Judge, then, fathers, to which of these kingdoms you belong.You have heard the language of the city of peace, the mystical Jerusalem; and you have heard the language of the city of confusion, which Scripture terms "the spiritual Sodom." Which of these two languages do you understand? which of them do you speak? Those who are on the side of Jesus Christ have, as St.Paul teaches us, the same mind which was also in him; and those who are the children of the devil- ex patre diabolo- who has been a murderer from the beginning, according to the saying of Jesus Christ, follow the maxims of the devil.Let us hear, therefore, the language of your school.I put this question to your doctors: When a person has given me a blow on the cheek, ought I rather to submit to the injury than kill the offender? or may I not kill the man in order to escape the affront?
Kill him by all means- it is quite lawful! exclaim, in one breath, Lessius, Molina, Escobar, Reginald, Filiutius, Baldelle, and other Jesuits.Is that the language of Jesus Christ? One question more:
Would I lose my honour by tolerating a box on the ear, without killing the person that gave it? "Can there be a doubt," cries Escobar, "that so long as a man suffers another to live who has given him a buffet, that man remains without honour?" Yes, fathers, without that honour which the devil transfuses, from his own proud spirit into that of his proud children.This is the honour which has ever been the idol of worldly-minded men.For the preservation of this false glory, of which the god of this world is the appropriate dispenser, they sacrifice their lives by yielding to the madness of duelling; their honour, by exposing themselves to ignominious punishments; and their salvation, by involving themselves in the peril of damnation- a peril which, according to the canons of the Church, deprives them even of Christian burial.We have reason to thank God, however, for having enlightened the mind of our monarch with ideas much purer than those of your theology.His edicts bearing so severely on this subject, have not made duelling a crime- they only punish the crime which is inseparable from duelling.He has checked, by the dread of his rigid justice, those who were not restrained by the fear of the justice of God; and his piety has taught him that the honour of Christians consists in their observance of the mandates of Heaven and the rules of Christianity, and not in the pursuit of that phantom which, airy and unsubstantial as it is, you hold to be a legitimate apology for murder.Your murderous decisions being thus universally detested, it is highly advisable that you should now change your sentiments, if not from religious principle, at least from motives of policy.Prevent, fathers, by a spontaneous condemnation of these inhuman dogmas, the melancholy consequences which may result from them, and for which you will be responsible.And to impress your minds with a deeper horror at homicide, remember that the first crime of fallen man was a murder, committed on the person of the first holy man; that the greatest crime was a murder, perpetrated on the person of the King of saints; and that, of all crimes, murder is the only one which involves in a common destruction the Church and the state, nature and religion.
I have just seen the answer of your apologist to my Thirteenth Letter, but if he has nothing better to produce in the shape of a reply to that letter, which obviates the greater part of his objections, he will not deserve a rejoinder.I am sorry to see him perpetually digressing from his subject, to indulge in rancorous abuse both of the living and the dead.But, in order to gain some credit to the stories with which you have furnished him, you should not have made him publicly disavow a fact so notorious as that of the buffet of Compiegne.Certain it is, fathers, from the deposition of the injured party, that he received upon his cheek a blow from the hand of a Jesuit; and all that your friends have been able to do for you has been to raise a doubt whether he received the blow with the back or the palm of the hand, and to discuss the question whether a stroke on the cheek with the back of the hand can be properly denominated a buffet.I know not to what tribunal it belongs to decide this point; but shall content myself, in the meantime, with believing that it was, to say the very least, a probable buffet.
This gets me off with a safe conscience.
