“Let us commence,” resumed the father, “with the beneficiaries. You are aware of the traffic with benefices that is now carried on, and that were the matter referred to St. Thomas and the ancients who have written on it, there might chance to be some simoniacs in the Church. This rendered it highly necessary for our fathers to exercise their prudence in finding out a palliative. With what success they have done so will appear from the following words of Valencia, who is one of Escobar’s ‘four living creatures.’ At the end of a long discourse, in which he suggests various expedients, he propounds the following at page 2039, vol. iii., which, to my mind, is the best: ‘If a person gives a temporal in exchange for a spiritual good’—that is, if he gives money for a benefice—‘and gives the money as the price of the benefice, it is manifest simony. But if he gives it merely as the motive which inclines the will of the patron to confer on him the living, it is not simony, even though the person who confers it considers and expects the money as the principal object.’ Tanner, who is also a member of our Society, affirms the same thing, vol. iii., p. 1519, although he ‘grants that St. Thomas is opposed to it; for he expressly teaches that it is always simony to give a spiritual for a temporal good, if the temporal is the end in view.’ By this means we prevent an immense number of simoniacal transactions; for who would be so desperately wicked as to refuse, when giving money for a benefice, to take the simple precaution of so directing his intentions as to give it as _a motive_ to induce the beneficiary to part with it, instead of giving it as _the price_ of the benefice? No man, surely, can be so far left to himself as that would come to.” “I agree with you there,” I replied; “all men, I should think, have _sufficient grace_ to make a bargain of that sort.” “There can be no doubt of it,” returned the monk. “Such, then, is the way in which we soften matters in regard to the beneficiaries. And now for the priests—we have maxims pretty favorable to them also. Take the following, for example, from our four-and-twenty elders: ‘Can a priest, who has received money to say a mass, take an additional sum upon the same mass? Yes, says Filiutius, he may, by applying that part of the sacrifice which belongs to himself as a priest to the person who paid him last; provided he does not take a sum equivalent to a whole mass, but only a part, such as the third of a mass.’”