al; and when Dr. Jose Rizal urged his reforms in the church and
civil service, he was shot, though not as a blasphemer, but because
his secret order, the Katipunan, with its Masonic ritual and blood
initiation, was thought to be dangerous to the public peace.

The change from this mediaeval condition to that of the nineteenth
century, with its impatience of title, caste, form, and ceremony,
its trust in equal right, its insistence on freedom of belief,
came suddenly. In shaking off their ancient political and religious
bonds the Filipinos may lose some of the quaint and poetic records of
their ancient faiths; for the first progress of a nation after a long
sleep is a material one, and art, literature, all the more delicate
expressions of national taste, history, and tendency, have to bide
their day until the fortunes of the nation are assured. In this period
of reconstruction let us hope that those fables and dreams will not
be forgotten which tell, more truly than dates and names and records,
the ancient state of the people, and afford us a means of estimating
the impetus and direction of their advance.

The influence of Christian teaching is plain in some of the songs,
plays, and stories of the natives, especially in the plays, for in them
the hero is often a Christian prince who defeats a strong and wicked
Mohammedan ruler, and releases an injured maiden. Change the names and
the play becomes a modern English melodrama. In several of the islands,
however, the impress of Spanish occupancy is slight, and customs are
still in force that have existed for hundreds of years. On Mindanao
are still to be found the politic devil-worshippers, who, instead of
seeking to ingratiate themselves with benevolent deities, whose favor
is already assured, try to gain the goodwill of the fiends. Their
rites are practised in caves in which will be found ugly figures of
wood and an altar on which animals are sacrificed. The flesh of these
animals is eaten by the devils, according to the priests, and by the
priests, according to the white men. The evil spirits who appear in
the half-darkness of these caves, leaping and screaming, goading the
company to frenzy, are priests in disguise and in demoniac possession.

Tagbanuas tear a house down when a death occurs in it, bury the
corpse in the woods, and mark the grave by dishes and pots used by
the deceased in life. These implements are broken. Among our American
Indians the outfits supplied