On the 22nd of March in the same year the council wrote to the tribunal of the provinces, that it had remarked, in one of the trials, that certain writings had not been digested in the places where the facts mentioned had happened; whence they concluded that these formalities had not been fulfilled at the proper time, but at the moment when the proceedings were to begin: the council then recommended them to avoid these abuses, as contrary to the instructions. But the orders of the council were not obeyed: the same irregularity was renewed, and produced another still more dangerous, which during my time had the most serious consequences. In order to supply what might be omitted in the course of the trial, the inquisitors adopted the custom of writing each act, declaration, and deposition, on separate sheets of paper. As in these tribunals they did not make use of stamped paper, and as the pieces of the process were not numbered, it often happened that those which they wished to conceal from the council, the diocesan in ordinary, or other interested parties, were changed or suppressed. This manoeuvre was employed by the inquisitors in the affair of the Archbishop of Toledo, Carranza, and I have myself seen several attestations of the secretary changed at the request of the inquisitors of Madrid. The circular of the 11th of July in the same year is more remarkable, and had more success than the preceding. The inquisitors of the provinces were directed to refer to the Supreme Council all sentences pronounced without the unanimity of the inquisitors, the diocesan and the consulters, even supposing that there was only one dissentient voice. The inquisitors were afterwards obliged to consult the council on all the judgments which they passed; and I must confess that this measure was extremely useful, because, in a difference of opinion, the decisions of the _supreme_ were much more just than those of the tribunals of the provinces, from being composed of a greater number of enlightened judges. The council displayed the same love of justice in 1536, when it decreed that those convicted of making use of gold, silver, silk, or precious stones, should be punished by pecuniary fines, and not by fire, although they had been prohibited from so doing on pain of being _relaxed_.