The Church authorities were this time not slow to act. On the 14th of February Mgr Amette, the new archbishop of Paris, prohibited his diocesans to read or defend the two books, which "attack and deny several fundamental dogmas of Christianity," under pain of excommunication. The abbé again declared "it is impossible for me honestly and sincerely to make the act of absolute retractation and submission exacted by the sovereign pontiff." And the Holy Office, on the 7th of March, pronounced the major excommunication against him. At the end of March Loisy published _Quelques Lettres_ (December 1903-February 1908), which conclude: "At bottom I have remained in my last writings on the same line as in the earlier ones. I have aimed at establishing principally the historical position of the various questions, and secondarily the necessity for reforming more or less the traditional concepts." Three chief causes appear jointly to have produced M. Loisy's very absolute condemnation. Any frank recognition of the abbé's even general principles involves the abandonment of the identification of theology with scholasticism or even with specifically ancient thought in general. The abbé's central position, that our Lord himself held the proximateness of His second coming, involves the loss by churchmen of the prestige of directly divine power, since Church and Sacraments, though still the true fruits and vehicles of his life, death and spirit, cannot thus be immediately founded by the earthly Jesus himself. And the Church policy, as old as the times of Constantine, to crush utterly the man who brings more problems and pressure than the bulk of traditional Christians can, at the time, either digest or resist with a fair discrimination, seemed to the authorities the one means to save the very difficult situation.