that induced him to part with it? Tell me, Reverend Fathers, ingenuously, what answer will your cafuifts make to this question? Will not TANNERUS tell you, in express terms, "that it is no fimony in confcience, be"cause the money is not the price or real "value of the living, but only the MOTIVE

or REASON for beftowing it?" And will not VALENTIA, your CAEN theses, SANCHEZ, and ESCOBAR prove it TO BE NO SIMONY for the fame reafon? Are not these authorities fufficient to exempt this patron from fimony? And would you have the affurance, (whatever your own private opinions may be) to treat him as a fimoniacal perfon in your confeffionals, fince he could filence all your clamour with authority, by telling you, (that in this) he has only followed the advice of fo many GRAVE DOCTORS? No, Fathers, the patron by your own confeffion is very innocent; and now, defend your

doctrine if you can.

This, Fathers, is the way to treat a queftion when we defign to make it out clear; and not by clogging it with school terms, or changing the state of the question as you have done in your laft charge against me. For inftance, TANNERUS, you fay, declares that

fuch

fuch an exchange is a great fin, and you reproach me for having maliciously fuppreffed that circumftance which according to you, " JUSTIFIES HIM INTIRELY." But here again you are wrong in several respects. For, granting what you say to be true, yet the queftion in that place was not to know if there was any sIN in it, but only if there was any SIMONY. Now, these two questions are widely different: SINs, according to your maxims, oblige a man no farther than to coNFESSION: SIMONY obliges to RESTITUTION: and fome folks can difcern well enough the difference between one and the other. For have found out many expedients to make confeffion eafy, but not one to make restitution agreeable.

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And I must tell you further, that the case which TANNERUS charges with fin, is not merely THAT whereby fpirituals are given for temporals, which laft were the principal motiyes fo to do, but he adds, " for prifing "for "the temporality more than the spirituality," which is that imaginary cafe I spoke of before.

And I do not think he does amifs to charge THAT with fin; for a man muft either be à most abandoned wretch, or an incorrigible

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blockhead to load himself with a fin fo eafily to be avoided as this is, viz. only by not comparing the price of these two things together, at the time that he is permitted to give one for the other. But farther, VALENTIA, (on the fame paffage) enquiring whether it was a fin to give a fpiritual good for a temporal, the latter being the principal motive; after fhewing the reafons alledged by feveral cafuifts to prove it a fin, he adds, " Sed hoc non " videtur mihi fatis certum: But this does not appear to me to be fure enough."

But fince that, your father ERADE BILL, profeffor of cafes of conscience in your college at Caen, has peremptorily decided, that there is no fin at all in it: for your PROBABLE OPINIONS grow riper and riper every day. This decifion of his appears in his works of 1644. against which M. Du PRE doctor and profeffor at Caen made that fine harangue, which was afterward printed, and well known in the world. For although ERADE BILL confeffes that VALENTIA's opinion followed by father MILHARD, and condemned by the Sorbonne," is contrary to the general opinion, "and in many things fufpected of fimony, "and justly punished, when the facts are "discovered,"

discovered," yet he fays, the opinion is PROBABLE, and therefore fafe in conscience confequently, there is no fimony, nor fin." IT IS a PROBABLE opinion,

fays he, taught by a great many catholic "divines that it is not fimony, NOR ANY "SIN to give money or any other worldly "confideration for a benefice, either by way "of acknowledgment, or by way of special "motive without which it would not be "conferred, provided you do not give it as a PRICE equal to the benefice."

What can be wished for, or defired more? According to all these maxims, fimony you fee, Fathers, is fo rare that SIMON MAGUS himself could not now be judged guilty of it. He was willing indeed to BUY the HOLY GHOST, in which he represents your fimoniacal PURCHASERS; and GEHAZI taking money for a miracle, is the reprefentative of all fimoniacal SELLERS. Yet both, by your maxims, are innocent. For when SIMON MAGUS, in the ACTS, OFFERED money to the Apostles to confer their power upon him, it is certain he neither made ufe of the words BUYING, SELLING, or PRICE, he only offered fome money as a motive to prevail on the Apoftles, to confer that spiritual gift E 2

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upon him. Which, by your authors, being no fimony, he might eafily have warded off St. PETER'S anathema, if he had but been inftructed in your modern tenets. This fame ignorance, too, was very unlucky to poor GEHAZI, whom his master ELISHA ftruck with a leprofy; for, taking money of the Prince who was miraculously healed, only as an acknowledgment, and not as a PRICE equal to that divine virtue, which performed the miracle, he might, had he been rightly instructed, have obliged ELISHA, under the pain of a mortal fin, to have cured him again. And herein he would but have acted agreeably to a number of GRAVE DOCTORS, who enjoin all confeffors to abfolve their penitents in fuch like cafes, and to cleanse them of their spiritual leprofy, of which the bodily is nothing but the figure.

I can seriously affure you, Fathers, that there is nothing fo eafy as to fet you here in a ridiculous light; and I am surprised how you came to lay yourselves fo open. For I should have nothing to do but quote your other maxims, and amongst them this of EsCOBAR: In the practice of fimony, according to the fociety of JESUS. n. 40. "When two Monks engage with each o"ther,

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