Besides, for more than a hundred years, Brazil was the constant scene of war and contention between the European powers terming themselves Christian. French, English, and Dutch, were in turn endeavouring to seize upon one part or other of it; and every description of rapine, bloodshed, and treachery which can disgrace nations pretending to any degree of civilization was going on before the eyes of the astonished natives. What notions of Christianity must the Indians have had, when these people called themselves Christians? They saw them assailing one another, fighting like madmen for what in reality belonged to none of them; burning towns, destroying sugar plantations; massacring all, native or colonist, that fell into their hands, or seizing them for slaves. They saw bishops contending with governors, priests contending with one another; they saw their beautiful country desolated from end to end (down to 1664), and every thing which is sacred to heaven or honourable or valuable to men, treated with contempt.—What was it possible for them to believe of Christianity, than that it was some devilish compact, which at once invested men with a terrible power, and with the will to wield it, for the accomplishment of the widest ruin and the profoundest misery? Through all this, under all changes, whoever were masters, or whoever were contending—the Indians experienced but one lot, slavery and ruin. Laws indeed were repeatedly enacted in Portugal on their behalf—they were repeatedly declared free—but as everywhere else, they were laughed at by the colonists, or resisted with rebellious fury. Amid this long career of violence, the only thing which the mind can repose on with any degree of pleasure, is the conduct of the Jesuits, the steady friends of justice and the Indians; and towards the latter part of this period there arrived in Maranham one of the most extraordinary men, which not only that remarkable order, but which the world has produced. This was Antonio Vieyra, a young Jesuit, who had left the favour of the king and court, and the most brilliant prospects, for the single purpose of devoting himself to the cause of the Indians. His boldness, his honesty of speech and purpose, his resolute resistance to the system of base oppression, operating through the whole mass of society around him—were perhaps equalled by his fellows; but the greatness of his talents, and the vehement splendour of his eloquence, have few equals in any age. Mr. Southey has given the substance of a sermon preached by him before the governor at St. Lewis, which so startled and moved the whole people, by the novel and fearful view in which he exhibited to them their treatment of the Indians, that with one accord they resolved to set them free.