that
any function is vital to one who is in need of it. As I said before,
they are not essentially a religious people; but the early Spanish
discoverers prescribed religion as a doctor prescribes a missing
ingredient in the food of an invalid, and the Filipinos have benefited
thereby, Roman Catholicism is just what the Filipino needs. He has no
zest for morbid introspection, he does not feel the need of bearing
testimony to cosmic truth, and in his lack of feeling that need is just
as helpless as the man whose system cannot manufacture the necessary
amount of digestive juices or red blood corpuscles; he is an invalid,
who must be supplied artificially with what his system lacks.

I am quite sure that the Catholic clergy, as represented by
the American Archbishop, bishops, and priests, are certain that
Protestantism holds no threats for the Church in the Philippines
other than that it may be the opening wedge in a schism which will
send the Filipino not only out of the Church, but to rationalism of
the most Voltairian hue. When danger really threatens the Church in
the Philippines, it will be no half-way danger. The Filipino will be
orthodox as he is now, formally, positively orthodox, or he will be
cynically heterodox. As God made him, he might in time have arrived
at the philosophy of Omar, "Drink, for ye know not why or when,"
or the identical philosophy of Epicurus, "Let us eat and drink,
for to-morrow we die." But the Church found him, and recognizing his
peculiarities artfully substituted her own phrase, "Eat and drink in
peace, for to-morrow you die in the full knowledge that pertains to
your salvation." Let no proselyting evangelist delude himself with the
idea that the Filipino has the mental bias which leads him to think,
"Let me neither eat nor drink till I know whence I came and whither
I go." That is the spirit of true Protestantism, which discovers a
new light on faith every decade and still is seeking, seeking for
the perfect light.

But if the Church in the Philippines is in no real danger from
Protestantism, it is in more or less imminent danger from two
sources--the necessity for reform in the Church itself, and the
growing national sense of the Filipinos, which leads them to demand
their own clergy, and to resent to the point of secession a too firm
hold by the new American clergy.

CHAPTER XVI

My Gold-Hunting Expedition

Word of an Abandoned Gold Mine near Manila--I Arise Before Three