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.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." So say your ordinances, and so say the letters of your generals, Aquaviva, Vitelleschi, &c.
We have good reason, therefore, for charging upon you the errors of your associates, when we find they are sanctioned by your superiors and the divines of your Society.With me, however, father, the case stands otherwise.
I have not subscribed to the book of the Holy Virginity.All the alms-boxes in Paris may be broken into, and yet I am not the less a good Catholic for all that.In short, I beg to inform you, in the plainest terms, that nobody is responsible for my letters but myself, and that I am responsible for nothing but my letters.Here, father, I might fairly enough have brought our dispute to an issue, without saying a word about those other persons whom you stigmatize as heretics, in order to comprehend me under the condemnation.
But, as I have been the occasion of their ill treatment, I consider myself bound in some sort to improve the occasion, and I shall take advantage of it in three particulars.One advantage, not inconsiderable in its way, is that it will enable me to vindicate the innocence of so many calumniated individuals.Another, not inappropriate to my subject, will be to disclose, at the same time, the artifices of your policy in this accusation.But the advantage which I prize most of all is that it affords me an opportunity of apprising the world of the falsehood of that scandalous report which you have been so busily disseminating, namely, "that the Church is divided by a new heresy." And as you are deceiving multitudes into the belief that the points on which you are raising such a storm are essential to the faith, I consider it of the last importance to quash these unfounded impressions, and distinctly to explain here what these points are, so as to show that, in point of fact, there are no heretics in the Church.I presume, then, that were the question to be asked: Wherein consists the heresy of those called Jansenists? the immediate reply would be, "These people hold that the commandments of God are impracticable to men, that grace is irresistible, that we have not free will to do either good or evil, that Jesus Christ did not die for all men, but only for the elect; in short, they maintain the five propositions condemned by the Pope." Do you not give it out to all that this is the ground on which you persecute your opponents? Have you not said as much in your books, in your conversations, in your catechisms?
A specimen of this you gave at the late Christmas festival at St.Louis.
One of your little shepherdesses was questioned thus: "For whom did Jesus Christ come into the world, my dear?" "For all men, father." "Indeed, my child; so you are not one of those new heretics who say that he came only for the elect?" Thus children are led to believe you, and many others besides children; for you entertain people with the same stuff in your sermons as Father Crasset did at Orleans, before he was laid under an interdict.
And I frankly own that, at one time, I believed you myself.You had given me precisely the same idea of these good people; so that, when you pressed them on these propositions, I narrowly watched their answer, determined never to see them more, if they did not renounce them as palpable impieties.
