Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/91

Rh condition. There were from the first some among the Spanish invaders, besides ecclesiastics, who were men of gentle blood and of education. They called themselves Christians. All their references to their “sacred faith,” their most “holy church,” are profoundly reverential, and they exult over their privileges as its children. The freebooters and desperadoes among them, even the worst of them, did hold in dread the anathemas of the Church. The most and the least craven of them shrunk with terror from the denial of its sacraments in life and death. Why was the Church so utterly powerless and palsied then, in the exercise of a sway such as it has never had since that age? True, the ecclesiastics among the invaders were at first very few, and many of the marauding parties may not have been accompanied by a single ghostly adviser. But those marauders knew, as did the priests, that their terrific creed doomed the natives dying unbaptized to an awful woe; and yet they were not withheld from a wanton anticipation of it by visiting upon them a promiscuous slaughter. Small as might have been among them the number of those whom Charlevoix calls “the predestined elect,” there was no arrest of the work of slaughter sufficient to satisfy the condition of baptism.

In 1509, Diego, a son of the Admiral, came over as Governor of St. Domingo. He was followed, the next year, by a company of a dozen or more Dominican friars, earnest, resolute men, in poverty and heroic fidelity. A humble monastery was provided to shelter them. With an undaunted courage they resolved to rebuke, and in the name of all that was just and holy to protest against, the enormities of the Spanish desperadoes and the whole course of cruelty towards the natives. They put forward one of their number, Brother Antonio Montesino, who in a Sunday sermon addressed a great crowd of hearers of the principal persons of St. Domingo. His piercing rebukes and his scorching invectives, unsparing in their directness of