e pathway
of life; friars were your first and friars will be your last teachers;
a friar it is who opens the hearts of your sweethearts, disposing
them to heed your sighs; a friar marries you, makes you travel over
different islands to afford you changes of climate and diversion; he
will attend your death-bed, and even though you mount the scaffold,
there will the friar be to accompany you with his prayers and tears,
and you may rest assured that he will not desert you until he sees you
thoroughly dead. Nor does his charity end there--dead, he will then
endeavor to bury you with all pomp, he will fight that your corpse
pass through the church to receive his supplications, and he will only
rest satisfied when he can deliver you into the hands of the Creator,
purified here on earth, thanks to temporal punishments, tortures, and
humiliations. Learned in the doctrines of Christ, who closes heaven
against the rich, they, our redeemers and genuine ministers of the
Saviour, seek every means to lift away our sins and bear them far,
far off, there where the accursed Chinese and Protestants dwell,
to leave us this air, limpid, pure, healthful, in such a way that
even should we so wish afterwards, we could not find a real to bring
about our condemnation.

"If, then, their existence is necessary to our happiness,
if wheresoever we turn we must encounter their delicate hands,
hungering for kisses, that every day smooth the marks of abuse from
our countenances, why not adore them and fatten them--why demand their
impolitic expulsion? Consider for a moment the immense void that
their absence would leave in our social system. Tireless workers,
they improve and propagate the races! Divided as we are, thanks
to our jealousies and our susceptibilities, the friars unite us in
a common lot, in a firm bond, so firm that many are unable to move
their elbows. Take away the friar, gentlemen, and you will see how the
Philippine edifice will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy
limbs to sustain it, Philippine life will again become monotonous,
without the merry note of the playful and gracious friar, without
the booklets and sermons that split our sides with laughter, without
the amusing contrast between grand pretensions and small brains,
without the actual, daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio
and La Fontaine! Without the girdles and scapularies, what would you
have our women do in the future--save that money and perhaps becom