such a degree as to be differentiated from all other oriental peoples, and known as Christians, why send missionaries from other Christian countries to do the work over again? Our method of answering this question is, first, to give as clear a setting of the situation as possible, showing just what the religious condition of the Filipino people is; and, secondly, to state with equal definiteness and clearness just what we are doing and planning to do in a missionary way for these island inhabitants. Then the questioner will be able to judge for himself of the situation, and what should be the attitude of the Protestant Church.

Conditions under Catholicism

First, what is the religious condition of the Filipino people, apart from the efforts of Protestant Christianity? When the Spaniards really took possession of the Islands, forty years after Magellan's discovery and death, they were first ruled and influenced in their political and religious life by two men of remarkable character,-Legaspi, sent from Mexico to be governor of the new possessions, and Urdeneta, an Augustinian friar who was intimately associated with Legaspi, as a religious representative of the Church of Rome. The people were at that time, in all probability, animistic in their religious ideas, given to the worship of spirits, possessed of superstitious fear and reverence of the dead, such as characterize the primitive minds of all human beings.

Some writers think there must have been a further preparedness on the part of the people for the introduction of the religion of the West, because of the fact that the Filipinos came over to the Catholic faith almost en masse in a very short period

of time. Be that as it may, the fact is that within a century following the coming of Legaspi and Urdeneta, in 1565, "during which period whole communities were converted at a time," the great proportion of the Filipino people became Roman Catholic Christians. This was accomplished by the missionary labors of the Jesuits, Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Recollets, among which orders the Islands had been partitioned out into separate districts for missionary activities.

Friar
Rule

These monastic missionary fathers, having once gotten control of the people by reason of their early religious domination, refused to give way to secular ecclesiastical priests as provided by the Church of Rome. Thus arose what is known as the Friar Rule in the Philippines. Not only did the friars, i. e. the members of the religious orders mentioned above, resist the coming of priests from Spain to take charge of the ecclesiastical affairs of their converts, but they also resisted the ordination of native priests who should take such ecclesiastical oversight. When such were ordained as coadjutor-priests to assist the friars in their unwieldy parishes, they were usually kept down to a very subordinate place. "not much more than a frocked lackey of the friardirector of the town." In the so-called "good old days before the Filipinos were corrupted by modern ideas," the residences of the friars, along with the massive churches, towered above all other structures of a Philippine village, governmental as well as private, and were "the very centers of village activities, sometimes social as well as religious and political." All this shows clearly that the Friar Rule, with its inter

pretation of Christianity, was practically universal and absolute in the Philippines for at least three hundred years. What now must be said of their product and how shall that product be treated by the Protestant Christian Church? Mr. James A. Leroy, for several years connected with the Department of the Interior in the Philippine Government, is known as a very high authority on the Philippine situation. He says in a recent volume:

Idolatry and Witchcraft

"Though we give great credit to Spain and to the early friars in particular for the christianization of the Filipinos, and, along with it, the very considerable Europeanization of the people of the Oriental tropics on matters social and political as well as religious, yet we cannot quite accept at face value the grandiloquent claims of pro-friar writers of recent years. They themselves are inconsistent, in that, after praising the missionaries for having wrought miracles in the conversion of the Filipinos, they then turn around and rend the latter, accusing them of every sort of vice and intellectual incompetency. But there is plenty of evidence in the early friar chronicles and in the writings of foreign sojourners in the Philippines before the inroad of modern thought had begun, that the Friars did not make of the Filipinos, in the good old days when they are represented as being docile and plastic as clay, models of Christian virtues and morals in all respects. Religion was not taught, and is but little understood in the Philippines today. The people's practices in worship were changed, and they were given a more stately ceremonial. But their already existing superstitions were not only not up