the Church. Nor should this be accomplished in the manner hitherto
employed employed--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.

_The Bishop of the Filipinas_



Letter from the Bishop of the Philipinas to the Governor

_Jesus_