Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet.
Horace.
SIR;
I might spare myself the trouble of answering your fifth, concluding Letter, because I believe it will be read by few, and credited by none. You seem afraid of being called an alarmist. Good Sir, be easy. No man of common information, or of common sense, will catch the alarm of danger from your pretended conclusions. Your impotent cries of danger to church and state are like the cries of a madman, who should scream out "Fire, Fire," in the midst of a deluge[[116]]. Thus, even if your
pretended conclusions descended in a right order of logic from your premises, the slightest view of the present state of things would convince every thinking man of the inutility of taking precautions, where no danger can possibly exist. But what must every thinking man conclude, when he knows, that your miserable inferences descend from a mass of forgeries, calumnies, imputations equally groundless and malicious; when he traces them up to a string of gratuitous suppositions, wantonly assumed and totally devoid of proof? If he has looked into my four Letters, he has recoiled with disgust from that sink of ribaldry, inconsistency, contradiction, and falsehood, which provoked them; and he has said, that though Clericus has swept away only a part of the dirt, which you have collected, he has sufficiently showed, that the rest, which he has left untouched, is equally odious and noisome. In fact, upon a slight review of your audacious criminations, I cannot discover even one, which is supported by truth; no, not one, which I would not undertake to brand with the stigma of falsehood.
And what then can engage me to meddle with your final observations and inferences? Certainly not the apprehension, that men of sense and knowledge will ever acquiesce in them; but because they are all intended to feed some of the worst passions, that canker the human heart, to gratify disappointed anger, fretful jealousy, and revengeful spite. That these sour passions are apt to rankle in narrow hearts is not a novelty. I have caught them, in late years, venting themselves against your enemies the Jesuits, through newspapers and other prints, in tales nearly as absurd and fictitious, as was the alarming story in the reign of Charles II, of thirty thousand pilgrims and lay brothers, embodied at St. Andero, ready to invade old England under the conduct of the general of the Jesuits. Now your monstrous stories coming upon the back of these fables, must lead every man of sense to conclude, that not the consideration of public security, but the accomplishment of some private view must have prompted this wantonness of slander. But
supposing for an instant, that all and each of your random accusations of ancient Jesuits were as true, as all and each are undeniably false; allowing that your columns in the Times could arrest a reader, unacquainted with continental history, in a state of hesitation and doubt; yet he must at least say: "These bad men, like the ancient giants, have been exterminated, they have long since disappeared, we have survived their criminal practices, why is the alarm bell sounded in the present times?"—"But," cries Laicus, "there once was a body of English Jesuits, and, during the whole term of their existence, 'our fathers spent restless nights and uneasy days. Dr. Sherlocke, living under dread of popery and arbitrary power, could enjoy no repose, when every morning threatened to usher in the last dawn of England's liberty.' I trust this quotation will not be without its use[[117]]." "Yes, these English Jesuits laid upon us 'a yoke, which was too heavy for
our fathers to bear,' and the pope is again trying to fasten it upon our shoulders." &c.[[118]]