第68章

But, fathers, you shall not escape by these vain artifices; for I shall put some questions to you so simple, that they will not admit of coming under your distinguo.I ask you, then, without speaking of "positive rights,"of "outward presumptions," or "external tribunals"- I ask if, according to your authors, a beneficiary would be simoniacal, were he to give a benefice worth four thousand livres of yearly rent, and to receive ten thousand francs ready money, not as the price of the benefice, but merely as a motive inducing him to give it? Answer me plainly, fathers: What must we make of such a case as this according to your authors? Will not Tanner tell us decidedly that "this is not simony in point of conscience, seeing that the temporal good is not the price of the benefice, but only the motive inducing to dispose of it?" Will not Valentia, will not your own Theses of Caen, will not Sanchez and Escobar, agree in the same decision and give the same reason for it? Is anything more necessary to exculpate that beneficiary from simony? And, whatever might be your private opinion of the case, durst you deal with that man as a simonist in your confessionals, when he would be entitled to stop your mouth by telling you that he acted according to the advice of so many grave doctors? Confess candidly, then, that, according to your views, that man would be no simonist; and, having done so, defend the doctrine as you best can.Such, fathers, is the true mode of treating questions, in order to unravel, instead of perplexing them, either by scholastic terms, or, as you have done in your last charge against me here, by altering the state of the question.Tanner, you say, has, at any rate, declared that such an exchange is a great sin; and you blame me for having maliciously suppressed this circumstance, which, you maintain, "completely justifies him." But you are wrong again, and that in more ways than one.For, first, though what you say had been true, it would be nothing to the point, the question in the passage to which I referred being, not if it was sin, but if it was simony.Now, these are two very different questions.Sin, according to your maxims, obliges only to confession- simony obliges to restitution;and there are people to whom these may appear two very different things.

You have found expedients for making confession a very easy affair; but you have not fallen upon ways and means to make restitution an agreeable one.Allow me to add that the case which Tanner charges with sin is not simply that in which a spiritual good is exchanged for a temporal, the latter being the principal end in view, but that in which the party "prizes the temporal above the spiritual," which is the imaginary case already spoken of.And it must be allowed he could not go far wrong in charging such a case as that with sin, since that man must be either very wicked or very stupid who, when permitted to exchange the one thing for the other, would not avoid the sin of the transaction by such a simple process as that of abstaining from comparing the two things together.Besides, Valentia, in the place quoted, when treating the question- if it be sinful to give a spiritual good for a temporal, the latter being the main consideration-and after producing the reasons given for the affirmative, adds, "Sed hoc non videtur mihi satis certum- But this does not appear to my mind sufficiently certain." Since that time, however, your father, Erade Bille, professor of cases of conscience at Caen, has decided that there is no sin at all in the case supposed; for probable opinions, you know, are always in the way of advancing to maturity.This opinion he maintains in his writings of 1644, against which M.Dupre, doctor and professor at Caen, delivered that excellent oration, since printed and well known.For though this Erade Bille confesses that Valentia's doctrine, adopted by Father Milhard and condemned by the Sorbonne, "is contrary to the common opinion, suspected of simony, and punishable at law when discovered in practice," he does not scruple to say that it is a probable opinion, and consequently sure in point of conscience, and that there is neither simony nor sin in it.