第67章

And yet, provided this metaphysical comparison be not drawn, any one may, according to your authors, give away a benefice, and receive money in return for it, without being guilty of simony.Such is the way in which you sport with religion, in order to gratify the worst passions of men; and yet only see with what gravity your Father Valentia delivers his rhapsodies in the passage cited in my letters.He says: "One may give a spiritual for a temporal good in two ways- first, in the way of prizing the temporal more than the spiritual, and that would be simony; secondly, in the way of taking the temporal as the motive and end inducing one to give away the spiritual, but without prizing the temporal more than the spiritual, and then it is not simony.And the reason is that simony consists in receiving something temporal as the just price of what is spiritual.If, therefore, the temporal is sought- si petatur temporale- not as the price, but only as the motive determining us to part with the spiritual, it is by no means simony, even although the possession of the temporal may be principally intended and expected- minime erit simonia, etiamsi temporale principaliter intendatur et expectetur." Your redoubtable Sanchez has been favoured with a similar revelation; Escobar quotes him thus: "If one give a spiritual for a temporal good, not as the price, but as a motive to induce the collator to give it, or as an acknowledgement if the benefice has been actually received, is that simony? Sanchez assures us that it is not." In your Caen Theses of 1644 you say: "It is a probable opinion, taught by many Catholics, that it is not simony to exchange a temporal for a spiritual good, when the former is not given as a price." And as to Tanner, here is his doctrine, exactly the same with that of Valentia; and I quote it again to show you how far wrong it is in you to complain of me for saying that it does not agree with that of St.Thomas, for he avows it himself in the very passage which I quoted in my letter: "There is properly and truly no simony," says he, "unless when a temporal good is taken as the price of a spiritual;but when taken merely as the motive for giving the spiritual, or as an acknowledgement for having received it, this is not simony, at least in point of conscience." And again: "The same thing may be said, although the temporal should be regarded as the principal end, and even preferred to the spiritual; although St.Thomas and others appear to hold the reverse, inasmuch as they maintain it to be downright simony to exchange a spiritual for a temporal good, when the temporal is the end of the transaction."Such, then, being your doctrine on simony, as taught by your best authors, who follow each other very closely in this point, it only remains now to reply to your charges of misrepresentation.You have taken no notice of Valentia's opinion, so that his doctrine stands as it was before.But you fix on that of Tanner, maintaining that he has merely decided it to be no simony by divine right; and you would have it to be believed that, in quoting the passage, I have suppressed these words, divine right.This, fathers, is a most unconscionable trick; for these words, divine right, never existed in that passage.You add that Tanner declares it to be simony according to positive right.But you are mistaken; he does not say that generally, but only of particular cases, or, as he expresses it, in casibus a jure expressis, by which he makes an exception to the general rule he had laid down in that passage, "that it is not simony in point of conscience,"which must imply that it is not so in point of positive right, unless you would have Tanner made so impious as to maintain that simony, in point of positive right, is not simony in point of conscience.But it is easy to see your drift in mustering up such terms as "divine right, positive right, natural right, internal and external tribunal, expressed cases, outward presumption," and others equally little known; you mean to escape under this obscurity of language, and make us lose sight of your aberrations.