THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS.--The wicked, sir, are never at a loss for reasons. You are, I repeat, absolutely destroying yourself, for the Abbé de St. Cyran, who has not performed any miracles, and the Abbé Paris, who performed some in St. Médard.... 3. Before the abbé had finished his speech, the merchant drove him out of his counting-house; and after having legally lent his money, to the last penny, went to represent the conversation between himself and the abbé, to the magistrates, who forbade the Jansenists from propagating a doctrine so pernicious to commerce. "Gentlemen," said the chief bailiff, "give us of efficacious grace as much as you please, of predestination as much as you please, and of communion as little as you please; on these points you are masters; but take care not to meddle with the laws of commerce." INTOLERANCE. Read the article on "Intolerance" in the great "Encyclopædia." Read the treatise on "Toleration" composed on occasion of the dreadful assassination of John Calas, a citizen of Toulouse; and if, after that, you allow of persecution in matters of religion, compare yourself at once to Ravaillac. Ravaillac, you know, was highly intolerant. The following is the substance of all the discourses ever delivered by the intolerant: You monster; you will be burned to all eternity in the other world, and whom I will myself burn as soon as ever I can in this, you really have the insolence to read de Thou and Bayle, who have been put into the index of prohibited authors at Rome! When I was preaching to you in the name of God, how Samson had killed a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, your head, still harder than the arsenal from which Samson obtained his arms, showed me by a slight movement from left to right that you believed nothing of what I said. And when I stated that the devil Asmodeus, who out of jealousy twisted the necks of the seven husbands of Sarah among the Medes, was put in chains in upper Egypt, I saw a small contraction of your lips, in Latin called _cachinnus_ (a grin) which plainly indicated to me that in the bottom of your soul you held the history of Asmodeus in derision.