The subjection will result only in advantage to the governors and ordinaries, in trouble to the Indians (for the latter furnish the wealth of such ministers) and disservice to his Majesty; since it means the ruin of religious discipline. The Indians being harassed and the governors and ordinaries being interested parties, all contrary to his Majesty's holy intent, the Indians will come to have disinclination instead of love to affairs of the faith and religion. And I dare affirm that Christians thus instructed will be Christians rather by force than in their hearts. In no part of the Yndias can one more intelligently expect that the regulars will be strict of observance than in the Filipinas Islands; for all their missions, even those in the suburbs of Manila, are surrounded by heathen and Moros--Chinese, Japanese, Mindanaos, Joloans, and Borneans, and people of almost all the other kingdoms of the Orient whose conversion is so anxiously desired. For if those heathen and Moro nations, who have before their eyes the conduct of the Christians, come to observe it as not at all in accord with right, not only among the secular clergy but among the regulars--who are by their profession teachers of the law and are bound to furnish a good example as the rule of their observance--what would they think, or what notion would they form of it? It is learned from some mandarins of Great China who were converted to our holy faith because they saw in all the ministers of it for many years a conformity of morals that was regulated to natural law, that they prudently conclude therefrom that the law which taught such actions could not be other than true. If the Chinese and Japanese who live in those islands should see the evangelical ministers acting against all natural dictates, they would come to a contrary conclusion, for they have no greater arguments for belief than those which come through their eyes. The regulars of the Filipinas Islands have well understood how just it is that the right of his Majesty's royal patronage be observed therein according to his orders. Therefore, they do not petition for exemption from the choice by the governors and the collations by the ordinaries under any other title than that of a favor from the greatness of his Majesty, if perchance their merits have deserved it. For, as is well known, there are no missions more distant throughout the monarchy nor more seas to pass nor seas so endangered by the enemies of the faith--which can be affirmed by those who administer outside the suburbs of Manila and their environs, who continually bear death or captivity before their eyes.