Page:The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 (Volume 07).djvu/292

 namely, by the perversion of all law, divine and human; by murders, robberies, captivities, conflagrations, and the depopulation of villages, estates, and houses. These wrongs are inflicted and perpetrated by those who, under pretext and in the name of preaching the gospel, entered the Indias, and have thus profaned the sacred name of God and made the holy gospel odious; and it is by them that our holy religion has been dishonored. But now that his Majesty knows what excesses have been committed in these islands, he should order that henceforth they shall cease, and that in the promulgation of the holy gospel the instructions and rules be observed which our Lord Jesus Christ ordained, and which His holy evangelical law directs and commands, and which the holy apostles and the apostolic men who came after them practiced and observed until our wretched times. Since the Spaniards entered the Indias, their excessive cupidity has devised new methods of preaching the gospel such as our Lord Jesus Christ never ordained, or His holy apostles knew; they are not permitted by the law of nature, nor do they agree with reason.

I shall send the proofs of these conclusions to your Lordship as soon as my occupations give me opportunity and leisure to prove them. At Manila, on the eighteenth of January, 1591.

In the document which I sent to your Lordship the other day was contained the substance of the opinion