I told you before, and I repeat it, violence and verity can make no impression on each other.Never were your accusations more outrageous, and never was the innocence of your opponents more discernible: never has efficacious grace been attacked with greater subtility, and never has it been more triumphantly established.You have made the most desperate efforts to convince people that your disputes involved points of faith; and never was it more apparent that the whole controversy turned upon a mere point of fact.In fine, you have moved heaven and earth to make it appear that this point of fact is founded on truth; and never were people more disposed to call it in question.And the obvious reason of this is that you do not take the natural course to make them believe a point of fact, which is to convince their senses and point out to them in a book the words which you allege are to be found in it.The means you have adopted are so far removed from this straightforward course that the most obtuse minds are unavoidably struck by observing it.Why did you not take the plan which I followed in bringing to light the wicked maxims of your authors- which was to cite faithfully the passages of their writings from which they were extracted?
This was the mode followed by the cures of Paris, and it never fails to produce conviction.But, when you were charged by them with holding, for example, the proposition of Father Lamy, that a "monk may kill a person who threatens to publish calumnies against himself or his order, when he cannot otherwise prevent the publication," what would you have thought, and what would the public have said, if they had not quoted the place where that sentiment is literally to be found? or if, after having been repeatedly demanded to quote their authority, they still obstinately refused to do it? or if, instead of acceding to this, they had gone off to Rome and procured a bull, ordaining all men to acknowledge the truth of their statement?
Would it not be undoubtedly concluded that they had surprised the Pope, and that they would never have had recourse to this extraordinary method, but for want of the natural means of substantiating the truth, which matters of fact furnish to all who undertake to prove them? Accordingly, they had no more to do than to tell us that Father Lamy teaches this doctrine in Book 5, disp.36, n.118, page 544.of the Douay edition; and by this means everybody who wished to see it found it out, and nobody could doubt about it any longer.This appears to be a very easy and prompt way of putting an end to controversies of fact, when one has got the right side of the question.How comes it, then, father, that you do not follow this plan?
You said, in your book, that the five propositions are in Jansenius, word for word, in the identical terms- iisdem verbis.You were told they were not.What had you to do after this, but either to cite the page, if you had really found the words, or to acknowledge that you were mistaken.But you have done neither the one nor the other.In place of this, on finding that all the passages from Jansenius, which you sometimes adduce for the purpose of hoodwinking the people, are not "the condemned propositions in their individual identity," as you had engaged to show us, you present us with Constitutions from Rome, which, without specifying any particular place, declare that the propositions have been extracted from his book.
