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.
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