How are you to get at a person who talks in this way, father? On
what quarter will you assail me, since neither my words nor my
writings afford the slightest handle to your accusations, and the
obscurity in which my person is enveloped forms my protection
against your threatenings? You feel yourselves smitten by an invisible
hand- a hand, however, which makes your delinquencies visible to all
the earth; and in vain do you endeavour to attack me in the person
of those with whom you suppose me to be associated. I fear you not,
either on my own account or on that of any other, being bound by no
tie either to a community or to any individual whatsoever. All the
influence which your Society possesses can be of no avail in my
case. From this world I have nothing to hope, nothing to dread,
nothing to desire. Through the goodness of God, I have no need of
any man's money or any man's patronage. Thus, my father, I elude all
your attempts to lay hold of me. You may touch Port-Royal, if you
choose, but you shall not touch me. You may turn people out of the
Sorbonne, but that will not turn me out of my domicile. You may
contrive plots against priests and doctors, but not against me, for
I am neither the one nor the other. And thus, father, you never
perhaps had to do, in the whole course of your experience, with a
person so completely beyond your reach, and therefore so admirably
qualified for dealing with your errors- one perfectly free- one
without engagement, entanglement, relationship, or business of any
kind- one, too, who is pretty well versed in your maxims, and
determined, as God shall give him light, to discuss them, without
permitting any earthly consideration to arrest or slacken his
endeavours.
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