Volume V

Chapter III

The discalced Augustinian religious continue their spiritual conquests on the coast of Zambales, and pacify it with their labors.  They extend their fervent tasks to the province of Caraga, in Mindanao.

1.  If God created man with a certain fertility, with which to propagate other men, although that fertility was not taken away by the first sin, it is not what it would be if disobedience had not intervened; and if to that propagation conservation be not added, it would not proceed according to the form and method of its kind, but even in these natural arrangements nothing would be done without the cooperation of the Creator.  Proportionally so is it in the spiritual propagation, in which man is formed for piety and justice.  He who plants or he who waters is nothing, but it is only God who giveth the increase.  For that reason so necessary dispositions are not useless, but are indispensable in the present providence.  How can they hear unless there be one to preach to them?  God gave man understanding, but it is as dull in infancy as if he did not have one; it must be excited, and brought to light with the increase of age, in which he becomes capable of knowledge and of instruction, skilful to perceive truth and pure and chaste love, with which to fight strenuously against the engendered vices to which he is inclined naturally from his youth.  Those spiritual propagations in semi-brutish men are very difficult; for, although reason is not altogether extinguished, the sparks of it are so feeble that one must use considerable discretion and prudence in order to arouse them.  With those monsters were the discalced Augustinian religious dealing on the Zambales coast; having as the object of their living faith the salvation of souls, they could employ themselves admirably in such spiritual propagations, planting and watering with immense labor, God granting them the desired increase in that so blessed intercourse.  Establishing themselves in Masinloc, they did not restrain themselves in the undertaking until they reached the end of the coast, on whose famous point is the village of Bolinao.  There they had had the first intelligence of the gospel, which the observantine Augustinians had tried to communicate to them.  But either the ferocity and barbarous customs of the natives, who threatened to kill them, or their great occupation in other more abundant missions, compelled them to abandon that attempt.  At the demand of those religious, together with a commission from the governor then in office, Don Rodrigo de Rivero, and the instance of the venerable dean and cabildo, the vice-provincial despatched fathers Fray Christoval de Christo and Fray Andres del Espiritu Santo to that conversion.  The village was then located on an island, which formed the port of the same point.  When the venerable religious entered, the natives would have nothing to do with them; however they did not dare to expel the fathers nor lay hands on them.  They supported themselves on certain herbs and roots, which grow naturally and without labor in the forest, necessarily suffering misery and misfortunes.