“When, on the 17th of this month, I had the honour of being received by Your Eminence, I feared to trespass on your paternal kindness and on your pastoral clemency by expounding at sufficient length the matter about which I came to converse with you. But as this affair reflects on your high and holy jurisdiction and concerns the government of this diocese, which counts among the most ancient and beautiful provinces of Christian Gaul, I conceive it to be my duty to submit to the watchful impartiality of Your Eminence the facts concerning which it is called upon to judge in the plenitude of its authority and in the fulness of its wisdom. “In bringing these facts to the knowledge of Your Eminence, I am fulfilling a duty which I should characterise as painful to my heart, if I did not know that the accomplishment of every duty brings to the soul an inexhaustible spring of consolation, and that it is not enough to obey God, if one does not obey Him with ready gladness. “The facts which it behoves you to know, Monseigneur, relate to Abbé Guitrel, professor of rhetoric at the high seminary. I will state them as briefly and as accurately as possible. “These facts concern: “First, the doctrine; “Second, the morals of Abbé Guitrel. “I will first state the facts relating to M. Guitrel’s doctrine. “On reading the note-books from which he delivers his lectures on sacred rhetoric, I noticed in them various opinions which do not agree with the tradition of the Church. “First, M. Guitrel, whilst condemning as to their conclusions the commentaries on Holy Scripture drawn up by atheists and so-called reformers, does not condemn them in their principle and origin, in which he is seriously in error. For it is evident that, the care of the Scriptures having been confided to the Church, the Church alone is capable of interpreting the books which she alone preserves. “Second, led astray by the recent example of a monk who thirsted for the applause of the age, M. Guitrel presumes to explain the scenes of the Gospel by means of that pretended local colour and that pseudo-psychology of which the Germans make a great show; and he does not perceive that, by thus walking in the way of infidels, he is skirting the abyss into which they have fallen. I should weary the benevolent attention of His Eminence Monseigneur the Cardinal-Archbishop were I to place before his reverend glance the passages where M. Guitrel with pitiable childishness follows the narratives of travellers, as to ‘the boat-service on the Lake of Tiberias,’ and those where, with intolerable indecency, he describes what he calls ‘the soul-states’ and ‘the psychic crises’ of our Lord Jesus Christ.