“But your doctors have gone even beyond this; and the license which they have assumed to tamper with the most holy rules of Christian conduct amount to a total subversion of the law of God. They violate ‘the great commandment on which hang all the law and the prophets;’ they strike at the very heart of piety; they rob it of the spirit that giveth life; they hold that to love God is not necessary to salvation; and go so far as to maintain that ‘this dispensation from loving God is the privilege which Jesus Christ has introduced into the world!’ This, sir, is the very climax of impiety. The price of the blood of Jesus Christ paid to obtain us a dispensation from loving him! Before the incarnation, it seems men were obliged to love God: but since ‘God has so loved the world as to give his only-begotten Son,’ the world, redeemed by him, is released from loving him! Strange divinity of our days—to dare to take off the ‘anathema’ which St. Paul denounces on those ‘that love not the Lord Jesus!’ To cancel the sentence of St. John: ‘He that loveth not, abideth in death!’ and that of Jesus Christ himself: ‘He that loveth me not keepeth not my precepts!’ and thus to render those worthy of enjoying God through eternity who never loved God all their life![227] Behold the Mystery of Iniquity fulfilled! Open your eyes at length, my dear father, and if the other aberrations of your casuists have made no impression on you, let these last, by their very extravagance, compel you to abandon them. This is what I desire from the bottom of my heart, for your own sake and for the sake of your doctors; and my prayer to God is, that he would vouchsafe to convince them how false the light must be that has guided them to such precipices; and that he would fill their hearts with that love of himself from which they have dared to give man a dispensation!” After some remarks of this nature, I took my leave of the monk, and I see no great likelihood of my repeating my visits to him. This, however, need not occasion you any regret; for, should it be necessary to continue these communications on their maxims, I have studied their books sufficiently to tell you as much of their morality, and more, perhaps, of their policy, than he could have done himself.—I am, &c. ----- Footnote 204: See before, p. 116. Footnote 205: _Imago Primi Seculi_, l. iii., c. 8. Footnote 206: Esc. tr. 7, a. 4, n. 135; also, Princ., ex. 2, n. 73. Footnote 207: