2. Their barbarousness, which made it proper and necessary that they should serve a refined people.
3. They must be subjugated in order that they might be brought under the True Faith.
4. The weak among them needed protection from the cruelties of the strong, in cannibalism, and in being sacrificed to false gods. Sepulveda argued that more victims were sacrificed to the idols than fell in war, — which statement was doubtless false.
If the sort of Christianity which our age at least believes in, as “full of mercy and of good fruits,” was what was to follow on such a conquest of idolatrous barbarians, these reasons would not have been without weight. The authority of Scripture adduced by Sepulveda was from Deuter. xx. 10-15. Las Casas went deep in his final plea when he urged, in answer, that the cruel deeds related in the Jewish Scriptures were set before us “to be marvelled at and not imitated.”[1] He also affirmed, as from his own experience, that the work of conversion was better advanced by the gentle ways of peace and mercy than by the rage and havoc of war, especially with such mild and childlike natives. The apostle of love had to speak cautiously, with ecclesiastics before him and the Inquisition behind him, when he impugned the well-recognized assumption by the Church of the lawfulness of using force and cruelty in the interest of the true faith. As to the rights of the monarchs of Spain over “the Indies,” he nobly pleaded that these were
- ↑ This single sentence, coming from the ingenuity of the gentle heart of Las Casas, puts him two centuries in advance of his own age as a rationalizing interpreter of the Scriptures. It was a bold interpolation of his own to throw into the Hebrew text the suggestion that it was written to amaze, rather than to guide, subsequent generations. Sepulveda was right in his interpretation of the text for those who believed in its divine, infallible authority. All the reason which sustained it as first used, applied to all like cases afterwards. The text, with inferences from it, as divine teaching — as also many other texts, especially this: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” — was ample warrant to many denominations of Christians in persecuting and cruel proceedings.
