[De veritate dicenda aut tacenda]

permitting anyone to live according to their pleasure, they quickly find many adherents, just as Muhammad, establishing carnal and voluptuous laws, had obedient Saracens in a short time. Because to many it is more pleasing to live according to the flesh than according to reason. But these are true corrupters of the law, not correcting the transgressors of the law, and they acquire a heavy account to render before God for them, and they store up the wrath of God for themselves on the day of God's just judgment, unless another reasonable cause should intervene, which would persuade by right reason that some faults should be passed over for a time by some silence or dissimulation.

On the necessity of truth in judgments.

Third proposition: In public judgments, whether secular or spiritual, sometimes it is necessary to express the truth, and sometimes it is not. Regarding which, it must be known that in a judgment, a judge first occurs, and co-judges, who as such perform a public office there to minister justice to the litigants, for themselves or against another, alleging and requesting that a sentence be pronounced according to the allegations and proofs in accordance with the form of law, of which the judge is the executor and not the dictator. Hence, regarding these matters, under penalty of mortal fault, with all favor, love, or hatred put aside, he is bound to confess the truth which he knows at that time, or through an investigation if he does not know it, even if he feels differently about it privately as a private person than he determined in the act of judgment; nor should he estimate that he ought to do something against his conscience. For a judge is considered to have a double conscience: namely, as a private person and as a public person. He has the first conscience for acting, the second for doing. If indeed he knows differently in secret than what he pronounces at that time, he then acts against his private conscience, but he does not act against the conscience of doing—that is, how he ought to act—as a minister of the law according to the dictate of the law