as God shall give him light, to discuss them, without permitting any earthly consideration to arrest or slacken his endeavors. Since, then, you can do nothing against me, what good purpose can it serve to publish so many calumnies, as you and your brethren are doing, against a class of persons who are in no way implicated in our disputes? You shall not escape under these subterfuges: you shall be made to feel the force of the truth in spite of them. How does the case stand? I tell you that you are ruining Christian morality by divorcing it from the love of God, and dispensing with its obligation; and you talk about “the death of Father Mester”—a person whom I never saw in my life. I tell you that your authors permit a man to kill another for the sake of an apple, when it would be dishonorable to lose it; and you reply by informing me that somebody “has broken into the poor’s box at St. Merri!” Again, what can you possibly mean by mixing me up perpetually with the book “On the Holy Virginity,” written by some father of the Oratory, whom I never saw, any more than his book?[323] It is rather extraordinary, father, that you should thus regard all that are opposed to you as if they were one person. Your hatred would grasp them all at once, and would hold them as a body of reprobates, every one of whom is responsible for all the rest. There is a vast difference between Jesuits and all their opponents. There can be no doubt that you compose one body, united under one head; and your regulations, as I have shown, prohibit you from printing anything without the approbation of your superiors, who are responsible for all the errors of individual writers, and who “cannot excuse themselves by saying that they did not observe the errors in any publication, for they ought to have observed them.” So say your ordinances, and so say the letters of your generals, Aquaviva, Vitelleschi, &c. We have good reason, therefore, for charging upon you the errors of your associates, when we find they are sanctioned by your superiors and the divines of your Society. With me, however, father, the case stands otherwise. I have not subscribed the book of the Holy Virginity. All the alms-boxes in Paris may be broken into, and yet I am not the less a good Catholic for all that. In short, I beg to inform you, in the plainest terms, that nobody is responsible for my letters but myself, and that I am responsible for nothing but my letters.