"
What surprises me, therefore, is not the little scrupulosity
with which you load them with crimes of the foulest and falsest
description, but the little prudence you display, by fixing on them
charges so destitute of plausibility. You dispose of sins, it is true,
at your pleasure; but do you mean to dispose of men's beliefs too?
Verily, fathers, if the suspicion of Calvinism must needs fall
either on them or on you, you would stand, I fear, on very ticklish
ground. Their language is as Catholic as yours; but their conduct
confirms their faith, and your conduct belies it. For if you
believe, as well as they do, that the bread is really changed into the
body of Jesus Christ, why do you not require, as they do, from those
whom you advise to approach the altar, that the heart of stone and ice
should be sincerely changed into a heart of flesh and of love? If
you believe that Jesus Christ is in that sacrament in a state of
death, teaching those that approach it to die to the world, to sin,
and to themselves, why do you suffer those to profane it in whose
breasts evil passions continue to reign in all their life and
vigour? And how do you come to judge those worthy to eat the bread
of heaven, who are not worthy to eat that of earth?
Precious votaries, truly, whose zeal is expended in persecuting
those who honour this sacred mystery by so many holy communions, and
in flattering those who dishonour it by so many sacrilegious
desecrations! How comely is it, in these champions of a sacrifice so
pure and so venerable, to collect around the table of Jesus Christ a
crowd of hardened profligates, reeking from their debauchcries; and to
plant in the midst of them a priest, whom his own confessor has
hurried from his obscenities to the altar; there, in the place of
Jesus Christ, to offer up that most holy victim to the God of
holiness, and convey it, with his polluted hands, into mouths as
thoroughly polluted as his own! How well does it become those who
pursue this course "in all parts of the world," in conformity with
maxims sanctioned by their own general to impute to the author of
Frequent Communion, and to the Sisters of the Holy Sacrament, the
crime of not believing in that sacrament!
Even this, however, does not satisfy them.
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