My argument was simple, applicable, natural, and pressing:  it offered itself, of itself.  Wherefore, the confessor was amazed by it; he blushed, he beat about the bush, he could not collect himself.  By degrees he did so, and replied to me in a manner that he doubtless thought would convince me at once.  “If the case you suggest were to happen,” he said, “and the Pope declaring for one disputant were to excommunicate the other and all his followers, such excommunication would not merely be unjust, it would be false; and it has never been decided that a false excommunication should hinder us from doing our duty.”

“Ah! my father,” I said, “your distinction is subtle and clever, I admit.  I admit, too, I did not expect it, but permit me some few more objections, I beseech you.  Will the Ultramontanes admit the nullity of the excommunication?  Is it not null as soon as it is unjust?  If the Pope has the power to excommunicate unjustly, and to enforce obedience to his excommunication, who can limit power so unlimited, and why should not his false (or nullified) excommunication be as much obeyed and respected as his unjust excommunication?  Suppose the case I have imagined were to happen.  Suppose the Pope were to excommunicate one of the two brothers.  Do you think it would be easy to make your subtle distinction between a false and an unjust excommunication understood by the people, the soldiers, the bourgeois, the officers, the lords, the women, at the very moment when they would be preparing to act and to take up arms?  You see I point out great inconveniences that may arise if the new doctrine be accepted, and if the Pope should claim the power of deposing kings, disposing of their crowns, and releasing their subjects from the oath of fidelity in opposition to the formal words of Jesus Christ and of all the Scripture.”

My words transported the Jesuit, for I had touched the right spring in spite of his effort to hide it.  He said nothing personal to me, but he fumed.  The more he restrained himself for me the less he did so for the matter in hand.  As though to indemnify himself for his moderation on my, account, he launched out the more, upon the subject we were discussing.  In his heat, no longer master of himself, many things escaped him, silence upon which I am sure he would afterwards have bought very dearly.  He told me so many things of the violence that would be used to make his constitution accepted, things so monstrous, so atrocious, so terrible, and with such extreme passion that I fell into a veritable syncope.  I saw him right in front of me between two candles, only the width of the table between us (I have described elsewhere his horrible physiognomy).  My hearing and my sight became bewildered.  I was seized, while he was speaking, with the full idea of what a Jesuit was.  Here was a man who, by his state and his vows, could hope for nothing for his family or for himself; who could not expect an apple or a glass of wine more than his brethren; who was approaching an age when he would have to render account of all things to God, and who, with studied deliberation and mighty artifice, was going to throw the state and religion into the most terrible flames, and commence a most frightful persecution for questions which affected him in nothing, nor touched in any way the honour of the School of Molina!