Especially troublesome to the church were the thousands of baptized Jews in Spain, who had been driven into its fold by the massacres, pulpit denunciations, and legal restrictions to which their race was exposed. Not only the lay new-Christians, but also those who had taken orders or had assumed the monk's garb, continued to observe, more or less openly, the Jewish religious laws. The sophistry of the converts, Paul de Santa Maria and Geronimo de Santa Fé, regarding the testimony in the Old Testament and the Talmudic Agada to the Messiahship of Jesus, the Incarnation of God, the Trinity and other church dogmas, impressed the Marranos but little. In spite of baptism, they remained stiff-necked and blind, _i. e._, true to the faith of their fathers. Don Juan of Castile, at the instigation of his favorite, Alvaro de Luna, who was anxious to strike at his arch-enemies, the new-Christians, complained to Pope Nicholas V of the relapses of the Marranos, and the pontiff knew of no remedy but force. He addressed rescripts to the bishop of Osma and the vicar of Salamanca (November 20th, 1451), empowering them to appoint inquisitors to inquire judicially into cases of new-Christians suspected of Judaizing. The inquisitors were authorized to punish the convicted, imprison them, confiscate their goods and disgrace them, to degrade even priests, and hand them over to the secular arm--a church euphemism for condemning them to the heretic's stake. This was the first spark of the hell-fire of the Inquisition, which perpetrated more inhumanity than all the tyrants and malefactors branded by history. At first this bull seems to have been ineffectual. The times were not ripe for the bloody institution. Besides, the Christians themselves helped to keep up the connection of the baptized Jews with their brethren in race. They denied equal rights to new-Christians of Jewish or Mahometan origin, and wished to exclude them from all posts of honor. Against this antipathy, inherent in the diversity of national elements, the pope was compelled to issue a bull (November 29th, 1451), but it was powerless to uproot the prejudice. It could be removed only by higher culture, not at the dictation of a church chief, even though he boasted of infallibility.