“The God of the Christians became for these imaginative savages the awe-inspiring _Tupan_. Satan was incarnate in the person of the terrible Anangá. Then they grasped a trinity, based upon the Catholic Trinity, and composed of the sun, the moon and Ruda, the god of love. We took part in our childhood at processions where fetich beliefs were mixed up with Christian rites. The ingenious priests who invented ceremony certainly did more than all the other preachers put together to perpetuate a semblance of the Catholic faith amongst the Indians. “When the Indians celebrated any saint’s day they erected an altar in their hut upon which they placed an image of the Saint and at its feet is placed the _Siare_. In front of the house they raise a large thatched roof. Tables are set up and everything prepared for dancing and merrymaking.” In this way were the native Indians induced to adopt at least the external forms of religion. It was not long until the majority of the aborigines became nominal adherents of the new religion. Wherever a tribe became baptized a church was erected in which to hold services, and a priest was left in charge. These priests instructed the Indians in rudimentary agriculture as well as theology, and the superiority of the educated priest over the ignorant native soon gave him a position of great vantage and influence. Power proved pleasing to the Jesuit. It was not long until the priests were really stronger than the civil authorities, and a practical theocracy sprang into existence. They fought for the freedom of the Indian. The colonists wanted to enslave these poor natives, and make them work, willingly or unwillingly, on the plantations which they themselves were too lazy to cultivate. This was strenuously resisted by the Jesuit fathers, and by the church authorities in general, and led to many hard struggles. So when we read of the early struggles between the “Paulistas” and the Jesuits, one cannot help but sympathize with the latter, for they were championing the rights of the weak. And yet their motives do not seem to have been wholly altruistic, for they eventually endeavoured to reduce the Indians to a blind obedience to their own whims and will. Though they gave him a great measure of peace, they made him a blind servant to the will of an ambitious priesthood. The colonists continued their efforts to enslave the Indians, and in the end the Jesuits were expelled for a time from several of the states.