There live in this college (the leading one [34] in this vice-province) seventeen of Ours--seven priests and ten brethren. All of them, by the favor of divine Providence, have by their example and labor brought in a rich harvest from the spiritual tilling of this city. This has been added to on account of the war and the earthquake, the loss of the ships, and other calamities; and we have learned by experience that piety grows more rapidly in adverse than in prosperous fortune. The earthquake has made us hesitate to go on with the completion of the college buildings, for we are compelled first to repair what has already fallen or is on the verge of ruin. Last year we wrote that on the twenty-first of June the main part of the nave of the church had fallen; but in this year of 1601, on the sixteenth of January, the other part corresponding to it was overthrown, and the rest so shaken that it had to be leveled with the ground. We regard it as a great blessing that these buildings fell without injuring anyone, although the first of the earthquakes came while the people were in the church at mass, the other when it was least expected. The people of Manila have accordingly been warned by Ours of the daily peril of life on earth, and have begun to lift up their hearts to heaven, and to pray for its care and protection. By a happy lot it has been obtained for them by the patronage and advocacy of St. Polycarp, [35] bishop and martyr, the disciple of St. John the Evangelist; and in his honor they have begun to celebrate an annual feast with a solemn procession.
The beginning of another pious work has been made this year with marked results. This is the practice of scourging, not as hitherto on three days in Lent, but every Friday throughout the year, in our church. There is a great concourse of people at that time to hear the fiftieth psalm, _Miserere_, by the melancholy harmony of which they are most moved to devotion and to doing penance. Not infrequently the royal auditors and the governor himself have been present, as well as other leading men.
Those in prison also have been aided by the reception of sacramental confessions and by pious exhortations; and--a thing that has edified the people not a little--the necessary food was for some days carried all the way to the prisons on our shoulders. From children, too, the food of Christian doctrine has not been withheld on Sundays; and with the children arranged in the form of a procession we went out during Lent to the military barracks, where after delivering sermons we reaped fruit not to be ashamed of.