In the mean while, I shall make no remarks on the advertisements which you have tagged to the end of each of your charges, filled as they are with scandalous falsehoods. I mean to answer all these in a separate letter, in which I hope to show the weight due to your calumnies. I am sorry fathers, that you should have recourse to such desperate resources. The abusive terms which you heap on me will not clear up our disputes, nor will your manifold threats hinder me from defending myself. You think you have power and impunity on your side; and I think that I have truth and innocence on mine. It is a strange and tedious war, when violence attempts to vanquish truth. All the efforts of violence cannot weaken truth, and only serve to give it fresh vigor. All the lights of truth cannot arrest violence, and only serve to exasperate it. When force meets force, the weaker must succumb to the stronger; when argument is opposed to argument, the solid and the convincing triumphs over the empty and the false; but violence and verity can make no impression on each other. Let none suppose, however, that the two are, therefore, equal to each other; for there is this vast difference between them, that violence has only a certain course to run, limited by the appointment of Heaven, which overrules its effects to the glory of the truth which it assails; whereas verity endures forever, and eventually triumphs over its enemies, being eternal and almighty as God himself.[247] ----- Footnote 241: Pierre du Moulin is termed by Bayle “one of the most celebrated ministers which the Reformed Church in France ever had to boast of.” He was born in 1568, and was for some time settled in Paris; but having incurred the resentment of Louis XIII., he retired to Sedan in 1623, where he became a professor in the Protestant University, and died, in the ninetieth year of his age, in 1658, two years after the time when Pascal wrote. Of his numerous writings, few are known in this country, excepting his “Buckler of the Faith,” and his “Anatomy of the Mass,” which were translated into English. (Quick’s Synodicon, ii., 105.) Footnote 242: De Eleemosyna, c. 6. Footnote 243: See before, page 73. Footnote 244: See before, page 140. Footnote 245: See before, p. 177. Footnote 246: “The Parliament of Paris was originally the court of the kings of France, to which they committed the supreme administration of justice.” (Robertson’s Charles V., vol. i. 171.) Footnote 247: