It
appears that, provided your accommodating theology is treated as
judicious complaisance, you never disavow those that publish it, but
laud them as contributing to your design; but let it be held forth
as pernicious laxity, and the same interest of your Society prompts
you to disclaim the maxims which would injure you in public
estimation. And thus you recognize or renounce them, not according
to the truth, which never changes, but according to the shifting
exigencies of the times, acting on that motto of one of the
ancients, "Omnia pro tempore, nihil pro veritate- Anything for the
times, nothing for the truth." Beware of this, fathers; and that you
may never have it in your power again to say that I drew from the
principle of Vasquez a conclusion which he had disavowed, I beg to
inform you that he has drawn it himself: "According to the opinion
of Cajetan, and according to my own- et secundum nostram- (he says,
chap. i., no. 27), one is hardly obliged to give alms at all when
one is only obliged to give them out of one's superfluity." Confess
then, fathers, on the testimony of Vasquez himself, that I have
exactly copied his sentiment; and think how you could have the
conscience to say that "the reader, on consulting the original,
would see to his astonishment that he there teaches the very reverse!"
In fine, you insist, above all, that if Vasquez does not bind
the rich to give alms out of their superfluity, he obliges them to
atone for this by giving out of the necessaries of life.
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