What do you really think now, fathers, of these impious and extravagant expressions? According to them, if we would wait “till there be some hope of amendment” in sinners before granting their absolution, we must wait “till God the Father swear by himself,” that they will never fall into sin any more! What, fathers! is no distinction to be made between _hope_ and _certainty_? How injurious is it to the grace of Jesus Christ, to maintain that it is so impossible for Christians ever to escape from crimes against the laws of God, nature, and the Church, that such a thing cannot be looked for, without supposing “that the Holy Ghost has told a lie;” and if absolution is not granted to those who give no hope of amendment, the blood of Jesus Christ will be useless, forsooth, and “would never be applied to a single soul!” To what a sad pass have you come, fathers, by this extravagant desire of upholding the glory of your authors, when you can find only two ways of justifying them—by imposture or by impiety; and when the most innocent mode by which you can extricate yourselves, is by the barefaced denial of facts as patient as the light of day! This may perhaps account for your having recourse so frequently to that very convenient practice. But this does not complete the sum of your accomplishments in the art of self-defence. To render your opponents odious, you have had recourse to the forging of documents, such as that _Letter of a Minister to M. Arnauld_, which you circulated through all Paris, to induce the belief that the work on Frequent Communion, which had been approved by so many bishops and doctors, but which, to say the truth, was rather against you, had been concocted through secret intelligence with the ministers of Charenton.[275] At other times, you attribute to your adversaries writings full of impiety, such as the _Circular Letter of the Jansenists_, the absurd style of which renders the fraud too gross to be swallowed, and palpably betrays the malice of your Father Meynier, who has the impudence to make use of it for supporting his foulest slanders. Sometimes, again, you will quote books which were never in existence, such as _The Constitution of the Holy Sacrament_, from which you extract passages, fabricated at pleasure, and calculated to make the hair on the heads of certain good simple people, who have no idea of the effrontery with which you can invent and propagate falsehoods, actually to bristle with horror. There is not, indeed, a single species of calumny which you have not put into requisition; nor is it possible that the maxim which excuses the vice could have been lodged in better hands.