ir mission, the wary priests descried a providential miracle.

In their opinion the non-Catholic had no rights in this world--no
prospect of gaining the next. If the Pope claimed the whole world
(such as was known of it) to be in his gift--how much more so heathen
lands! The obligation to convert was imposed by the Pope, and was
an inseparable condition of the conceded right of conquest. It was
therefore constantly paramount in the conqueror's mind. [88] The
Pope could depose and give away the realm of any sovereign prince
"_si vel paulum deflexerit_." The Monarch held his sceptre under the
sordid condition of vassalage; hence Philip II., for the security
of his Crown, could not have disobeyed the will of the Pontiff,
whatever his personal inclinations might have been regarding the
spread of Christianity. [89] If he desired it, he served his ends with
advantage to himself--if he were indifferent to it, he secured by its
prosecution a formidable ally in Rome. America had already drained the
Peninsula of her able-bodied men to such an extent that a military
occupation of these Islands would have overtaxed the resources of
the mother country. The co-operation of the friars was, therefore, an
almost indispensable expedient in the early days, and their power in
secular concerns was recognized to the last by the Spanish-Philippine
authorities, who continued to solicit the aid of the parish priests
in order to secure obedience to decrees affecting their parishioners.

Up to the Rebellion of 1896 the placid word of the ecclesiastic, the
superstitious veneration which he inspired in the ignorant native,
had a greater law-binding effect than the commands of the civil
functionary. The gownsman used those weapons appropriate to his
office which best touched the sensibilities and won the adhesion of
a rude audience. The priest appealed to the soul, to the unknown,
to the awful and the mysterious. Go where he would, the convert's
imagination was so pervaded with the mystic tuition that he came
to regard his tutor as a being above common humanity. The feeling
of dread reverence which he instilled into the hearts of the most
callous secured to him even immunity from the violence of brigands,
who carefully avoided the man of God. In the State official the native
saw nothing but a man who strove to bend the will of the conquered race
to suit his own. A Royal Decree or the sound of the cornet would not
have been half so effective as the