103. [103.] A different result occurred, however, with his successor, Benedict XIV.* He declared that he had confirmed in his heart that because the Lord had transferred all power over the heavens to Peter, the Lord had no power left, and consequently no longer any holiness. I saw him speaking with Sixtus V,** who was summoned up from below, but afterward sank down again. I heard him saying something about the Word and still more about the Bull Unigenitus,*** but we do not have the space here to present what he said. Benedict was a clever man, and I found him at first civil, then perceptive. He loved the Jesuits more than other orders. He also descended to Jesuits in their hell, and have I not seen him ascend from there as yet. Neither do I much suppose he will ascend, as he said he had confirmed and supported the Bull Unigenitus, because to his mind, he said, the Holy Scripture was not equal to papal dictate but lesser. When it was shown to him that the Word was sacred in every one of its expressions, and that these constituted an end less series of correspondent forms, and that the Word consequently served the whole of heaven, he regarded this as of no account, saying that a papal dictate had the same sacred character. However, he was told that in every pronouncement that the Pope makes in Consistory there is something which draws its character from an infernal love of ruling over heaven and earth, and of claiming Divine power for self and so of being worshiped in place of God, and such a pronouncement has in it hell and not heaven. He was also shown what kind of spirits dictate the pronouncement, and who then swell and stir the breast, namely, that they are hellish spirits who in heart wish to be hailed as the Holy Spirit. But he reasoned in opposition to this. * Benedict XIV (born Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini), 1675-1758, Italian ecclesiastic, pope 1740-1758, remembered as a scholar and patron of the arts. ** Sixtus V (born Felice Peretti), 1521-1590, Italian ecclesiastic, pope 1585-1590. *** A papal bull issued by Clement XI on September 8, 1713, a well-known and controversial document in the 18th century, condemning 101 propositions extracted from Pasquier Quesnel's Reflexions Morales. Quesnel (1634-1719) was a French Jansenist.