children
are ablaze. Thus in each of those villages nearly two hundred
children assemble every day, uttering praises to the Divine Majesty,
acknowledging His greatness, learning the Christian doctrine, and
imparting it to their parents and elders. The confessions cannot be
enumerated, for they are as many as there are Christians. No one fails
to make his confession during Lent, even though he may have confessed
many times during the year; and with like ardor the other exercises
of piety and devotion are performed. This was especially evident on
Holy Friday of that year, one thousand six hundred and two, during
the adoration of the cross, in which they displayed deep emotion;
they even removed the rings from their fingers and the jewels from
their ears, to make offerings of these. As Father Gabriel Sanchez
has been the usual laborer in that island, I shall here set down
a part of one of his letters in which, with his usual simplicity,
he gives some account of the island and of Christianity therein:
"Our Lord has been well served this year in the island of Bohol, with
the fruits gathered from the conversion of those pagans, for in this
barren waste we have set out a beautiful garden of new plants which our
Lord has planted. Many people have been brought together and induced
to settle in villages, wherein they are instructed. At the time when
I am writing this, we are in a village on the coast, whither there
came down to us yesterday two other villages of the Tinguianes, or
mountaineers, asking us, of their own accord, to allow them to live
here. As an earnest of their desire, they brought as many as forty
children that we might baptize them, which we have done. We value this
all the more because these two villages have up to this time been the
most obstinate and stubborn in all the island: but God has now been
pleased to soften their hearts. May He be blessed and praised that,
if there had been fathers for all of them, the whole island would
now be converted; for, although there are actually in this mission no
more than four thousand Christians, its people are so well disposed
that on the day when they shall have someone to teach and baptize
them they will all be converted. The very villages that we are unable
to teach come frequently to ask that we will go to instruct them and
unite them into one, and give them baptism. But, as so few fathers
have been in this island, we have not been able to succor them; and so
they rem