Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/60

 labourers. A curious report, alluded to at the time by most Jesuitical and anti-Jesuit writers, and ill-temperedly noticed by Southey, spread far and wide—namely, that the Fathers were compelled to arouse their flocks somewhat before the working hours, and to insist upon their not preferring Morpheus to Venus, and thus neglecting the duty of begetting souls to be saved. I have found the tradition still lingering amongst the modern Paraguayans. Everything, pleasures as well as labours, meals and prayers, was regulated and organized by the Fathers. The saint's day was duly celebrated with feasting, dancing, drinking, tournaments, bull-baiting, and cock-fighting; in the simple, childish Indian brain religion consisted of fêtes and processions. The ceremonies of worship and even the mode of entering church were made matters of etiquette. The Fathers wore their golden copes; the children, robed in white, swung their censers, and the faithful paced in complacent ranks with measured steps under the perfumed shade of their orange groves. The description reads like a scene of piping and fiddling in a play. Dress was regulated—the women wore petticoats and armless chemises girt at the waist, with hair plaited into one or two tails and adorned with a crimson flower; the men were clad in ponchos and drawers; both sexes looked like big babies, and they went barefoot, still the fashion of middle and lower class Paraguay.

Education in the Missions was, in the seventeenth century, what the Republic has preserved in the nineteenth. The Jesuits, whose university was at Córdoba in the modern province of Santa F, had their own printing-presses in the Reductions; they were diligent students of the barbarous native dialects, which they soon advanced by means of grammars and vocabularies to the rank of semi-civilized tongues; they did the thinking for their converts, but they