They went on to compare the labour of the missioners to Penelope's web: to say that our Saint preached more like a Huguenot pastor than a Catholic Priest, and, in fine, that he went so far as to call the heretics his brethren, a thing so scandalous that the Protestants had already conceived great hope of bringing him over to their own party.
The good Bishop, however, better informed as to the real state of the case, paid little heed to this appeal, dictated by a bitter zeal, rather than by the true science of the Saints. He merely exhorted each one to persevere, and to remember that every spirit should praise the Lord according to the talents committed to it by God.
Our Blessed Father, being informed of these complaints made against him to his Bishop, would not defend himself, but commended his cause to the judgment of God, and, silently but hopefully, awaited the result. Nor was his expectation disappointed, for experience soon showed that the too ardent eagerness of these zealots was more likely to delay than to advance the work.
To crown all this, the preachers who had objected to his method had ere long themselves to be set aside as unfit.
On one occasion when I was talking with him and had turned the conversation on this subject, he said to me: "These good people looked through coloured spectacles. They saw all things of the same hue as their own glasses. My predecessor soon found out who were the real hindrances to the conversion of the Protestant Cantons."
On my asking him how he could in reason apply the term "brethren" to persons who certainly are not such, since no one can have God for his Father who has not the Catholic Church for his mother, and since, therefore, those who are not in her bosom cannot be our brethren, he said to me: "Ah! but I never call them brethren without adding the epithet _erring_, a word which marks the distinction with sufficient clearness.
"Besides, they are in fact our brethren by Baptism, which they duly administer and receive. Moreover, they are our brethren according to the flesh, for are we not all children of Adam? Then, too, we are fellow citizens, and subjects of the same earthly prince. Is not that enough to constitute a kind of fraternity between us?