.

Motolinia was a devout man, whose apostolic life among the Indians won him
his dearly loved name, equivalent to "the poor man" or poverello of St.
Francis, but with all his virtues, he belonged to the type of churchman
that dreads scandal above everything else. The methods of Las Casas
scandalised him; it wounded his patriotism that Spaniards should be held
up to the execration of Christendom, and he rightly apprehended that such
damaging information, published broadcast, would serve as a formidable
weapon in the hands of the adversaries of his church and country. It must
also be remembered that he lived in Mexico, where Las Casas admits that
the condition of the Indians was better than in the islands and other
parts of the coast country.

The Bishop of Burgos and Lope Conchillos will be seen to be fair exponents
of the bureaucratic type of opponents to the reforms Las Casas advocated.
The Bishop in particular appears in an unsympathetic light throughout his
long administration of American affairs. Of choleric temper, his manners
were aggressive and authoritative, and he used his high position to
advance his private interests. He was a disciplinarian, a bureaucrat
averse to novelties and hostile to enthusiasms. He anticipated
Talleyrand's maxim "Surtout pas de zole," and to be nagged at by a
meddlesome friar was intolerable to him. Such men were probably no more
consciously inhuman than many otherwise irreproachable people of all
times, who complacently pocket dividends from deadly industries, without a
thought to the obscure producers of their wealth or to the conditions of
moral and physical degradation amidst which their brief lives are spent.

The most formidable of all the adversaries of Las Casas was Gines de
Sepulveda. A man of acute intellect, vast learning, and superlative
eloquence, this practiced debater stood for theocracy and despotism,
defending the papal and royal claims to jurisdiction over the New World.
In striving to establish a dual tyranny over the souls and bodies of its
inhabitants, he concerned himself not at all with the human aspect of the
question nor did he even pretend to controvert the facts with which his
opponent met him. He was exclusively engaged in upholding the abstract
right of the Pope and the Spanish sovereigns to exercise spiritual and
temporal jurisdiction over heathen, as well as Catholic peoples. To impugn
this principle was, according to Sepulveda, to strike at the