because he found him protected with the impregnable rosary of the Virgin. Of him we have the pious faith that, full of years and of virtue, he has flown to heaven." CHAPTER XLV The election as provincial of father Fray Domingo Gonçalez, and the state of the province On the sixteenth of April in this year 1633, the fathers of the province assembled in Manila to elect a superior. Their minds were in such agreement that without difficulty they unanimously elected, on the first ballot, father Fray Domingo Gonçalez, prior of the same convent, not one vote being lacking for the election but his own. He was very acceptable to the estates, both secular and ecclesiastical, of this region, as have been all of the other provincials; since the electors have always exhibited great zeal for the good of the order, and have made their choice without considering personal predilections. In general, the election has not previously been discussed, so that the provincial is elected before anyone suspects who he is. Often a person is elected with regard to whom no one imagined any such thing, so that the city is not a little edified. He who was elected at that time was in España a student at the college of San Gregorio, where he was for many years a teacher of theology. After filling all the offices of the order, he became commissary of the Holy Office in these islands--as he still is, with which we must bring to an end all that may be said with regard to him. The provincial and the definitors found nothing to occupy themselves with in the reformation of the province. Advice was received of a new ordinance of the chapter-general held in Roma in 1629, in which permission is given to the provinces to discontinue the intermediate chapter as being the source of much expense and trouble to all the order--and, in this province, of much interference with the systematic instruction of the Indians in our charge, many of whom are entirely without ministers during the whole time spent in coming to these intermediate chapters. In their place were very prudently substituted the councils, which, being reduced to a much smaller number of religious, the picked men of the province, are almost as useful and much less expensive, and are not followed by the bad results spoken of. This permission was accepted, and the precedent has since been followed.