Yet one must not forget that the Spanish mission system, however useful and benevolent as an agency in bringing a barbarous people within the pale of Christian civilization, could not be regarded as permanent unless this life is looked upon simply as a preparation for heaven.  As an educative system it had its bounds and limits; it could train to a certain point and no farther.  To prolong it beyond that stage would be to prolong carefully nurtured childhood to the grave, never allowing it to be displaced by self-reliant manhood.  The legal status of the Indians before the law was that of minors, and no provision was made for their arriving at their majority.  The clergy looked upon these wards of the State as the school-children of the church, and compelled the observance of her ordinances even with the rod.  La Perouse says:  “The only thought was to make Christians and never citizens.  This people was divided into parishes, and subjected to the most minute and extravagant observances.  Each fault, each sin is still punished by the rod.  Failure to attend prayers and mass has its fixed penalty, and punishment is administered to men and women at the door of the church by order of the pastor.” [125] Le Gentil describes such a scene in a little village a few miles from Manila, where one Sunday afternoon he saw a crowd, chiefly Indian women, following a woman who was to be whipped at the church door for not having been to mass. [126]

The prevalence of a supervision and discipline so parental for the mass of the people in the colony could but react upon the ruling class, and La Perouse remarks upon the absence of individual liberty in the islands:  “No liberty is enjoyed:  inquisitors and monks watch the consciences; the oidors (judges of the Audiencia) all private affairs; the governor, the most innocent movements; an excursion to the interior, a conversation come before his jurisdiction; in fine, the most beautiful and charming country in the world is certainly the last that a free man would choose to live in.” [127]

Intellectual apathy, one would naturally suppose, must be the consequence of such sedulous oversight, and intellectual progress impossible.  Progress in scientific knowledge was, indeed, quite effectually blocked.

The French astronomer Le Gentil gives an interesting account of the conditions of scientific knowledge at the two Universities in Manila.  These institutions seemed to be the last refuge of the scholastic ideas and methods that had been discarded in Europe.  A Spanish engineer frankly confessed to him that “in the sciences Spain was a hundred years behind France, and that in Manila they were a hundred years behind Spain.”  Nothing of electricity was known but the name, and making experiments in it had been forbidden by the Inquisition.  Le Gentil also strongly suspected that the professor of Mathematics at the Jesuit College still held to the Ptolemaic system. [128]