Sur citizenship can be secured from the narrow nto which Rome runs all her ecclesiastical mateAll history bears witness against its possibility. The experience of Europe and South American States are but foot-notes to the pages of European history. Protestantism has an errand in the Philippines. She must lift the individual to his feet, and bid him take his place as a son of God and a partner in God's work for his world. She must do this for His sake, and for the sake of society and the State.

Protestantism is in the Philippines because it is not good for Churches to be alone. Competition in religion may seem a shocking thing to some minds, but it has served the ends of greater purity of teaching and life from the days of Pharisees and Sadducees to the times of Catholic and Protestant. One of the Philippine Civil Commissioners said in a session of that body, when a petition from the Methodists of Manila for a long lease on certain government property formerly administered by friars was before them for consideration: "I shall vote to grant the petition. I am a Catholic, but I believe in competition in religion." It is not good for man to be alone. That is true of him as an individual, and equally true of him in his organizations for social or religious ends. Monopolies become bigoted. Catholicism has had its own way in the Philippines for three centuries, and she is not so healthfully prosperous here as she is in lands where other faiths have lived by her side, and exerted the pull of their example upon her doctrine and spirit. It will be a tonic for Catholicism to have the Protestant Churches by her side. She will purge out some of the bad doctrinal leaven that has been spoiling her measures of Filipino meal. She will scrape some barnacles from her hull in the shape of questionable and im

meral o urses among her priesthood.

All this will be rainful, and her members and leaders will cry out against the process. Survery is always painful... Yet we can not do with u. suntety.

Is Protestantism Asturbing the religious peace of the Philippines? On the alleged ground of such disturb arce, some earnest people are distressed that the movement has begun. But do they know where there is any religious peace in the Philippines? The fact is, that the Protestant leader who goes wisely and constructively about his work finds hundreds and thousands of earnest souls who have not now, and who never did have, religious peace. They hunger for it. They welcome, as a very angel of God, the Protestant with his Scriptures, and his simple message of attainable, conscious salvation ir this world for all who repent and believe on the Christ. Who does not know that the claim that the Filipino people are "entirely Catholic." as the pope solemnly assured Governor Taft in his correspondence about the friar iands, is a misstatement of the facts? It is said with much emphasis that the disloyalty of the Filipino Catholic is against the friar, but not against the Church. But when the recent history of the Philippines is dispassionately sifted, and when the attitude of the population that would kill forty friars, all of them serving under the orders of the Church to which their murderers are said to be unswervingly loyal; when they imprison four hundred more, and chafe like tigers in a net to think that it was impossible to kill all the latter as they had killed the former, it will appear how loyal they are to the organization sending and supporting these offending priests! When it is considered that the Filipino people have been buying Bibles at the rate of more than five thousand a month for every month since the beginning of 1902, in spite of the

burning denunciation of all who dare to buy them, uttered by priests and bishops and Church periodicals, almost daily, threatening their souls with the torments of hell after death, and intimating that the full weight of ecclesiastical disabilities, plus cholera and smallpox and the death of their cattle-all sorts of heathen curses on basket and store-would light on them in this world if they persisted in their course, it can be seen that this plea of a solid Catholic population is without foundation. The Protestant does not need to proselyte. He finds an eager constituency waiting him. Thousands of natives, men and women, are receiving Protestant Christianity eagerly, joyously. They sing its soul-stirring hymns; they are reading its vernacular Scriptures; they are meeting day after day in little companies for mutual inspiration and help. They come miles to services, on foot across ricepaddies, and in rain and darkness. They entertain Protestant ministers in their homes, and feed them with the best that the neighborhood affords. They are not loyal to the Church as a people. Protestantism comes not to disturb a condition of religious peace, but to quiet a condition of religious unrest. Protestantism comes to bring true peace by bringing that "righteousness" which St. Paul declares must always precede both "peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." (Rom. xiv, 17.)

There will be turmoil at the first, and the appearance of unseemly strife; but it is the inevitable clash of opinion, and out of it will come the larger purpose of the good God of us all for people who have had but three centuries' lift from practical barbarism, but who show, by their rapid strides under conditions far from favorable, what may be expected when they find Jesus Christ in the fullness of His power to save, and enter into all the fullness of life which He came to give.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION-A GENERAL VIEW.

FUNDAMENTAL religious conceptions undergo change very slowly. In some triumphant future of Pentecostal power such as has not yet rested upon the Church of Christ, it will probably be true that a nation will be born. in a day, and that this birth will be into a life so utterly different from that out of which the converts have come, that they will leave their old conceptions "by life's unresting sea," never to resume them again. But the history of religious thought bears many testimonies to the conclusion that evolutionary processes more or less rapid have controlled in the development of the religious consciousness of peoples. The postulates of Platonic thought persisted in Christian theology long after New Testament times. The fiery evangelism which swept the Goths and Vandals into a professedly Christian faith left them in possession of much of their gloomy and severe conceptions of Deity and of human relationships. Druidism left its dark trail across centuries of teaching in Christian England.

While it is true that six millions of the Filipino people are counted as Roman Catholics, it is yet true that, to a far greater degree than is commonly known, they yet retain the fundamental notions of God and the controlling ideals of their idolatrous faith. In proof of this we have but to know a little of their religious past, and to come into close contact with them in their religious worship,

their ordinary ways of thinking and speaking of God, duty, immortality, and eschatological subjects in general.

From the meager stocks of knowledge which we possess of that earlier faith we can glean but little. The Malays who were here when Legaspi, the ruler, and Urdaneta, the friar and evangelist, came to establish the authority of Spain and found the Christian faith, had never reduced their religious ideas to writing. Therefore it is impossible to study them as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Mohammedanism are studied. The friars who came to displace the old faiths were iconoclasts. Everything not of Rome was of the evil one. Rome has not yet produced one sympathetic student of Comparative Religions, or, if any studies by such a writer have seen the light of the printed page, that light has been quenched by papal order as was the book on New Rome in Zola's "La Roma.” In any case, no records are left us of painstaking effort on the part of the friar missionaries really to understand what the poor people for whom they labored did believe, and what were the hopes which those beliefs kindled in their bosoms.

From what little we know of the religious belief of the Malay invaders of the Philippines, we are led to conclude that it was an idolatrous form of demon-worship. It postulated malevolence as the chief characteristic of Deity, and its worship was a series of fear-born attempts to propitiate the wrath which they conceived burned against them unceasingly. This unseen and malevolent. Being was believed to exist in many forms. Their idols. were numerous, as idolatry can never be exactly certain that it has secured a correct representation of the Unseen, and with pathetic eagerness to be right continues the weary unavailing search for God if haply they may find Him who is near to every one of us.