"Forgive my outspokenness," he writes to his friend M. de Fresne, "if my opinion differs totally from yours. No, the Reformation was _not_ an outburst of holy and generous indignation against abuses and infamies. This indignation possessed all the eminent and virtuous men _in_ the church, but it was not to be found among the reformers. The Reformation, on the contrary, came to legalize corruption and bend the precepts of the Gospel to the exigencies of the flesh. Luther was literally the Mahomet of the West. Both acted through the sword: the one established polygamy, the other divorce, a species of polygamy far more fatal to morals than polygamy proper. If you would know what the Reformation really was, look at its founders and abettors, and see if chastity was dear to them. Henry VIII. married six wives, of whom he divorced two and executed two more; Zwinglius took a wife, Beza took a wife, Calvin took a wife, Luther took a wife, the landgrave of Hesse wished to take a second wife during the lifetime of his first, and Luther authorized him to do so. The caustic Erasmus, whose Catholicism was not very strict, could not help saying that the Reformation was a comedy like many others, where everything ended with marriages. The real reformers of the church, those who reformed her not according to the gospel of passion, but the Gospel of Jesus Christ, were S. Charles Borromeo, S. John of the Cross, S. Teresa, S. Ignatius Loyola, and thousands of holy priests and bishops." Not to weary the reader by constant comments on the text which reveals this great Christian thinker's mind, we will append the following significant quotations from his letters with as few breaks as possible. They are gathered from a collection extending over a period of more than thirty years: