the place quoted, when treating the question, if it be sinful to give a spiritual good for a temporal, the latter being the main consideration, and after producing the reasons given for the affirmative, adds, “_Sed hoc non videtur mihi satis certum_—But this does not appear to my mind sufficiently certain.” Since that time, however, your father, Erade Bille, professor of cases of conscience at Caen, has decided that there is no sin at all in the case supposed; for probable opinions, you know, are always in the way of advancing to maturity.[244] This opinion he maintains in his writings of 1644, against which M. Dupre, doctor and professor at Caen, delivered that excellent oration, since printed and well known. For though this Erade Bille confesses that Valentia’s doctrine, adopted by Father Milhard, and condemned by the Sorbonne, “is contrary to the common opinion, suspected of simony, and punishable at law when discovered in practice,” he does not scruple to say that it is a probable opinion, and consequently sure in point of conscience, and that there is neither simony nor sin in it. “It is a probable opinion,” he says, “taught by many Catholic doctors, that there is neither any simony _nor any sin_ in giving money, or any other temporal thing, for a benefice, either in the way of acknowledgment, or as a motive, without which it would not be given, provided it is not given as a price equal to the benefice.” This is all that could possibly be desired. In fact, according to these maxims of yours, simony would be so exceedingly rare; that we might exempt from this sin even Simon Magus himself, who desired to purchase the Holy Spirit, and is the emblem of those simonists that buy spiritual things; and Gehazi, who took money for a miracle, and may be regarded as the prototype of the simonists that sell them. There can be no doubt that when Simon, as we read in the Acts, “offered the apostles money, saying, Give me also this power;” he said nothing about buying or selling, or fixing the price; he did no more than offer the money as a motive to induce them to give him that spiritual gift; which being, according to you, no simony at all, he might, had he but been instructed in your maxims, have escaped the anathema of St. Peter. The same unhappy ignorance was a great loss to Gehazi, when he was struck with leprosy by Elisha; for, as he accepted the money from the prince who had been miraculously cured, simply as an acknowledgment, and not as a price equivalent to the divine virtue which had effected the miracle, he might have insisted on the prophet healing him again on pain of mortal sin; seeing, on this supposition, he would have acted according to the advice of your grave doctors, who, in such cases, oblige confessors to absolve their penitents, and to wash them from that spiritual leprosy of which the bodily disease is the type.