minded zealots like Canon Lynch that these text-books were armouries of insurrection. Let me introduce the subject by a letter received by Ferrer not in the early days of the Escuela Moderna, when the books were few and critical attention had not been directed to them, but in the spring of the present year. This letter, which was not produced at Ferrer's condemnation, as it would have been if he had had a trial, was published prominently in the Boletin de la Escuela Moderna ("The Bulletin of the Modern School") for June, 1909, and was fresh in the memory of the Barcelona authorities. It is from a bishop, unconnected with the Vatican—the "supreme bishop of the Independent Church of the Philippine Islands." It is dated from Manila, March 10, 1909:—
- Sr. D. Francisco Ferrer y Guardia,
Director of the Modern School,
Barcelona.
- Sr. D. Francisco Ferrer y Guardia,
Accept, Sir, the assurance of my most distinguished consideration:
My delegate at Barcelona, Sr. Isabelo de los Reyes, has sent me most of the magnificent works edited by you. I have been agreeably surprised by the modern, scientific, and civilising tendency of their teaching. If the Filipinos had studied those works instead of the stupefying treatises of the monks and Jesuits, which betray the evil odour of their cells, they would have learned in a few years what it has taken them nearly four centuries to learn from the fantastic disquisitions of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and others, who were assuredly, in their time, brilliant lights of the Church. But how are we going to teach from their archaic doctrines young people who are the contemporaries of aeroplanes, radium, and the thousands of other scientific discoveries?
Pray accept the warmest congratulations of our Church for your praiseworthy efforts and sufferings in the cause of Rationalism. Our Church believes that reason is directly inspired by God, and that to seek the truth is to seek the Lord.
The Supreme Council of our Bishops, which is composed of twenty-four prelates, has agreed that some of your manuals shall be established as text-books in our seminaries and schools—namely, the Natural Sciences and Physical Geography of Dr. Odon de Buen (to whom please send an assurance of our admiration), the First Stages of Humanity of Engerrand, the Ethnical Psychology of Letourneau, and Man and the Earth, by Reclus—merely rectifying or explaining the atheistic or anti-religious tendencies by saying that the authors are anti-religious because they, like yourself, have endured savage persecution at the hands of those who ought to be imitators of the gentlest, most humane, most noble, and free in spirit of all masters.
