ffended justice and constituted a
grave crime against morality, by which the King was inculpated and for
which he would have to answer at the bar of divine justice. No utilitarian
ends could justify criminal means, and that Indian slavery was profitable
to the Crown was in no sense a palliation of its essential wickedness.

The King's confessor, as keeper of the royal conscience, had already in
Ferdinand's time been prevailed upon to explain to his Majesty the grave
responsibility he incurred in tolerating a state of things so contrary to
divine and natural laws. Now Las Casas, in his extremity, turned to the
court preachers, who were eight in number, laying before them the entire
case as a problem in morals, upon which it was within their duty as the
spiritual instructors of the sovereign to pronounce. The part which these
ecclesiastics took in the matter was brief but not unimportant nor without
results Two of them were secular priests, the brothers Luis and Antonio
Corodele, both religious and learned men, doctors of the University of
Paris; another was Fray Miguel de Salamanca, also a doctor of Paris; there
was Father Lafuente of the University of Alcala, a Franciscan, Fray Alonso
de Leon, an Augustinian, Fray Dionisio, and two others whose names Las
Casas was not able to recall when writing his history some forty years
after these events occurred. This body of learned men represented
everything that was most authoritative in theological and canonical
opinion of the times and constituted a most formidable ally against the
Bishop and Council. Meetings of the eight preachers and Las Casas were
held in the convent of Santa Catalina, at which several other men of
importance assisted, one of whom was Fray Alonso de Medina, of the
Dominicans; while another, a Franciscan friar who had spent much time in
the Indies, is described as a brother of the Queen of Scotland. These
meetings, which were secret, were held at the same hour of the day as the
sittings of the India Council.

Religious dogma was held in that age to be axiomatic and incontrovertible;
all science was interpreted through the medium of the one universal
science of theology, and the civil law of the times drew its sanction from
the principles of canon law, from which indeed it was scarcely separable.
Just as it was sought to sustain Galileo's proposition concerning the
revolution of the earth by an appeal to theology, and just as theologians
were considered co