The very triviality of these cases illustrates the atmosphere of suspense and distrust in which the Spanish population existed, nor can their full import be realized unless we remember that, slight as the penalties may seem, they were the least part of the punishment, for penancing by the Inquisition was fatal to limpieza. How readily a man's career could thus be ruined by rivals or enemies is seen in the case of the Dominican Alonso de los Raelos in the Canaries. In 1568 some assertions of his respecting purgatory attracted attention, but led to no formal trial, because he did not deny its existence, and theologians are not agreed as to its exact locality and character. Some years later, there were feuds in the Order, due to an attempt to erect the Canaries into a separate province, when the prior, Blas de Merino, who hoped to become provincial, and who regarded Fray Alonso as a possible rival, accused him to the tribunal for this proposition. He was thrown into prison and, in 1572, was sentenced to penance and reclusion, thus rendering him ineligible.[311] We have seen in the previous chapter the penalties regarded as sufficient for the crime of seduction in the confessional, and a comparison between these and the punishments inflicted for utterances in the heat of discussion and indicative of no settled tendency to heresy, reveal the very curious standard of ethics prevalent at the period. In 1571, a priest named Miguel Lidueña de Osorio was accused in Valencia of having said that the bishops at the Council of Trent deserved to be burnt, because they assumed to be popes, and moreover that St. Anne was deserving of higher honor than St. Joaquin. For this he was required to abjure _de vehementi_, he was suspended from orders, recluded for six years and banished perpetually from Valencia.[312] It was not often that flagrant cases of solicitation were visited with such severity. [Sidenote: _RULES OF PROCEDURE_]