, and no
one could take their prize from them, or punish their arrogance. In
view of this one may infer how harassed were the distant villages,
and how filled with tribulations were our religious ministers, who
ever occupied the most advanced and dangerous posts.

316. It even transcended the tragic representation of so doleful
misfortunes, when in the year 1655 Corralat, king of Mindanao,
proclaimed war against the Christian name. He began his treachery by
the inhuman murders of two fathers of the Society whom their rank as
ambassadors, which is so greatly respected by the law of nations, did
not aid. That prince was in Philipinas what Gustavus Adolphus, king
of Suecia, was in Alemania, namely, the thunderbolt of Lucifer, the
scourge of Catholicism, and the Attila of the evangelical ministers,
who never practiced courtesy toward them except when force or some
reason of state compelled him so to do. For his private convenience
he had pretended that he was peaceful in public during the preceding
years. But now with no other reason than his fury, he gave license
to his vassals to infest the Christian villages; and they did it
like a river which overflows its bed, after having rid itself of
the embarrassment of its dikes. He was not content with that, but in
order to give greater flights to his impiety, he excused it among the
neighboring Moros under the name of a religious war; and under that
title he invited to it the Borneans, Tidorans, and Joloans, so that
confederated with him into one body they might unfurl the banners of
the perfidious Mahomet, without stopping until they utterly destroyed
the law of grace.

317. He incited so great an uprising against that straitened field
of Christendom that, although the previous persecutions that the
Moros had practiced against it were so inhuman, (as may be seen in
the places of this history cited in the margin) [23] they were all
assuredly less intolerable than those which were now incited; for now
fury and barbarity were carried to the extreme. That was so fierce
that disinterested pens did not hesitate to compare it with the last
of antichrist; so persevering, that until the year 1668, of which this
history is treating, and the year when the relations which we follow
end, there was not a single instant of rest; so shameless that ruin was
seen almost at the very gates of Manila; and so universal that but few
villages of our administration escaped being the theater of war an