interpreter and could be of use. I beg of your Lordship to insist
that the clergymen who are ministers of religious instruction should
not come and go so many times to Manila--not only on account of the
offenses which they commit, of which there always are some (as your
Lordship might ascertain if you wished to), but also that they may
not impose such burdens on the Indians. This is as much as concerns
the provision of ministers.

I propose the Augustinian fathers to your Lordship because they have
a greater number of religious than the other orders have, and not
because I have any partiality in regard to the orders, as your Lordship
suspects. I do not know on what you found your suspicion unless it be
on the advantages and benefits which have resulted to these fathers
from my protection and favor, as your Lordship is accustomed to say,
because you will not give any. I will tell you of several things in
which, by my interfering and inclining to your side, they have lost
what was due them; for in Cagayan I took away from them a resident's
house which was worth one hundred and fifty pesos of rent to them;
in Tondo, the lands to which the Indians laid claim; and the property
in Laguio and Nuestra Señora de Guia, which was theirs. When they
were saying mass in their house to the Indians, with considerable
notoriety and scandal to them, and no little affliction to the fathers,
they were ejected from the [_illegible in MS._] at my instance;
for I asked it, and chose to give them this punishment, in order to
palliate their offense. Thereupon your Lordship [_illegible in MS._]
occasioned some disturbance to result. This is what I have done for
this order, and the way in which I have favored them, which in truth
I might have done in many things most deservedly, and very rightly
and justly. But I protest before God that I neither have now nor have
had any other consideration or regard in this or in anything else,