The Easter season of 1545 was approaching, and the fulfilment of the precept of confession, which marks the farthermost frontier of Catholic observance, within which even the most lax must remain under penalty of excommunication ipso facto, afforded the Bishop his opportunity. He withdrew from all his clergy, except the dean and canon of his cathedral church, their faculties for granting absolution, reserving to himself all questions involving the relations of the Spaniards to the Indians. He furnished the two appointed confessors with a detailed list of cases in which not merely the questions of holding slaves and cruel treatment were involved, but likewise those which had to do with the right to hold property acquired unjustly from the natives and by violation of the law. This treatise was doubtless the same that was published in 1552 entitled _Confesionario_, etc., or in any case it contained the root doctrines of which that tract may have been an elaboration. Both upon the ability and the fidelity of the two confessors he had selected, the Bishop felt he could rely, but in the case of the Dean he was again mistaken in his choice, for in certain of the reserved cases the latter declared that he found no grounds, either in canon law or in any authorities, for his Bishop’s decision. The Mercedarian friars, who also had a community in the diocese, were likewise opposed to the severity of the Bishop, and as none of the colonists were disposed to ruin themselves by liberating the Indians, the situation was a grave one for a Catholic community, for no matter how little in conformity with the Church’s teaching were the daily lives of many, excommunication was intolerable to all of them. Remonstrances and petitions against his trenchant decision poured in upon the Bishop, and the Dean, supported by the Mercedarians, undertook to intercede for the Spaniards and, if possible, to obtain some relaxation of the obnoxious ruling. Their efforts were vain, for the simple reason that Las Casas held that it was not within his competence to recede from his decision without practically denying his life’s mission. As the tension became daily more severe, the colonists addressed to the Bishop, a formal “requirement” drawn up by a notary public, containing arguments to support their claims, based on the terms of the Bull of Alexander VI. and threatening, if he persisted in refusing them the sacraments, to appeal to his metropolitan, the Archbishop of Mexico, and ultimately to the Pope: meanwhile they would denounce him to the King and his Council as a disturber of the public peace and a formenter of dissensions and troubles in the country. To this threat the Bishop answered: “O blind men! How completely does the devil deceive you! Wherefore do you threaten me with your complaints to the Archbishop, to the Pope, and to the King? Know then that though I am obliged by the law of God to do as I do, and you to