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 {318} 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. {319}

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 priv