a wild forest life, they found the Jesuit discipline too irksome, and often fled back to the woods. Then the poor priest, left without his flock, had to take up the trail of the flying neophytes, follow them to the recesses of the forests, and persuade them to come back. As a means to secure the confidence of the Indians, the Jesuits found themselves obliged to communicate as rarely as possible with the Spanish settlements. Thus, from the first the policy of isolation, which was one of the chief charges brought against the Order in later years, was of necessity begun.[55] Voltaire, no lover of religious Orders, says of the Jesuits:[56] ‘When in 1768 the missions of Paraguay left the hands of the Jesuits, they had arrived at perhaps the highest degree of civilization to which it is possible to conduct a young people, and certainly at a far superior state than that which existed in the rest of the new hemisphere. The laws were respected there, morals were pure, a happy brotherhood united every heart, all the useful arts were in a flourishing state, and even some of the more agreeable sciences; plenty was universal.’