Luis Oliveira more or less friendly, but as usual fearful of giving offence to those who had a vested interest in the trade. Then the two Jesuits, hearing that another invasion of the Paulistas was expected in Guayrá, started back on their long journey through the woods, over the plains, across the mountain ranges, and through the dank _esteros_ which lay between them and their missions on the Paraná. The Captain-General seems to have been roused to a sense of the position by their words, for on his annual visitation at San Paulo he spoke in public to the colonists against their slave raids, when a shot fired from the meeting ended his speech.[70] The inhabitants then signified to him that, sooner than give up what seemed to them a justifiable and honest means of life, they would be debaptized. How they proposed to debaptize themselves is not related, but perhaps after the fashion of the Guaranís—by sand, hot water, and scraping with a shell; though why the tongue should be thus scarified seems doubtful, for no sect of Christians that is known exacts that people at that sacrament should put out their tongues, and even baptism does little or nothing to increase the power of scandal inherent both in those who have been and those who never were baptized. About this time (1630) the poor Jesuits were much tormented by the return to paganism of their Indians, and most especially by a hideous dwarf who set himself up as a god, and found a host of worshippers. Good Father Charlevoix thinks that _ce petit-monstre_,[71] despairing of being thought a man, had no resource but to give out he was a god, and remarks that, as even more hideous gods have been adored, it is not surprising that the Indians took him at his word. When stripped of the somewhat strange phraseology of the simple Jesuit, there is nothing really shocking in the incident. People in general, in making gods, endue them with their own least admirable attributes, and logically these poor Indians but followed out the general scheme.