This shifting of responsibility to the civil power was not through any sense that the laws punishing heresy with burning were cruel or unjust, for the Church taught this to be an act so eminently pious that it accorded an indulgence to any one who would contribute wood to the pile, thus assuming the responsibility and expending the Treasure of the Merits of Christ in stimulating popular ferocity. That this indulgence was well known in Spain appears in the evidence in the trial of Jan of Antwerp for Lutheranism at Toledo in 1561.[530] In fact, when Luther argued that the burning of heretics was contrary to the will of the Spirit, Leo X included this among his heresies condemned in the bull _Exsurge Domine_.[531] Consequently the secular power had no choice as to what it should do with heretics delivered to it; its act was purely ministerial, and if it listened to the hypocritical plea for mercy, it was liable to prosecution as a fautor of heresy and to deprivation of its functions.[532] The Church enforced this by embodying in the canon law a provision that princes and their officials must punish duly and promptly all heretics delivered to them by inquisitors, under pain of excommunication, which became heresy if endured for a year; and inquisitors were required to proceed against them, but were cautioned to speak only of executing the laws, without alluding to the death-penalty, in order to escape irregularity.[533] As elsewhere, so in Spain. The Inquisition abandoned the unrepentant or relapsed heretic to the secular arm, which was bound to sentence and execute him. In the hurried informality of the early period, it seems to have been indifferent whether the magistrate pronounced a sentence or not. A contemporary account of the Toledo auto of August 14, 1486, describes the reading of the sentences of the inquisitors and the condemned being carried at once to the Vega for execution, where they were burnt till not a bone remained, without any allusion to the formality of intervention by the secular power.[534] When, however, the form of a condemnation by the alcalde was observed, as at Córdova in 1484, he uttered it by virtue of the sentence of the inquisitors, which rendered unnecessary anything more than condemning the culprit to be burnt alive, wherefore he ordered the alguazil mayor to carry it into effect.[535] In the inquisitorial sentences of the period the adjuration for mercy is generally lacking. In that of Mencia Alonso, condemned at Guadalupe, November 21, 1485, not only is it absent but the duties of the secular officials are treated as purely ministerial, for it ends "As a limb of the devil and accursed and excommunicate, she shall be taken to the place of burning so that by the secular justice of this town, or by other laymen, justice shall be executed upon her according to the custom of these kingdoms."[536]