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.
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