even banished Manrique, the inquisitor-general, who was compelled to retire to his diocese, and died there. Charles did more than this. He addressed to the Holy Office, July 18, 1534, an ordinance prohibiting the arrest of a monk before laying the evidence before the council and awaiting its orders. But the emperor, all-powerful as he was, was not powerful enough to snatch a victim from the Inquisition. Virves, whose only crime was that of being a pious and moderate Catholic, had to undergo for four years all the horrors of a secret prison. He says himself that they hardly gave him leave to breathe. The inquisitors overwhelmed him with accusations, with interdictions, with libels and with words, he says, which one can not hear without being terrified. He adds that he was charged with errors, heresies, blasphemies, anathemas, schism, and other similar monstrosities. To convince them, he undertook labors which might be likened to those of Hercules. He exhibited the points which he had drawn up by way of preparation for an attack on Melanchthon before the diet of Ratisbon. But all was useless. The tribunal condemned him in 1537 to abjure all heresies, among others those of Luther, to be confined in a monastery for two years, and to abstain from preaching for two years after his liberation. The poor man had to appear in the cathedral of Seville, and to retract, among other propositions, the following:--'A life of action is more meritorious than a life of contemplation.--A larger number of Christians are saved in the married state than in all other states.' Charles the Fifth, determined at all cost to rescue his chaplain from imprisonment, applied to the pope, who by a brief of May 29, 1538, ordered that Virves should be set at liberty, and be again allowed to preach. Charles now nominated him bishop of the Canary Islands. After some hesitation, the pope consented to the appointment, and in 1540, the heretic was invested with the episcopal mitre. In the following year he published at Antwerp his _Philippicæ Disputationes_, in which his objections to the doctrines of Luther are set forth. In the same book, however, he asserted that heretics ought not to be ill-used, but persuaded, and this especially by setting before them the testimonies of Holy Scripture; because _all Scripture given by inspiration of God is profitable_, says St. Paul, _for doctrine, for reproof, for correction_. Alfonso Virves was one of those Spaniards whom the Inquisition prevented from becoming evangelical, but could not succeed in making papistical and ultramontane.[41]