Note 34 — THE FRIAR VIEWPOINT

It is known that the ancient monks divided their time among prayer, contemplation, study, and manual work. St. Anthony34 and his five thousand monks, as well as all those who afterward imitated the monastic life or that of the desert, employed part of their day in labor with their hands, weaving mats, making shoes, oars, boats, or small skiffs, and other similar labors. Our father, St. Augustine, desired his monks to also devote some hours of the day to manual labor. Accordingly, our predecessors did it. It is true, that the spirit of the respective epochs changed the character of the bodily work, but the monastic corporations of Filipinas, which recognized the incapacity of the Indian for science and deplored the pernicious effects of science poorly digested by the natives, if they could not do away with the action of the governments, the influence of opinion, the pressure of the times, would have had to turn aside, by means of their parish-priest religious, the tendency of the Indians to the literary branches, and to have directed that tendency to those branches of pure imitation, for which it is necessary to recognize, and we do that gladly, that the Filipino Indian has exceptional abilities. At the same time that the university was founded, and the colleges provided, schools and workshops ought to have been established for the natives, which would have obtained the preference in those narrow, dull, and lazy minds, with greater benefits to the country and less harm to all. All the monasteries founded by St. Basil the Great35 had in charge an elementary superior school, and another of arts and crafts joined to it. That ought to be the model of the religious orders in Filipinas, in spite of the governments of the mother country, of the demands of opinion manifestly gone astray on this point, and of the spirit of the epoch which could not have any influence in that country, most especially by their constitution, nature, customs, and government. Had the religious corporations, thoroughly permeated with their Christian and civilizing mission, proceeded in that manner, the contingent of sons with the three pointed design of the square and apron,36 who left the halls of the colleges and became the petty leaders and chief revolutionists who betrayed the mother country and were also the greatest enemies of those who had taught them the little good that they knew, would not have been so numerous.