hts to be sorry that you
should favor them, for they deserve it and your Lordship should do
so. But when your Lordship says that since you came here they have
lost some of their rights, I do not wish to agree to that, nor do
I think that they will say so; but let this wait for another time,
for I do not wish to treat of it here.

At this point your Lordship makes a long digression, trying to give me
to understand what my office is and what I can do and what I can not
do, and for this your Lordship makes distinctions of protector and
bishop and commissioner. Your Lordship need not have taken so much
trouble; for, as Captain Becerra dares to write to me not to take
so much trouble to give him light, because he has enough from God,
so it would not be very much for me to dare to tell your Lordship not
to take so much trouble as you have taken in this letter to teach me
what my office is and what I may do in conformity with it--because,
speaking with the respect which is due to your Lordship, you did not
come to this bishopric to teach me but to be taught by me. In truth I
do not understand what could be your Lordship's thought in discussing a
matter so foreign to your profession; and it did not seem at all well
to me, unless your Lordship regards me as so contemptible a person
that I am not equal to this. Although humility is well in all, and
particularly in bishops, it is not humility for the sheep to teach
the shepherd; nor would it be considered well in me, and still less
so in your Lordship, if it were known that I allowed you, who should
take rules of right living from me, to give them to me. Read, or have
read to you, the chapter _si imperator 96 distin_., in which your
Lordship will see what is the duty of secular princes and what that
of bishops, where among other words it says these: "If the emperor
is Catholic he is a son, not a prelate, of the church; and whatever
concerns religion he is to learn, not teach." In what follows in this
chapter your Lordship will see what is your duty and what is mine;
and our Lord, through the prophet Malachi, says that the lips of the
priest held knowledge, and from his mouth the law is to be sought,
and not from the governors. Since your Lordship wished to be master
when you should have been pupil, you could not avoid falling into
the difficulties into which you have fallen in this letter, as you
say that you do not know whether the bishop can order that all the
confessors should