The African came to know Christianity, in this part of the New World, as a system of values (the Christian ideas), and as a normative structure (the Catholic Church). These two were interrelated, although frequently in conflict with other values and other structures emerging from the social system which was established as a consequence of Portuguese colonization. In his quality as slave he was integrated into an inter-relational combine which included new forms of ecologic adaptation, of economy, of inter-personal relationships and their regulation, on a rural basis, and of a slave-holding, latifundiarian and senhorial orientation.

This brief communication will try to show the attitude of the Dutch Calvinists towards the other religious groups in Portuguese America, during the period of the occupation by the Dutch West India Company of northeast Brazil, from 1630 to 1654. At the time of their greatest expansion, the Dutch controlled all the coastal region from Sergipe to Maranhão.

Liberty of conscience had been announced beforehand for all Christians and Jews of the captaincy of Pernambuco in Brazil, which that company proposed to conquer. De facto, in the “Secret Instructions to General Lonck,” commandant of the squadron which took possession of that captaincy, instructions dated Middelburg, August 18, 1629, this liberty of conscience was immediately promised, although, at the same time, it was determined that “all the Jesuits, fathers and friars and other religious must be embarked with all their baggage.” Liberty of conscience was again promised by the Dutch in a manifesto addressed in 1632 to the owners of the sugar-mills and the inhabitants of Pernambuco, and, in 1635, when at the capture of Paraíba not only was this liberty promised but also liberty of cult.

I SHOULD like to ask you gentlemen to allow me, in the very beginning, to set limits to my task. The most imposing of these limitations are my own. It would be unbecoming of me to make a tacit profession of authority on the Enlightenment in English America by discoursing on the subject. I have, moreover, never made a frontal assault on the broad field of theology in the Latin world, for I regard the subject as universal, well-known to historical theologists, and when known for Europe generally predictable for America. There is also a relation between the Enlightenment in Spain and the Enlightenment in America, but what happens in America cannot be absolutely foretold by what happens in Spain. I shall therefore treat Spain, when I treat it at all, as only a back-drop for the American scene.

Since the general framework of the Commission’s history of the Americas is unknown to me, it would be presumptuous to comment on the style and organization of any one chapter; therefore, a prudent silence shall be maintained on that aspect of Dr. Zavala’s work.

1. Has sufficient attention been paid to the possible effect of wilderness conditions upon the early development of institutional Christianity in'America? The chapter quite properly displays the Americas as a frontier in which European institutions met almost nothing in the way of a competing civilization to contest their plantation and expansion. On the other hand, it may have been that without such competition European institutions in some cases were modified to suit frontier circumstances more cheerfully and easily than if those institutions had been self-consciously propagated in the midst of a resilient alien culture.

I have given a careful and interested reading to the draft of the chapter on the influence of religion on the history of the New World for the PAIGH project. As it now stands, the draft ought to be discarded and redrafted in its entirety. This essay lacks a conceptual framework which would provide some unity of organization to the considerable amount of illustrative data that such a chapter must of necessity include. What first must be selected are those spheres in which religion has played a major role in the history of the Americas and then to compare and to contrast the various roles that these religious factors have played in the development of Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch America. This type of organizational and conceptual framework will give a religious dimension to the central thesis of the whole project, i. e., that the Americas do have a common history, without distorting the often dissimilar impact that religious considerations have had on the historical development of the New World.