regular superior to suppress the regular curacies at his pleasure, since the ministries depend immediately on the corporation which appoints those religious who are to fulfil the duties of them. The need of keeping intact the authority of the regular prelate over his curas and missionaries. No one is ignorant that the religious corporations of the archipelago are communities composed in their vast majority of parish priests and missionaries. If that be so, and it must be so, in order that the orders fulfil the peculiar end for which they came to Filipinas, how could the jurisdiction of the regular prelate he maintained, if the attributes that he has received from the holy see, the only immediate authority to which the regulars are subject, for the government of his subjects, of whatever class they be, be lessened? By pontifical laws, the religious assigned to the doctrinas and missions are considered absolutely as viventes intra claustra, which signifies that they are governed by their peculiar superiors, rights, and attributes, which are binding on every subject strictly conventual. If it were not so, the individual life would be established to a greater or less extent in the orders; their communal bonds would disappear; the regular prelates would become mere figureheads; and the religious corporations, losing the internal discipline that gives them so much vigor and strength, would be converted into associations of priests [presbiteros], who although they pronounced religious vows one day, would afterwards have no other bonds with their superiors than the corporative habit and name, and too, perchance, the possession of the open door in order to take refuge in the convent whence they went out, whenever they so desired or the bishop ordered it. The action of the regular prelate over the curas and missionaries of his order must be so active, immediate, energetic, and universal, that he can change, remove, or transfer them, or give them another occupation and appointment, and his authority over them must remain in everything as powerful as if it were a question of the last one of the conventual religious. That is required by the regular discipline; that is demanded by the vow of obedience. In proportion as the attempt is made with the individual to restrict or weaken the jurisdiction of the order, it is equivalent to jesting at the intention of us religious, who do not profess to be subjects of the bishop, but only to occupy ourselves in the business of religion which our prelates assign us; it is equivalent to disnaturalizing the religious corporations, and consequently, to destroying them, the very thing that the separatists are attempting.