The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803; explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commericial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the beginning of the nineteenth century; [Vol. 1, no. 24]

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THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

[Vol. 24

they ordained and enacted the acts that they judged
advisable in accordance with that time. All those
acts show the sincerity of those who enacted them,
and they provided not only for the welfare of the
order, but for that of the native fathers under our
charge; for surely, under our shadow they increase
and are sheltered. And if religious were lacking,
what would become of them? Beyond doubt they
would be like the wretched boat exposed to the fury
of the winds, which has no greater security upon the
waters than where the winds choose to carry it. For
this one orders them, that one petitions them, and
another one seizes and knocks them about; but with
the protection of the religious they are free from all
these annoyances. Very conformably with this, religious were established in the missions in order to
teach them and often to protect them.
Our father provincial entered upon the exercise of
his office with the same wisdom and prudence as in
his first term, attending to it with all his might.
However, his second term was not apparently so
successful as the first - caused perhaps by various
casualties, which have no place here, and do not
affect the matter at all. In short, the affair was running badly and the body of the province was becoming laden with humors. I well believe that our
father knew it all, and that he could have been less
rigid, and that without dividing the forces that
cised the care of souls in Hagonoy and in Calumpit until 1607, in
which year he died.
Fray Mateo de Peralta was a conventual at Lubao in 1584,
of Pangasinan in 1587, of Calumpit in 1590; after which he was
at the missions in Mexico (I59I and 1607), P6rac (in I594),
Candaba (in 1597), Lubao (in 1602), Betis (in I608), and
Apailit in 1609, where he died in the same year.
See Perez's Catalogo.