sesame opens wide to the devotee the gates of heaven.

The Lamentable Error of the Bishop of Cebu

The prelate who accused the public schools in the form above mentioned
has committed a lamentable error. For my part, I can say that the
accusations awakened in me a desire to investigate the causes of
immorality and of the perversion of customs which the said prelate,
and we with him, all regret. According to those who have studied
the mentality of the majority of our people, it is evident that
superstition is the enemy which we all have to combat and that is
the cause of many of the moral errors which we observe. The regular
friars as well as the secular clergy confess that the mass of the
people still finds itself subject to the superstition inherited from
our predecessors--the superstition which could be called genuinely
Philippine, that which comes from the old belief in the nunu, in the
asuang, the anito and all the spirits of the old idolatry preached
before the implantation of Catholicism by the Spanish missionaries.

Failure of the Missionaries

According to their own confessions, these missionaries, after three
centuries of preaching, have failed to eradicate those superstitions
incrustated in the conscience of the people. We must accept their
declaration as a faithful recognition of the failure of their
religious mission. I am not interested in, nor do I discuss,
the religious point of view, but the importance of superstition
in social life, its pernicious influence upon the evolution of
morality. What undoubtedly results from the narratives contained in
that literature which constituted the only reading of the people is
the promotion of ignorance spreading in a very effective manner all
the superstitions aforementioned and adding to them a wealth of errors
which unfortunately governs the mentality of the mass of the people.

Not only the so-called Indios the ones concerned; the sons of the
Spaniards of pure blood or those mixed with Indios as well as the
Chinese mestizos are also accused of these superstitions. All these,
all of us Filipinos, are included among the individuals infected with
the leprosy of superstition fomented by the absurd miracles of the
Novenas and it cannot be said that it is an evil particularly of the
Filipino race but also the inhabitants of the Philippines in general.

In order that education be useful it has to form in the individual
the sense of responsibility thru the