In another place an Indian was lying sick, and had received communion and been anointed with the holy oil. Early in the evening he began to be in such agony that the people in the house took him for dead, and, after laying out the body, put him on his ancestral bier. After they had watched the whole night about his body, when dawn returned he returned also, stammered something, and about noon uttered his words articulately. Then he said first that he seemed to have been dead three years, because of the cruel torments which he had himself suffered in hell, and which he had seen an infinite number of Indians suffer. There demons—as it were, smiths—kindled forges with bellows, poured melted iron over the wretched souls, and in the midst of their pitiful howlings burnt them forever with never-ceasing tortures. After he had seen these things, he said, he had been led by a venerable old man away to a higher place, by reaching which (for he thought it was heaven) he was filled so full of bliss that he was unwilling to leave it. But when he was commanded, he returned to life, to inform the living about each place to which men are consigned, that of the blessed and that of the damned; and this command, he affirmed, was laid upon him under a heavy penalty; for there are among mortals not a few who by the pretense of virtue deceive themselves and others, and although they are looked upon as good, yet are very far from the service of God. Then he added that his conductor told him to bid his fellow-townsmen be of good courage, for the church they were then engaged in building would be better and stronger than the others. The Indian, after he had said these things, recovered, and a general confession was appointed. He continues to this day to show by his life and example that those things which he reported were no dreams. The improvement of morals which has followed in many others who heard of these things has almost entirely put an end to pretexts for doubt and suspicions of deceit.
The prophecy, moreover, with regard to the church—that it should be stronger than the others—has been fulfilled. A few months before, the church of these Indians had burned down for the second time, together with our house. The fire broke out in the following manner. Some of the townspeople were out hunting, and, a dispute arising among the barbarians about the hunt, they came to blows. Soon after the quarrel, fire was thrown on our house, and destroyed the new church with almost all the furniture. The relics of the saints and the images were in part saved from the fire by the dexterity of the Christians. But Ours after no long delay bent themselves to the work again, and erected another church for themselves, at no trifling expense, and with no small labor on the part of the Indians. This is the seventh church erected in the ten years since the founding of the town. A further fortune which befell an Indian woman confirmed many in the Christian faith. She had ventured, without confessing her sins after the manner of Christians, to receive Christ in the communion; after she went home, she began to suffer from such agony in her throat that she thought she should choke to death. Thus she suffered, complained, an wailed until, having recognized the cause of her suffering, she went to the church that very evening. She prayed and besought the father to hold back her soul, already departing; and to succor an unhappy woman, whose throat was burned by the host as if by a flaming torch. When the father heard this, he instantly besought God, and God instantly showed mercy. She declared her sins, and thereupon all her torment ceased; and by this salutary remedy of confession the maladies of many Indians have been suddenly dispelled by Ours, the name of God or of some saint being invoked.
At the college of Zebu one of the Society, when in the town one day, heard weeping not far away; and when he followed it he discovered a mother bitterly lamenting the death of her new-born infant. Touched by her grief, the father went a short distance away, and entreated God, in the name of the Virgin Mother, to help this afflicted woman. Instantly the child revived, without a trace of sickness left upon him. Whether it was his senses or his soul that had left him, it is surely to the divine goodness that his sudden revival is to be attributed. The recitation of the Gospel of St. John has also benefited many sick persons; but Ours have found nothing so fit for removing the sicknesses of souls as the salutary Exercises of our blessed Father [i.e., Loyola], which the very heads of each magistracy, the sacred and the civil, have employed—not alone to private but also to public advantage. Their example, imitated by some of those in the higher ranks, has been followed by the same results. The rest of the people have been marvelously stirred up by the renewed fervor of the members of the sodalities, among other things; and by the new confidence given them by letters from Rome received this year, to the great delight and approval of all; which letters have much promoted the worship of the most blessed Virgin, and have also kindled those who are reckoned among the first in the city to accept the advice to join a sodality. By these means cares have been turned aside, and four bitter family quarrels, in which the very heart of life and salvation was attacted, not without public scandal, were brought to an end with the desired success.
Bohol Establishment
VII. The harvest of souls at Bohol has increased with the decrease of the audacity of the enemy, and of the almost annual invasion by the people of Mindanao. As many as a thousand have been baptized, if children and adults are reckoned. In this number are several bailans, or priests of idols; and one there was who, before his baptism, did nothing but rage, and attack with teeth and nails those who passed by, who came forth from the waters of the sacred font, gentle and in his right mind. And when some Indians saw this, snatching the cause from the fact, they went to the father and begged him to sprinkle a dying Indian woman with the same healing waters. Our father, suspecting that they made this request with the the purpose of enabling the woman to avoid the trouble of learning the catechism refused, unless she would first learn what Christians know. “Father,” said they, “that ought not to be the way in which you act; we want her baptized to keep her alive.” “And I,” said one, “when I was lying near to death, was by the command of another father sprinkled by an Indian cantor, and as soon as I was sprinkled immediately I began to recover. Then that madman, as you know, washed away his madness in the same font; and this companion of mine, who was already despaired of, when he received baptism was restored to himself and his kinsfolk.” The father yielded to all these arguments, ordered the sick woman to be carried into the church, and after putting the questions demanded by the occasion and the need, cleansed her with that purifying sacrament: she immediately began to improve, and soon recovered all her former strength. Every day several feel the healing power of this font. An equally great miracle is that the chiefs of this tribe, who have been very ill disposed towards us, and from whom not even the lives of Ours were safe, have been so suddenly changed at the sight of one of our fathers that they not only—themselves, without being urged—have submitted to the Christian ordinances, but also seek out the barbarians, even in the mountains, where they wander and are dispersed like wild beasts; and partly by the exercise of their authority, partly by persuasion, bring them down to the villages, and offer them to the fathers for instruction and baptism. Together with these there were once offered more than seventy idols, the spoils of the bailans, which were publicly burnt by Ours before the uplifted cross. The same thing has been done again and again elsewhere, especially at Jalibon, Ingaon, Orion, and Canliron, where the joyful Indians in this manner took vengeance upon the evil demon who had so often deceived them by the delusions of idols. The bailans are conspicuous in this zealous attack upon the enemy. They go so far as to scourge themselves14 until they draw blood, in order to atone for their sins; and thus they who formerly opened the door to all kinds of impiety are now the means above all others by which the rest of the bailans who still work their impious sacrifices are led to the faith, for the art of these latter loses its power when the others reveal the deceit. Indeed the deceit not seldom reveals itself by their predicting that which never comes to pass, or threatening terrors which injure no one.
VIII. The members of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin are devoting their attention to themselves, and striving to root out from their souls those sins which have grown old there. There was an Indian woman who was seized by a suitor in her bed, and who, to protect her chastity, threw herself out of the window; there was a youth who, being unable to keep a crowd of wanton girls out of his cottage, so savagely scourged his own back with cords that they, alarmed at the fierceness of the sounds, at last dispersed. There were some who, to avoid the sin of drunkenness, entirely denied themselves the use of wine.
Of old there were among these Indians no bowels of compassion,
Flagellation in the Philippines was a custom probably taken from the early Spanish friars, but it has been so discouraged of late years by the church that it is performed only in the smaller villages of the interior and in the outlying
