the hearts of your sweethearts, disposing them to heed your sighs; a friar marries you, makes you travel over different islands to afford you changes of climate and diversion; he will attend your death-bed, and even though you mount the scaffold, there will the friar be to accompany you with his prayers and tears, and you may rest assured that he will not desert you until he sees you thoroughly dead.  Nor does his charity end there—­dead, he will then endeavor to bury you with all pomp, he will fight that your corpse pass through the church to receive his supplications, and he will only rest satisfied when he can deliver you into the hands of the Creator, purified here on earth, thanks to temporal punishments, tortures, and humiliations.  Learned in the doctrines of Christ, who closes heaven against the rich, they, our redeemers and genuine ministers of the Saviour, seek every means to lift away our sins and bear them far, far off, there where the accursed Chinese and Protestants dwell, to leave us this air, limpid, pure, healthful, in such a way that even should we so wish afterwards, we could not find a real to bring about our condemnation.

“If, then, their existence is necessary to our happiness, if wheresoever we turn we must encounter their delicate hands, hungering for kisses, that every day smooth the marks of abuse from our countenances, why not adore them and fatten them—­why demand their impolitic expulsion?  Consider for a moment the immense void that their absence would leave in our social system.  Tireless workers, they improve and propagate the races!  Divided as we are, thanks to our jealousies and our susceptibilities, the friars unite us in a common lot, in a firm bond, so firm that many are unable to move their elbows.  Take away the friar, gentlemen, and you will see how the Philippine edifice will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy limbs to sustain it, Philippine life will again become monotonous, without the merry note of the playful and gracious friar, without the booklets and sermons that split our sides with laughter, without the amusing contrast between grand pretensions and small brains, without the actual, daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio and La Fontaine!  Without the girdles and scapularies, what would you have our women do in the future—­save that money and perhaps become miserly and covetous?  Without the masses, novenaries, and processions, where will you find games of panguingui to entertain them in their hours of leisure?  They would then have to devote themselves to their household duties and instead of reading diverting stories of miracles, we should then have to get them works that are not extant.

“Take away the friar and heroism will disappear, the political virtues will fall under the control of the vulgar.  Take him away and the Indian will cease to exist, for the friar is the Father, the Indian is the Word!  The former is the sculptor, the latter the statue, because all that we are, think, or do, we owe to the friar—­to his patience, his toil, his perseverance of three centuries to modify the form Nature gave us.  The Philippines without the friar and without the Indian—­what then would become of the unfortunate government in the hands of the Chinamen?”