The two friends soon had a large house built, in which they lived happily for a year, using the enslaved Indians to cultivate the plantation and work the mines; for as yet neither of them had a thought that it was wrong to hold slaves, and believed that they were doing their duty to these natives by being kind to them and carefully instructing them in the truths of Christianity.
CHAPTER IV
A NEW LIFE
Las Casas was the only priest on the island of Cuba, and at Pentecost (Whitsunday) he arranged to go and preach and say mass in the new town of Sancti Spiritus. In looking for a text, he came across some verses in the Apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, which made him stop and think whether after all he was right in making the Indians work for him as slaves. These are the verses:
He that sacrificeth of a thing wrongfully gotten, his offering is ridiculous, and the gifts of unjust men are not accepted.
The Most High is not pleased with the offerings of the wicked, neither is He pacified for sin by the multitude of sacrifices.
Whoso bringeth an offering of the goods of the poor doeth as one that killeth the son before the father's eyes.
The bread of the needy is their life; he that defraudeth them thereof is a man of blood.
He that taketh away his neighbor's living slaveth him, and he that defraudeth the laborer of his hire is a bloodshedder.
As Las Casas read these verses he seemed to hear the voice of God speaking to his heart. He remembered Montesino's sermon, he thought of all the cruelties and injustices from which the gentle, helpless Indians suffered. At last his eyes were opened, and he saw plainly that it was neither right to take the lands and the property of the natives nor to hold them as slaves.
For Bartolomé Las Casas to see the right was always to do it. He resolved at once to give up his own Indians and to preach against enslaving them. He knew very well that if he did this they might, and probably would, fall into the hands of those who would not treat them so kindly, but he realized that he could not preach to others against slavery while he continued to possess slaves himself. Therefore he went at once to the governor and told him what he had resolved to do. The governor was very much astonished, and begged Las Casas to consider well what he was doing and at least to take fifteen days to think it over. But Las Casas refused to take even one day, saying that his mind was made up.
Four Dominicans, who had been sent from Hispaniola to found a community, arrived in Cuba about this time. They and Las Casas preached constantly and earnestly on the sin of holding the natives in slavery; but although the Spaniards were frightened, they were not turned from their evil ways, and Las Casas resolved to go to Spain and see if he could not so present the matter to the King that the whole system of dividing up the Indians and their lands among the white men, to be their property, might be done away with.