lted him in all that concerned
the welfare of the Indians.

On the feast of the Assumption, Las Casas preached a sermon on the
contemplative, as compared with the active life, in the course of which he
yielded to an impulse to make his intention publicly known. Turning
towards the Governor's seat, he said: "My lord, I give you permission to
tell to all what we have privately agreed upon between us, and I avail
myself of the same to announce it to all here present." He then launched
into a fervid discourse upon the blindness, the injustice, the tyranny and
cruelty that marked the colonists' treatment of the Indians, declaring
that their salvation was to be despaired of unless they liberated their
slaves and treated the natives humanely. The assembly was moved to
mingled admiration and astonishment, for most of the colonists would as
soon have thought it a sin to work their beasts of burden as their
Indians, so deeply ingrained was their belief that the natives were
created to serve them. Some were stimulated to sentiments of compunction,
but not to the extent of imitating the preacher's heroic example of
renouncing the source of his income in deference to his moral principles.
(27)

While Las Casas was passing through these experiences in Cuba, his friend
and partner, Renteria, was, by a singular coincidence, arriving at
analogous convictions concerning the Indians and pondering upon the
formation of some plan by which the diminishing remnant of them might be
rescued from servitude and converted to the Christian religion. During
lent of that year he made a retreat in a Franciscan monastery in Jamaica
whither, as has been said, he had gone to procure farm stock. During this
period of seclusion from temporal distractions, he came to the conclusion
that the best means to benefit the natives would be to found several
schools or colleges into which the Indian boys and younger men might be
collected, and he formed the determination to go himself, if necessary, to
Spain and seek royal approval and support for this project. Las Casas had
meantime become so impatient of further delay in beginning his labours
that, having made public his intentions, he abandoned his original idea of
waiting for Renteria's return before starting for Spain. Although he was
without funds and had no means of getting any save by the sale of a mare
worth a hundred pesos of gold, he wrote to Renteria telling him that he
was about leaving Cuba fo