Nevertheless, he had to answer to the alcalde for having commanded, ordered, and driven, just as if he were the originator of everything.

Yet be it said to his credit that he had never presumed upon or usurped such honors, which had cost him five thousand pesos and many humiliations.

But considering the income it brought him, it was cheap.
Well then, might it be God?
Ah, the good God disturbed neither the consciences nor the sleep of the inhabitants.

At least, He did not make them tremble, and if by chance He might have been mentioned in a sermon, surely they would have sighed longingly, "Oh, that only there were a God!" To the good Lord they paid little attention, as the saints gave them enough to do.

For those poor folk God had come to be like those unfortunate monarchs who are surrounded by courtiers to whom alone the people render homage.
San Diego was a kind of Rome: not the Rome of the time when the cunning Romulus laid out its walls with a plow, nor of the later time when, bathed in its own and others' blood, it dictated laws to the world--no, it was a Rome of our own times with the difference that in place of marble monuments and colosseums it had its monuments of sawali and its cockpit of nipa.