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The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 30 of 55, 1640: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth centuryAduarte, Diego

History

The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 30 of 55, 1640: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century

Name: The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 30 of 55, 1640: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
Author: Aduarte, Diego

Aduarte, Diego

Demarcation line of Alexander VI; Missions -- Philippines; Philippines -- Discovery and exploration; Philippines -- History -- Sources

carried, devoting themselves with diligence to the care of their bodies
and souls, and taking the food out of their own mouths to give it to
them. By this devotion and piety they prevented many deaths, and many
most horrible deaths; for, since this is an agricultural tribe, the
sick suffer much, and often even die without the sacrament, because
their kinsmen are obliged to go out to their fields and leave no one
to care for the sick person. So they had in these hospitals and still
have, all that was needed, for the hospitals are still in existence;
and the sick are cared for in them, bodily and spiritually, better
than in their own houses. The value of these hospitals was experienced
during an epidemic, in which few of those who were in the hospitals
died, while in the neighboring villages where they had no hospitals
there were numberless burials.

When the holy provincial reached Pangasinan, he saw his religious
persecuted by the Indians, upon whom they were heaping benefits--not
only to their souls but to their bodies, which were the only things the
savages understood and esteemed. He saw them without the necessaries
of life, lacking even food in sickness as well as in health; he saw
their dwellings so small that four reals was too much to pay for
them. Yet with all this he saw them happy and active, traveling from
one village to another as if there was nothing that they lacked. Still
there was nothing to be wondered at in all this, for God's mercy to
them was so clear that not only they but the heathen Indians were
obliged to recognize it. Thus, against their wills, their hearts
were softened by the good that the fathers did to them. The good old
man saw with tears of delight the many miracles which the Lord had
wrought to give authority to His preachers and His gospel among these
tribes; the flight of the devil from those villages where before he
had quietly reigned, the baptisms which began to be performed, the
devotion of the newly baptized. He saw the many new churches built
in the villages, poor as buildings, but rich in the fruits for God
to be gathered from them.]





CHAPTER XXVII

The province takes charge of the missions of the Chinese, and the
results which follow

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