Hurried as were the proceedings, there was due observance of all the formalities required by the cumbrous methods of the Holy Office. That same day, November 23d, the fiscal presented his _clamosa_, basing it on Morelos having signed the constitutional decree of November 22, 1814, as well as various proclamations condemned as heretical by the Inquisition;[548] also on his celebrating mass while under excommunication, and his reply to the Bishop of Puebla, when reproached for so doing, that it would be easier to get a dispensation after the war than to survive the guillotine; also on an edict of Bishop Abad y Queipo of Mechoacan, July 22, 1814, declaring him to be an excommunicated heretic. There was still time for a morning audience and the prisoner was brought before the tribunal, where he was subjected to the customary examination as to his genealogy and whole career, and the first monition was given to save his soul by confessing the truth. In the afternoon he had his second audience and monition. On the morning of the 24th came the third audience and monition, during which he admitted that, at Teypan, he had captured a package of the edicts against Hidalgo and had utilized them to make cartridges. The pompous formulas, urging him to discharge his conscience so that the Inquisition might show him its customary mercy, must have seemed a ghastly jest to a man who knew that his captors would shortly have him shot, and they contrast grotesquely with the feverish anxiety of the tribunal to have a share in the performance. That same afternoon the fiscal presented the accusation and, considering the haste in which it was prepared, its long accumulation of rhetoric is creditable to the industry of the draughtsman. He describes Morelos as abandoning the Church for the filthy and abominable heresies of Hobbes, Helvetius, Voltaire, Luther and other pestilent writers, rendering him a formal heretic, an apostate from the holy faith, an atheist, materialist, deist, libertine, seditious, guilty of divine and human high treason, an implacable enemy of Christianity and the state, a vile seducer, hypocrite, traitor to king and country, cunning, lascivious, pertinacious and rebellious to the Holy Office. He shows how rebellion is heresy and all rebellious acts are directly or indirectly heretical. To Morelos, in the bottom of his heart, Christ and Belial are equal; he is even suspect of toleration and, as usual, the accusation concludes by asking for confiscation and relaxation. The remainder of the afternoon and the morning audience of the 25th were occupied with the defendant’s answers to the twenty-four articles of the accusation. From what he said it appears that insurgents claimed to be opposing the French domination in Spain, and that Ferdinand’s restoration in 1814 was largely disbelieved or was assumed to be only another phase of Napoleon’s supremacy, showing that Ferdinand could not be a sincere Catholic.