His protests, however, were met by the government in an ill-humoured and disdainful way. It affected, indeed, to pay no attention to them. The most serious of the conflicts broke out over the General Seminary, founded at Leuven in 1786 by the emperor, and to which he ordered the bishops to send their students, closing at the same time their diocesan seminaries. The heretical teaching of the professors in this new institution, and the avowed purpose of using it as an instrument of ecclesiastical reform and a weapon against "ultramontanism", soon provoked among the students an agitation that ended in a general dispersion. The irritated emperor, forthwith, summoned the cardinal to Vienna to intimidate him by means, as he wrote to Kaunitz, "of those vigorous and unanswerable arguments of which you know so well how to make use".