On one hand, the great scarcity of missionaries scattered among so numerous islands (each one occupying a most extensive territory, with scarcely any communication [with one another], with a work both arduous and multiple, in all the orders, especially in the learning of so diverse and most difficult languages, and the adaptation of these languages in regard to their characters, phonetics, pronunciation, etc., to our characters, spelling, etc., a knowledge attained afterward by prolonged and constant phonological and philological studies), abandoned to their own resources and energies, since it is known that for many dozens of leguas there was no other Spaniard than the missionary, occupied preferably in the administration of sacraments and evangelization and the conservation of so numerous fields of Christendom; on the other hand the means which the laws granted them, entirely null and void, as has been shown, as is also the result obtained by the last royal decree of 1686, by which it is newly ordered "that schools be established and teachers appointed for the Indians, in order to teach the Castilian language to those who would voluntarily wish to learn it, in the way that may be of less trouble to them and without expense;" and with this clause of voluntary instruction, without trouble and without expense, since the natives were scattered in so many and so distant villages or reductions, and had no teachers, not since they knew the Castilian language, but that they could not even know it except by a rudimentary method in their own language: was there any possibility even that that beautiful language whose knowledge would have freed the missionary from so many sorrows, from so painful labor, from so continual anxieties as the detractors of those orders cannot even imagine, could be taught? Notwithstanding, it will be proved by unassailable documents that those missionaries with some useless laws, most of them deficient, have obtained what no one else could have obtained. Those religious orders, then, have not been the enemies, but the great friends, of instruction. They Have not been opposed, nor only slight lovers of its development, but decided well-wishers, and even enthusiasts in its greater development; and in order to achieve that, the missionaries and parish priests have done that which very few, perhaps no one, could have done: namely, to create schools wherever they preached the gospel; to support them by all means, and even pay them from their scant savings; to bring to a head all classes of philological work; to compile methods, grammars, innumerable dictionaries, books of doctrine, of doctrinal discourses, and many others which besides illuminating the understanding, strengthened the souls in the faith, in accordance with the spirit of those laws.