Charles referred the question back to the Royal Council, to which both sides presented memorials. Their temper may be judged by the argument of the chapter that, after so many religious bodies had adopted the exclusion, if the opponents contend it to be unscriptural, they are manifest heretics and should be burnt to ashes. A memorial of Siliceo to Charles is in the same key. A strange medley of evils is attributed to Jews and Conversos--even the German Lutherans are descendants of Jews. On taking possession of his archbishopric he had found that nearly all the beneficed priests and those having cure of souls were of Jewish extraction, and there was danger of Conversos obtaining entire possession of the Church, owing to the sale of preferment in Rome, where there were at the time five or six thousand Spaniards, most of them Conversos, bargaining for benefices. It was the same in the other professions, where judges, lawyers, notaries, scriveners, farmers of the revenue, etc., were mostly of Jewish stock, and they alone were physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, in spite of all that the Inquisition had burnt and was daily burning; they adopted these callings solely for the purpose of killing Christians--it was but the other day that, in a Toledo auto, there was reconciled a surgeon who always placed a poisonous powder in the wounds of his Christian patients. If Charles did not confirm the statute, the outlook was that the Conversos would govern the church of Toledo. Wild as all this may seem to us, it gives us a valuable insight into the impulses which governed Spain in its dealings with the alien races within her borders. It was a humiliating admission that they were regarded as men of superior intelligence and ability, whose wrongs for generations had converted them into irreconcilable enemies, the object of mingled dread and detestation; as they could not be matched in intellect, the only policy was brute repression and extermination.[849] Of course Siliceo carried the day. The confirmation of his statute by Paul III was conclusive and was regarded as establishing on irrefragable grounds the necessity of limpieza as a qualification for all who aspired to position in Church or State.[850] Toledo maintained it even against the pope. In 1573, the Venetian envoy, Leonardo Donato, reports that he had seen all the authority of the stern Pius V vainly exerted to secure the archidiaconate of Toledo for a servant of his who was not _limpio_ and who finally had to content himself with transferring the dignity to another and retaining a heavy pension on the revenues.[851]