chastising the people for having abandoned them.  To counteract this evil, among others, a solemn procession and mass were ordered, wherein our Lord was supplicated for the health of the people.  Inasmuch as a sermon was necessary, its preparation was assigned to Father Diego Sanchez, at the instance of the canon, Pablo Ruiz de Talavera, who is the priest of the Indians in Manila; he chose this father on account of his devotion to the Society, and of the great affection of the Indians for him, caused by his eloquence and the many and signal services that he has rendered them.  The father, discussing in his sermon the above-mentioned error, refuted it, and expelled it from their minds and hearts with that admirable force of expression and persuasion with which our Lord had equipped him; while He gave to the hearers grace and sensibility to perceive and be influenced by the truth, as since then has been evident on many, and notable occasions.

In that very time of the malady, admirable evidence appeared of the importance of the confraternity which, as we said above, that people had instituted for the purpose of exercising themselves in similar pious acts.  Its members aided the sick with the utmost solicitude, striving to provide them with comforts and medicines; and when deaths occurred they kept watch over the corpses, and accompanied them to burial, to the great edification of all who saw them.  As a natural result, the confraternity came to be much esteemed and valued, and many sought the intercession of influential persons in order to be admitted to its membership.  It is proverbial among the Spaniards that its members can be recognized by their quiet and modest address, for which they are much respected.  Not to mention other details, the devotion which they showed that year in the harvesting of their rice was certainly a source of great consolation; for they would not taste it until, after they had brought part of it as an offering to our Lord in His temple, that part had been blessed which they must immediately use.  Their offering was a sort of grateful acknowledgment that God had delivered their grain-fields from the plague of locusts, and themselves from the sickness.

Care was taken to check offenses against our Lord, and to break up vile illicit relations—­some secretly, and others by other gentle means—­by which many Indian women were kept in bondage.  These women, in their eagerness for worldly gain and kind treatment, were gratified by certain men, who maintained them in that mode of life without fear of God.  Indeed, there were two women who had killed their husbands that they might gain greater freedom in this respect.  Some, too, had lived during many years in this wretched state—­one ten years, another twelve, another thirteen; and still another, twenty long years.  Yet God, in His infinite patience, had been waiting for them all this time, and at the end received them into His most gentle mercy.