Published it shall be, fathers, and all your
policy will be inadequate to save you from the disgrace; for the
efforts which you may make to avert the blow will only serve to
convince the most obtuse observers that you were terrified out of your
wits, and that, your consciences anticipating the charges I had to
bring against you, you have put every oar in the water to prevent
the discovery.
LETTER XVI
TO THE REVEREND FATHERS, THE JESUITS
December 4, 1656
REVEREND FATHERS,
I now come to consider the rest of your calumnies, and shall begin
with those contained in your advertisements, which remain to be
noticed. As all your other writings, however, are equally well stocked
with slander, they will furnish me with abundant materials for
entertaining you on this topic as long as I may judge expedient. In
the first place, then, with regard to the fable which you have
propagated in all your writings against the Bishop of Ypres, I beg
leave to say, in one word, that you have maliciously wrested the
meaning of some ambiguous expressions in one of his letters which,
being capable of a good sense, ought, according to the spirit of the
Gospel, to have been taken in good part, and could only be taken
otherwise according to the spirit of your Society. For example, when
he says to a friend, "Give yourself no concern about your nephew; I
will furnish him with what he requires from the money that lies in
my hands," what reason have you to interpret this to mean that he
would take that money without restoring it, and not that he merely
advanced it with the purpose of replacing it? And how extremely
imprudent was it for you to furnish a refutation of your own lie, by
printing the other letters of the Bishop of Ypres, which clearly
show that, in point of fact, it was merely advanced money, which he
was bound to refund.
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