DEVOTION TO THE HEAE.T OP JESUS. $21 



erafed, and iffued a paftoral letter in the year 1781. 

 in which he abolifhed the devotion to the heart of Je- 

 fus in his fees of Piftoia and Prato. This paftoral let- 

 ter is compofed with fo much folidity and unclion, 

 that it was not only reprinted in many cities of Italy, 

 but likewife at Paris and Utrecht in French, at Vienna 

 in German, and is tranflated by John Agemi into Sy- 

 riac, for the ufe of the catholic Drufes. The Loyolites 

 felt themfelves fo much affronted by this procedure, 

 that they moved heaven and hell againft the worthy 

 bifhop. They excited the populace to a dangerous in- 

 furreclion, they publicly decried him as a heretic, 

 ftuck up a paper on the great door of the cathedral, 

 with the words : Orate pro epifcopo noftro heterodoxo, . 

 and blackened him with the grand duke as a wicked 

 Steward of the epifcopal goods. Numbers of his 

 friends forfook him, and with a hundred other princes, 

 not accuftomed to fee with their own eyes, his fall had 

 been certain. 



From the firfl: rife of this devotion, very weighty 

 writings, have at all times appeared againft it, which 

 have as often been enervated and fuppreffed by the 

 prevalence of the authority of the difciples of Loyola. 

 But it was never fo folidly and liberally oppofed as 

 iince the abolition of the fociety, in our own times, 

 and particularly in Italy. What the bifhop Scipione 

 Ricci, in his paftoral letter, what the abbot Marcello 

 del Mare, in his book printed at Piftoia in 17 81. under 

 the title of, Pregiudizi legittimi contro la nuova de- 

 vozione al cuor carneo di Gefu, what the advocate 

 Blah, in his DifTertatia commonitoria fuimet interpres 

 £t vindex, what Giorgi, the general procurator of the 



Auguftine 



