They may observe, that the imputations in this fourth Letter are two--king-killing continually practised, and immoral doctrines continually taught by Jesuits: and to this is added a short summary of authorities, by which all this trash is upheld. It would be an easy, but now uninteresting task, to disprove these several imputations; and this has long since been victoriously done. It may suffice to know, that they were all advanced by party men, maddened by civil and religious rage: they are registered only in the murky pages of antiquated libels, and they are here reproduced for the dishonest purpose of blackening virtue, which triumphed over them, when they were fresh. Pamphlets of Hugonots, libels of loose catholics, declamations of rival teachers, who apprehended their own humiliation in the success of the Jesuits, _Plaidoyers_, {306} _Requisitoires_, and harangues of _Pasquiers_ and _Harlays_, sworn enemies of the society, _Arrêts_ of their courts of parliament, ever intent to curtail the spiritual authority of the church, and to abridge the power of the reigning monarch, in order to advance their own. Such are the men, such the passions, which invented accusations of regicide against the Jesuits in France during the horrid confusion of the Hugonotic wars. At the return of public tranquillity, they all sunk into oblivion during the period of one hundred and fifty years, until Jansenism and Deism renewed them, in 1760, and the ensuing years, as a powerful engine to accomplish the utter destruction of their known and common enemies. It is needless to disprove each imputed fact: I will only, for a sample, refute the first, which stands in Laicus's foul calendar. It is the assertion, that the Jesuit Varade was implicated in the guilt of the assassins of Henry IV, Barriere and Chatel. Now Varade was defended and cleared by an advocate, to whom no reply could be made: this was Henry IV himself, who, in his famous answer to the parliamentary president {307} Harlay, vindicated the honour and the innocence of that Jesuit and of all his associates, in a strain of eloquence, which Harlay and his coadjutors felt to be irresistible. The royal orator concluded his victorious defence of his friends, by advising all his hearers to forget the past excesses of civil discord, and not to exasperate smothered passions, by mutual reproaches, into new crimes. The employers of Laicus would do well to follow this advice.