confessor.  Others remained a whole day in the church, waiting for their turn.  This gives evidence of the ardor and perseverance with which they attended to the welfare of their souls.  On Sundays and the afternoons of feast-days, when the sermons were preached in their own language, the church was crowded—­above, below, in the choir and galleries, all which, although very spacious, were filled; and, besides, there were many of those people outside the doors (which are five in number).

In two ways they were equally enthusiastic in celebrating the deposit of the holy relics:  first, in the great devotion that they displayed during the whole eight days while the festival lasted and the relics were exposed—­men, women, and children attending it in such numbers, both morning and afternoon, that they could not enter the church.  The Spaniards, astonished at this, said that those holy relics must have come to Manila for the Indians, judging from the way in which the latter attended and venerated them.  To show appreciation of their great devotion, and to inspire them with more, a short discourse, in their own language, was delivered to them every afternoon, preceding the Salve sung by the choir, and accompanied by the music of the wind-instruments.  The second thing they did in the service of the holy relics was to institute a confraternity or congregation dedicated to those relics with the title and vocation of “all saints.”  Their object was, each beginning with himself and his own spiritual profit, to strive with all their might for the welfare of their neighbors, by performing works of mercy, in both temporal and spiritual affairs, as their opportunities permit—­in which effort they exert themselves, by the grace of our Lord, with the advantages which we shall see later.

One of the best results is the modesty and virtue of the women, which we esteem in those regions, because it is but little practiced or valued among their heathen peoples.  In many—­I even believe, in all—­of those islands there existed a doctrine, sowed by the devil, that a woman, whether married or single, could not be saved, who did not have some lover.  They said that this man, in the other world, hastened to offer the woman his hand at the passage of a very perilous stream which had no other bridge than a very narrow beam, which must be traversed to reach the repose that they call Calualhatian. [73]

Consequently virginity was not recognized or esteemed among them; rather they considered it as a misfortune and humiliation.  Married women, moreover, were not constrained by honor to remain faithful to their husbands, although the latter would resent the adultery, and hold it as a just cause for repudiating the wife.  To illustrate this:  Upon my arrival in the Filipinas, in the latter part of May in the year fifteen hundred and ninety, I had landed at the island of Marinduque (which is about twenty-eight or thirty leguas from Manila), at the time when an ensign with a squad of