that concerns the salvation of the soul.  Their zeal could not be restrained here; more arduous was the obligation which had brought them, and the acquiring of some one of the many languages which are spoken in these islands.  Without that diligence their application would be useless; without such intercourse, men must necessarily consider one another as barbarians.  Since the Tagal language is the most general, their most careful study was given to it.  Their eagerness was emulative, and made them rapid in their haste.  He who most quickly penetrated the language was father Fray Miguel de Santa Maria, native and son of the convent of Zaragoza, a person of resolution and vigorous mind, and of no common abilities.

3.  With these arrangements they tried to make a beginning in their apostolate.  On discussing where they would better employ themselves, they thought that they would better not separate far then, since they were so few.  Quite near by, eight leguas distant, was the village of Marivelez, which had no ministers.  The other ministers had left it because of the insalubrity of its climate and the brutishness of its natives, who were very obstinate in their superstitions.  The voices of the missionaries did not at all soften them, wherefore with comfortable maxims they had left them in their obstinacy, shaking off secretly the dust from their sandals.  Truly their religion was ridiculous.  They had their groves or reserved places in the forest.  There were their peculiar penates or minor gods, to whom they made their sacrifices.  Certain old deluded and ceremonious persons took charge of the sacrifices.  They were assisted by certain old women, called catalonas, who had great authority among those deluded people, which they had acquired by deceitful and delusive tricks.  The method of sacrificing cattle was the common and transcendental one among those natives.  But irreligion was manifest in all their vain observances, and in the conservation of their traditions, rather than any active and positive religion.  They observed those long-kept and sacrilegious customs, through fear of punishment if they omitted them; and, even more, they were persuaded that they would die the instant when they violated these.

4.  Their laws in political government were no better, being at the pleasure of the most powerful, who exercised their tyranny despotically.  Many difficulties were those.  And if one would consider that others, who must be considered of equal or greater spirit, had abandoned them as unconquerable, he would understand their human prudence, or temerity, or their great conceit.  But the robust vicar-provincial stumbled in nothing, his wonderful zeal facilitating everything.  For that administration and conquest, he appointed Fray Miguel de Santa Maria the adelantado, giving him as associates father Fray Pedro de San Josef, and the lay brother Fray Francisco de Santa Monica, all of them now well acquainted with that