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At the beginning of the sixteenth century fresh attempts were being made to win back the Brethren to orthodoxy; and in this work the ardour of the Dominicans burned bright.
Then arose the tender and loving Francis, with his call to poverty and to service. The independent exercise of the intellect gave birth to heresies, but the Dominicans appeared to preach them down. The growth of the secular spirit and the progress of the new learning were too much for the old monasticism.
Negroes already existed there; the priests perceived their value, and that the introduction of a greater number would both improve the colony and diminish the anti-slavery agitation of the Dominicans.
Among the Dominicans from Cologne, most of whom were also asleep, there were none she would have trusted, nay, she even thought that one was the very person who, shortly before her fall from the rope, had pursued her with persistent importunity. But the Abbot of St. AEgidius in Nuremberg, who had dined with the ambassadors from his native city, was also a man of benevolent, winning expression.
The Dominicans were first established in 1225, in S. Giacomo in Peline, a small, roughly constructed church high on the hill, which has a fourteenth-century Madonna over the altar. Tradition says that S. Dominic himself established the community. The present church was building in 1297, and was consecrated in 1306.
Among the Colleoni statue's great admirers was Robert Browning, who never tired of telling the story of the hero to those unacquainted with it. The vast church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo does for the Dominicans what the Frari does for the Franciscans; the two churches being the Venetian equivalents of Florence's S. Maria Novella and Santa Croce.
The Dominicans were kept back with him, as he was their vicar-general, but the Franciscans went, and with them Father Luis Cancer, taking with him a copy of the new laws. These laws were a great triumph for Las Casas, and their acceptance was due to his wonderful personal influence. The clerico was now seventy years old. He had crossed the ocean twelve times.
But Italy at that moment was filled with religious enthusiasm by the advent of the Friars both great orders of whom, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, had already established themselves in the rising commercial city of Florence. Both orders had acquired sites for monastic buildings in the space outside the walls and soon began to erect enormous churches.
When the news of this revolt of the natives was heard at San Domingo, the officers of the colony resolved to send an expedition to avenge the murder of the Dominicans, and a captain, named Ocampo, was placed in command of it. This force started at once, and had reached Porto Rico when Las Casas and his laborers landed.
However, this accomplished nothing, as neither Father Montesino, the Prior of the little community, nor any of the brotherhood was at all moved by their threats, and all they obtained from the Dominicans was an agreement that Father Montesino should preach again the next Sunday and endeavor to please his congregation as far as his conscience would permit.
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