eir paganism and the
truths of the Christian religion; they have got good churches and
monasteries of wood, well constructed, with shrines and brilliant
ornaments, and all the things required for the service, crosses,
candlesticks, chalices of gold and silver, many brotherhoods and
religious acts, assiduity in the sacraments and being present at
divine service, and care in maintaining and supplying their monks,
with great obedience and respect; they also give for the prayers
and burials of their dead, and perform this with all punctuality and
liberality." [51] A generation later the report of the Religious is
not quite so sanguine: "They receive our religion easily and their lack
of intellectual penetration saves them from sounding the difficulties
of its mysteries. They are too careless of fulfilling the duties of
the Christianity which they profess and must needs be constrained by
fear of chastisement and be ruled like school children. Drunkenness
and usury are the two vices to which they are most given and these
have not been entirely eradicated by the efforts of our monks." [52]
That these efforts were subsequently crowned with a large measure of
success is shown by the almost universal testimony to the temperate
habits of the Filipinos.

This first period of Philippine history has been called its Golden
Age. Certainly no succeeding generation saw such changes and
advancement. It was the age of Spain's greatest power and the slow
decline and subsequent decrepitude that soon afflicted the parent
state could not fail to react upon the colony. This decline was in
no small degree the consequence of the tremendous strain to which
the country was subjected in the effort to retain and solidify its
power in Europe while meeting the burden of new establishments in
America and the Philippines. That in the very years when Spaniards
were accomplishing the unique work of redeeming an oriental people
from barbarism and heathenism to Christianity and civilized life,
the whole might of the mother-country should have been massed in a
tremendous conflict in Europe which brought ruin and desolation to
the most prosperous provinces under her dominion, and sapped her own
powers of growth, is one of the strangest coincidences in history.

Bending every energy for years to stay the tide of change and progress,
suppressing freedom of thought with relentless vigor, and quarantining
herself and her dependencies against new ideas, conservat