elevation of the Holy Cross before
the fanatical majority, who became an easy prey to fantastic promises
of eternal bliss, or the threats of everlasting perdition. Nor is this
assertion by any means chimerical, for it has been proved on several
occasions, notably in the raising of troops to attempt the expulsion
of the British in 1763, and in the campaign against the Sultan of Sulu
in 1876. But through the Cavite Conspiracy of 1872 (_vide_ p. 106)
the friars undoubtedly hastened their own downfall. Many natives,
driven to emigrate, cherished a bitter hatred in exile, whilst others
were emerging yearly by hundreds from their mental obscurity. Already
the intellectual struggle for freedom from mystic enthralment had
commenced without injury to faith in things really divine.

Each decade brought some reform in the relations between the
parish priest and the people. Link by link the chain of priestcraft
encompassing the development of the Colony was yielding to natural
causes. The most enlightened natives were beginning to understand that
their spiritual wants were not the only care of the friars, and that
the aim of the Religious Orders was to monopolize all within their
reach, and to subordinate to their common will all beyond their mystic
circle. The Romish Church owes its power to the uniformity of precept
and practice of the vast majority of its members, and it is precisely
because this was the reverse in political Spain--where statesmen are
divided into a dozen or more groups with distinct policies--that the
Church was practically unassailable. In the same way, all the members
of a Religious Order are so closely united that a quarrel with one
of them brings the enmity and opposition of his whole community. The
Progressists, therefore, who combated ecclesiastical preponderance in
the Philippines, demanded the retirement of the friars to conventual
reclusion or missions, and the appointment of _clerigos_, or secular
clergymen to the vicarages and curacies. By such a change they hoped
to remedy the abuses of collective power, for a misunderstanding with
a secular vicar would only have provoked a single-handed encounter.

That a priest should have been practically a Government agent in his
locality would not have been contested in the abstract, had he not,
as a consequence, assumed the powers of the old Roman Censors, who
exercised the most dreaded function of the _Regium Morum_. Spanish
opinion, however, was very much d