714. It has ever been a very common complaint among historians of the order, and all make it, of time the destroyer of all things and of the neglect in leaving advisory news thereof. There is no doubt that for these two reasons the memory of many valiant deeds of excellent religious, who have filled our discalced Recollect order with honors in the Philipinas Islands, who have extended the Catholic faith untiringly at the cost of unspeakable hardships, and destroyed the abominable altars of heathen blindness, have been lost. But never more than at present does that complaint appear justifiable, when we begin to treat of the progress of Christianity in the districts of Linào and Cagayàn, villages of the island of Mindanào, one of the Philipinas. There was the evangelical trumpet heard by dint of members of our reformed order, with memorable fruit.... Let us pass then to mention what we have been able to bring to light from the confused memories which time excused. 715. In the year 1674, father Fray Joseph de la Trinidad, a native of Zaragoza, was elected provincial in Philipinas. That apostolic laborer had always had great zeal for the conversion of souls. Agitated by that sacred fire that burned without consuming his heart which fed it, he worked in his own person, as much as he who did most, so that all the heathens of that distant archipelago should embrace, believe, and reverence the faith of the true God, in whose name only is found salvation. For that purpose he went not only once into the highest peaks of Zambàles, in order to illumine their darkness with the Catholic light or to lose his life in so heroic an act of charity. He desired with unspeakable anxiety to be given the opportunity to make a sacrifice of his blood by shedding it in so good warfare, in confirmation of the truth which he was preaching. "When shall I have the desirable happiness," he exclaimed to his pious fellow countryman, San Pedro Arbuès, "of being made a good martyr from a bad priest by the merciful God?" That desire we see already had made him leave every fear; and consequently, without any horror of death, notwithstanding that it represented itself to him as to all, full of bitterness, he placed himself in excessive dangers, in order that he might whiten with the water of baptism the souls of the inhabitants of those ridges, so that in their darkened bodies they might obtain the beauty of grace. Thus was his practice throughout his life, not only in the above-mentioned district, but also in other places of the many which are entrusted to us in those vast territories, and if he did not effectively obtain the crown of martyrdom, yet the merited reward will not be lacking to such prowess.