In their feasts and ceremonies the natives have hymns and prayers to the rain-spirit, the sea, the star-god, the good birds, and the winds. Little has been done toward the preservation of their myths, for the Spaniards, during their centuries of control, suppressed learning, except as it pertained to religious studies, and tolerated but scant liberty of opinion. The friars, against whom the people nursed so strong a hate, stood for all that was harsh, narrow, tyrannical, and unprogressive. In order to gain money and maintain their political ascendency they engaged in commerce, became owners of real estate and buildings, including saloons and dance-houses, debased their churchly functions, discouraged attempts at progress, practically forbade the printing of secular books and papers, making illiteracy, with its attendant vice, poverty, and superstition, universal; and when Dr. Jose Rizal urged his reforms in the church and civil service, he was shot, though not as a blasphemer, but because his secret order, the Katipunan, with its Masonic ritual and blood initiation, was thought to be dangerous to the public peace. The change from this mediaeval condition to that of the nineteenth century, with its impatience of title, caste, form, and ceremony, its trust in equal right, its insistence on freedom of belief, came suddenly. In shaking off their ancient political and religious bonds the Filipinos may lose some of the quaint and poetic records of their ancient faiths; for the first progress of a nation after a long sleep is a material one, and art, literature, all the more delicate expressions of national taste, history, and tendency, have to bide their day until the fortunes of the nation are assured. In this period of reconstruction let us hope that those fables and dreams will not be forgotten which tell, more truly than dates and names and records, the ancient state of the people, and afford us a means of estimating the impetus and direction of their advance.