Page:Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent Buckley.djvu/393

360 and this a most noble city, then is our lamentation to be redoubled and greater anxiety to be felt.

It was not truly in distant lands, but in the very central light of Italy, under the eyes of the city, and nigh the threshold of the apostles; it was a bishop distinguished by the honour of a double see (Scipio de Ricini, formerly bishop of Pistoria and Prato), whom, when he came to us for the purpose of taking on him his pastoral function, we embraced with paternal charity, who in turn sealed the attachment and obedience due to us and to this Apostolic See, at the very rite of his sacred ordination, by the sacredness of a solemn oath.

And that same person, not long after that, being dismissed from our embrace with the kits of peace, he came to the people committed to his care, circumvented by the wiles of the masters of a perverse philosophy assembled around him, began to apply his mind to this, not to defend, cultivate, and perfect, as he ought to do, that praiseworthy and peaceful arm of the Christian institution, which former prelates had, according to the ecclesiastical rule, long sinceinmtroduced, and in a manner established, but on the contrary, under the mask of a feigned reformation, by introducing unseasonable novelties, he disturbed, convulsed, and tore it up from the foundation.

Nay more, when even by our exhortation he directed his attention to the diocesan synod, it was effected by his refractory pertinaciousness in his own way of thinking, that from that quarter whence some remedy of the wounds was to be sought, more disastrous ruin sprung forth. Indeed, after this Synod of Pestoria burst forth from its lurking-place, in which it lay concealed for a considerable time, there was no person entertaining a pious and wise sentiment concerning the interests of religion, who did not forthwith perceive that the intention of the authors was, that the seeds of perverse doctrines, which they had before scattered by pamphlets of various kinds, they should condense as it were into one body, should resuscitate errors long since proscribed, and take away credit and authority from the apostolic decrees in which they were proscribed.

When we saw that these things, in proportion as they are the more alarming in themselves, so much the more urgently