ry Filipino is emotionally loyal to
his Church and satisfied with the very positive promises which that
Church gives him. It ministers not only to his spiritual but to his
material needs on earth, and it promises him in no circumlocutory
terms salvation or damnation. It either gives him or denies him
absolution. He believes in it with the implicit faith of one who
has never investigated. On the other hand, he is tolerant with the
tolerance of one who has in his blood none of the acrimony begotten
by an ancestry alternately conquerors and victims through their
faith. The Filipino Catholic is far more tolerant than the Irish or
German Catholic. But the Philippines have known no battle of the Boyne,
no Thirty Years' War. When the abuses of the friars here led to revolt
and insurrection, the ultimate outcome of the struggle would have
been probably a religious secession from Rome, as well as political
severance from Spain, had not the accident of the Spanish-American
War precipitated us upon the scene, and settled the matter by the
immediate expulsion of the Spanish Government. The only real point of
infection left to create a sore in the new body Filipino--the friar
lands--was fortunately so treated by Secretary Taft that it ceased
to menace the State or threaten to mingle religion with government.

The Filipinos are tolerant of Protestantism because to them it is
still a purely religious and not a civil influence. They have not
killed or been killed for religion; for it they have not burnt the
homes of others, nor seen their own roof trees blaze; they have not
gained power or office through religion; they have neither won nor
lost elections through it. They have the same tolerance in religious
matters that they have in regard to the Copernican Theory or Kepler's
Laws. Religion, as pure religion, unrelated to land or land titles,
property or office, is no more the source of party animosity to them
than to us. Secretary Taft was wise enough to see that, and eliminated
the cause that threatened to make religion a vital question.

But if religion is not consciously vital to the Filipinos, as they
themselves would conceive and act on it (and I make the assertion in
the assumption that the reader understands as I do by _consciously
vital_ that for which the individual or the race is willing to die
singly or collectively), the unprejudiced observer must admit that
it is vital to their ultimate evolution, vital in just the sense