There is but one religion in the world, our Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Religion, apart from which there can be but darkness and damnation.

I quite understand that what you mean to imply is a return to early Christianity.

But the error of so-called Protestantism, so culpable and so deplorable in its consequences, never had any other pretext.

As soon as one departs from the strict observance of dogma and absolute respect for tradition one sinks into the most frightful precipices....

Ah! schism, schism, my son, is a crime beyond forgiveness, an assassination of the true God, a device of the loathsome Beast of Temptation which Hell sends into the world to work the ruin of the faithful! If your book contained nothing beyond those words 'a new religion,' it would be necessary to destroy and burn it like so much poison fatal in its effects upon the human soul." He continued at length on this subject, while Pierre recalled what Don Vigilio had told him of those all-powerful Jesuits who at the Vatican as elsewhere remained in the background, secretly but none the less decisively governing the Church.