What interest has the state, or the pope, or
bishops, or doctors, or the Church at large, in this conclusion? It
does not affect them in any way whatever, father; it can affect none
but your Society, which would certainly enjoy some pleasure from the
defamation of an author who has done you some little injury. Meanwhile
everything is in confusion, because you have made people believe
that everything is in danger. This is the secret spring giving impulse
to all those mighty commotions, which would cease immediately were the
real state of the controversy once known. And therefore, as the
peace of the Church depended on this explanation, it was, I
conceive, of the utmost importance that it should be given that, by
exposing all your disguises, it might be manifest to the whole world
that your accusations were without foundation, your opponents
without error, and the Church without heresy.
Such, father, is the end which it has been my desire to
accomplish; an end which appears to me, in every point of view, so
deeply important to religion that I am at a loss to conceive how those
to whom you furnish so much occasion for speaking can contrive to
remain in silence. Granting that they are not affected with the
personal wrongs which you have committed against them, those which the
Church suffers ought, in my opinion, to have forced them to
complain. Besides, I am not altogether sure if ecclesiastics ought
to make a sacrifice of their reputation to calumny, especially in
the matter of religion.
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