Since, then, you can do nothing against me, what good purpose
can it serve to publish so many calumnies, as you and your brethren
are doing, against a class of persons who are in no way implicated
in our disputes? You shall not escape under these subterfuges: you
shall be made to feel the force of the truth in spite of them. How
does the case stand? I tell you that you are ruining Christian
morality by divorcing it from the love of God, and dispensing with its
obligation; and you talk about "the death of Father Mester"- a
person whom I never saw in my life. I tell you that your authors
permit a man to kill another for the sake of an apple, when it would
be dishonourable to lose it; and you reply by informing me that
somebody "has broken into the poor-box at St. Merri!" Again, what
can you possibly mean by mixing me up perpetually with the book On the
Holy Virginity, written by some father of the Oratory, whom I never
saw any more than his book? It is rather extraordinary, father, that
you should thus regard all that are opposed to you as if they were one
person. Your hatred would grasp them all at once, and would hold
them as a body of reprobates, every one of whom is responsible for all
the rest.
There is a vast difference between Jesuits and all their
opponents. There can be no doubt that you compose one body, united
under one head; and your regulations, as I have shown, prohibit you
from printing anything without the approbation of your superiors,
who are responsible for all the errors of individual writers, and
who "cannot excuse themselves by saying that they did not observe
the errors in any publication, for they ought to have observed
them.
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