Generals.—It is not enough for them to introduce such morals into our churches, templis inducere mores. Not only do they wish to be tolerated in the Church, but as though they had become the stronger, they would expel those who are not of them....
Mohatra. He who is astonished at this is no theologian.
Who would have told your generals that the time was so near when they would give laws to the Church universal, and would call the refusal of such disorders war, tot et tanta mala pacem.
They cannot have perpetuity, and they seek universality; therefore they make the whole Church corrupt, that they may be saints.
You abuse the credence which the people has in the Church, and make them believe untruth.
I suppose that men believe the miracles:
You corrupt Religion either in favour of your friends, or against your enemies. You dispose of all at your will.
So that if it be true on the one hand that some lax religious, and some corrupt casuists, who are not members of the hierarchy, are steeped in these corruptions, it is on the other hand certain that the true pastors of the Church, who are the true depositories of the divine word, have preserved it unchangeably against the efforts of those who have striven to ruin it.
And thus the faithful have no pretext to follow that laxity which is only offered them by the stranger hands of these casuists, instead of the sound doctrine which is presented to them by the fatherly hands of their own pastors. And the wicked and heretics have no reason to put forward these abuses as marks of the defective providence of God over his Church, since the Church having her true existence in the body of the hierarchy, it is so far from the present condition of things being a proof that God has abandoned her to corruption, that it has never so plainly appeared as at the present day that God visibly defends her from corruption.
For if some of these men, who by an extraordinary vocation have made profession of retirement from the world, and have adopted the religious dress, that they might live in a more perfect state than ordinary Christians, have fallen into disorders which horrify ordinary Christians, and have become among us what the false prophets were among the Jews; this is a private and personal matter, which we must indeed deplore, but from which we can conclude nothing against the care which God takes for his Church; since all these things are so clearly foretold, and it has been long since announced that temptations would arise on account of such persons, so that when we are well instructed we see therein rather the notes of the guidance of God than his forgetfulness in regard to us.