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. 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.
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