“You were just telling me a little ago, father, that he was not.”
“I told you no such thing,” replied the father; “did I express myself so generally? I told you he was not bound to make restitution, provided he succeeded in gaining the cause for the party who had the wrong side of the question. But if a man has justice on his side, would you have him to purchase the success of his cause, which is his legitimate right? You are very unconscionable. Justice, look you, is a debt which the judge owes, and therefore he cannot sell it; but he cannot be said to owe injustice, and therefore he may lawfully receive money for it. All our leading authors, accordingly, agree in teaching ‘that though a judge is bound to restore the money he had received for doing an act of justice, unless it was given him out of mere generosity, he is not obliged to restore what he has received from a man in whose favor he has pronounced an unjust decision.’”[[181]]
This preposterous decision fairly dumbfounded me, and while I was musing on its pernicious tendencies, the monk had prepared another question for me. “Answer me again,” said he, “with a little more circumspection. Tell me now, ‘if a man who deals in divination is obliged to make restitution of the money he has acquired in the exercise of his art?’”
“Just as you please, your reverence,” said I.
“Eh! what!—just as I please! Indeed, but you are a pretty scholar! It would seem, according to your way of talking, that the truth depended on our will and pleasure. I see that, in the present case, you would never find it out yourself: so I must send you to Sanchez for a solution of the problem—no less a man than Sanchez. In the first place, he makes a distinction between ‘the case of the diviner who has recourse to astrology and other natural means, and that of another who employs the diabolical art. In the one case, he says, the diviner is bound to make restitution; in the other he is not.’ Now, guess which of them is the party bound?”
“It is not difficult to find out that,” said I.
“I see what you mean to say,” he replied. “You think that he ought to make restitution in the case of his having employed the agency of demons. But you know nothing about it; it is just the reverse. ‘If,’ says Sanchez, ‘the sorcerer has not taken care and pains to discover, by means of the devil, what he could not have known otherwise, he must make restitution—si nullam operam apposuit ut arte diaboli id sciret; but if he has been at that trouble, he is not obliged.’”
“And why so, father?”
“Don’t you see?” returned he. “It is because men may truly divine by the aid of the devil, whereas astrology is a mere sham.”
“But, sir, should the devil happen not to tell the truth (and he is not much more to be trusted than astrology), the magician must, I should think, for the same reason, be obliged to make restitution?”