Father Urios having persuaded a Manobo, who wished to be baptized, to do this, the man said to him: “Of my two wives I have decided to keep the elder, but I make a great sacrifice in separating from the other, for I had so much trouble to obtain her. Her father would only give her to me in exchange for fifteen slaves. As I did not possess them, I was obliged to take the field against the timid tribes in an unknown country, and to capture these fifteen slaves. I was obliged to fight often, and to kill more than thirty men.”
The illustration represents a scene from the labours of Father Gisbert amongst the Bagobos. He is exhorting a blood-stained old datto and his wives and followers to abandon their human sacrifices, exhibiting to them the image of the crucified Redeemer, whose followers he urges them to become.
As regards the maintenance of the missions, I do not for one moment doubt that the liberality of the Roman Catholics of the United States is quite equal to the needs of the pioneers of civilisation, who have laboured with such remarkable success.
Altogether the Jesuits administered the spiritual, and some of the temporal affairs of 200,000 Christians in Mindanao.
They educated the young, taught them handicrafts, attended to the sick, consoled the afflicted, reconciled those at variance, explored the country, encouraged agriculture, built churches, laid out roads, and assisted the Administration. Finally, when bands of slave-hunting, murdering Moros swept down like wolves on their flocks, they placed themselves at the head of their ill-armed parishioners and led them into battle against a ferocious enemy who gives no quarter, with the calmness of men who, long before, had devoted their lives to the Master’s cause, to whom nothing in this world is of any consequence except the advancement of the Faith and the performance of duty.
They received very meagre monetary assistance from the Spanish Government, and had to depend greatly upon the pious offerings of the devout in Barcelona and in Madrid. It is to be feared that these subscriptions will now fall off as Spain has lost the islands; if so, it is all the more incumbent upon the Roman Catholics of America to find the means of continuing the good work.
I feel sure that this will be so—Christian charity will not fail, and the missions will be maintained.
For their devotion and zeal, I beg to offer the Jesuit missionaries my profound respect and my earnest wishes for their welfare under the Stars and Stripes.
To my mind, they realise very closely the ideal of what a Christian missionary should be. Although a Protestant born and bred, I see in that no reason to close my eyes to their obvious merit, nor to seek to be-little the great good they have done in Mindanao. Far from doing so, I wish to state my conviction that the easiest, the best, and the most humane way of pacifying Mindanao is by utilising the powerful influence of the Jesuit missionaries with their flocks, and this before it is too late, before the populations have had time to completely forget the Christian teaching, and to entirely relapse into barbarism.
