Against Gaudentius, Bishop of the Donatists

Gaudentius, Donatist bishop of Thamugadi, was threatening to burn himself in his church together with some desperate men who had joined him. The honorable Dulcitius, tribune and notary, to whom our most devout emperor entrusted the execution of his laws out of concern for completing unity, was dealing gently with these madmen, as was fitting, and had first sent a peaceable letter to Gaudentius. Gaudentius wrote back two letters: one shorter and, as he indicates, hurried because the carriers were in a hurry; the other longer, in which he thinks he has answered more carefully according to the Scriptures. With the Lord’s help, then, I have undertaken to refute his writings in such a way that even those of slower wit will not doubt that I have answered everything. For I will first set down his words and then add ours, but not as I did when I answered the letter of Petilian. For there, at each point, when his words are inserted, it is written “Petilian said,” and when my words are given, “Augustine answered.” For this he slandered me as if I had lied, saying that he had never disputed with me face to face; as if he did not say what he wrote because I did not hear it in his words but read it in his letter, or as if I did not answer because I did not speak in his presence, but answered his writings by writing in turn. What are we to do with people who have such a heart, or who suppose that those to whom they wish their writings to become known have such a heart? But let us satisfy even such people here: when we set down Gaudentius’s words, let us not say “Gaudentius said,” but “Words of the letter”; and when we answer, let us not say “Augustine answered,” but “Reply to this.” So let us begin to refute Gaudentius’s first and shorter letter.

Words of the letter: “To the honorable Dulcitius, tribune and notary, much to be longed for by us, if you so wish, Gaudentius, bishop.” Reply to this: We should not discuss even this, lest we dwell almost on superfluous matters, when there are necessary places that will compel us to speak at somewhat greater length.

Words of the letter: “I have received the writings of Your Religiousness through men who are plainly dear to all for their character and their way of life.” Reply to this: Nor will I discuss how you said “Your Religiousness” to a man whom you think rather irreligious. You returned the courtesy as you thought it should be returned, since he treated you more courteously in the letter he gave you than a Catholic ought to treat a heretic, thinking your mind could be healed by such conversation.

Words of the letter: “In it,” he says, “so many things were said by Your Worthiness, about which for now I am silent. But since the sharpness of your mind did not notice that in the same writing you could assert us to be neither fully innocent nor guilty …” Reply to this: How did he not assert them guilty, when he said they had been wrongly gathered? How did he not assert you guilty, when he said that under your leadership the souls of wretched people would perish by an abominable end, adding that you ought to understand what ill will could await you in this world and what punishment in that last judgment, past hope? How did he not assert you guilty, when he exhorted you as he could to follow the example of others worth imitating, give up the error of your former heresy, and betake yourself to the one true faith of God? Yet we have undertaken not to defend the tribune’s words but to refute the heretic’s. If, then, this man of ours, as a military layman, said something rather incautiously, who would not forgive him? Who would contend that the Catholic Church must be prejudged by his words? You, consider more carefully what you say, you whom the party of Donatus put forward, together with six others, as a defender of its division at our conference held at Carthage.

Words of the letter: “But if you think us criminals,” he says, “you must flee a fellowship that is to be condemned.” Reply to this: Plainly the fellowship of criminals must be fled, but that of the corrected is not to be rejected. So we avoid the former for their health in such a way that we mercifully want, wish, and press for the latter.

Words of the letter: “But if you think us innocent,” he says, “as you yourself said, we, settled in the faith of Christ, rejoice to endure persecutors.” Reply to this: I have examined the tribune’s letter to you and nowhere in it did I read that he called you innocent, but that he had heard or learned from others that you are prudent. In the holy Scriptures, however, not only the good but the bad too are commonly so called. For there even the serpent, deceiver of man, received this name. For where some have translated “the wisest of all the beasts,” the Greek manuscripts, from which that Scripture was translated into the Latin language, have rather “the most prudent.” But if those whom he said are held by you against their will for destruction must be thought to have been called innocent by the tribune, what wonder if he believed that what he knew had happened in other places was happening there too? So there is no reason for you to rejoice that you suffer persecution, when you cannot find how to assert that you are innocent. Far be it, moreover, that this should be called a persecution of people, when it is rather a persecution of vices for the setting free of people, such as even the care of physicians inflicts on the sick. And yet, even if you were innocent, you would be made guilty by this, that you desire to kill the innocent. For those who try to assert that they are innocent and yet will not spare their own lives, of what else are they convicted but of killing the innocent?

Words of the letter: “But in this church,” he says, “in which the name of God and of his Christ, as you yourself said, has always been invoked in truth, we either remain alive as long as it pleases God, or, as is worthy of the household of God, we end our life within the Lord’s camp; on this condition, namely, that this can happen only if force has been used. For no one is so mad as to hasten to death with no one driving him.” Reply to this: Nor is it read in the tribune’s letter that the name of God was invoked by you in truth, though he did say it was invoked. And even if he had said so, it could be understood not to your glory but to your punishment. For the apostle said even of the impious Gentiles, “who hold the truth in unrighteousness,” as you also do, who hold the truth of divine baptism in the unrighteousness of human error. Hence, when we correct your unrighteousness, we must certainly not annul the truth of that sacrament. You do confess, innocent man, though in other words, that you and yours will perish together with the church. For when you say “in the church,” what else do you want understood but “with the church,” since you are preparing to do it by fire? This is the innocence of the party of Donatus: that, adding your own deaths, you do what you are alleged to have done at Carthage too, to stir up ill will against us, to the basilicas that had been yours, as far as you could and with whom you could, without your own deaths. For who would not believe that you did that out of zeal, when you are planning to do it even by dying? But if you did not do that, this which you are preparing to do is certainly more furious. But you said, “if force has been used,” and added, “For no one is so mad as to hasten to death with no one driving him”: how much madder, then, is he who, when driven toward life, hastens to death!

Words of the letter: “As for those who are with us,” he says, “I call God to witness and all his sacraments that I have exhorted and most earnestly persuaded them that anyone who wished to leave should say so publicly without fear. For neither can we hold people against their will, we who have learned that no one is to be compelled to the faith of God.” Reply to this: But why do you not most openly declare yourself, if not a retainer of the unwilling, at least an exhorter to a good work, if what you are going to do is good? Or perhaps you yourself understand how evil it is, and threaten that you will do it more to frighten than to carry it out, being either faithless by lying or cruel by telling the truth?

Words of the letter (in another hand): “I wish you well, flourishing in the affairs of the state and withdrawing from the harassment of Christians.” Reply to this: We too can wish him well and flourishing in the affairs of the state, but not resting from the correction of heretics.

Words of the later letter: “To the honorable Dulcitius, to be longed for with all affection, Gaudentius, bishop.” Reply to this: If you long for the man with all affection, why do you refuse to hold the unity of Christ with him? Or, as if returning evil for evil, do you long to rebaptize the one you think your persecutor?

Words of the letter: “People known to each other only by reputation,” he says, “commonly desire either to exchange words face to face or at least, though unacquainted, not to shrink from each other’s presence. But Your Censorship has informed me by letter that you were glad to find me absent and saddened that I had returned.” Reply to this: Not all who are known to each other only by reputation wish to see each other, but those whom that reputation commends well. It is truly strange what has happened to you: you say he is to be longed for, by whom you complain you suffer persecution; while he who persecutes you would rather you were absent and does not wish to find the one he persecutes. But why this, unless because he wanted you rather to be understood as the persecutor of those whose salvation in Christ he believed your presence was hindering?

Words of the letter: “But since yesterday,” he says, “so as not to be silent in my letter of reply, I briefly and summarily informed you of some points because of the haste of the carriers, I must now answer Your Worthiness’s writings with the words of the sacred divine law. The Lord says: ‘You shall not kill the innocent and the just, and you shall not acquit the guilty.’ It is certain, therefore, that in the judgment of God the one who acquits the guilty and the one who kills the innocent are bound by equal crime and equal guilt. If Gabinius, whom you named, or the other faith-breakers, partners in that evil fall, were guilty before communion, according to God’s words they ought by no means to have been acquitted. But if they were received as innocent or holy, why do you kill the innocent who remain in the faith from which you receive them as holy?” Reply to this: You speak spitefully and falsely. For the man to whom you speak received no such order as that you should be killed, but that you should be corrected; and if you refuse, so that you do not hinder the correction of others, you will be sent into exile. If this ought not to be done by the just to the unjust, why did you wish, even falsely, to boast at our conference of Caecilian’s exile, to which you said he was sent by the emperor Constantine at the insistence of your forebears? And this tribune to whom you write, who has been entrusted with the laws passed for unity, so much wants you to live that he fears you will kill yourself. See, set before your eyes him and yourself! He wants you to live in the peace of Christ; you seek to kill yourself in the party of Donatus: recognize which of you is your persecutor.

As for Gabinius, now ours, who was once yours, and very many others who, having considered the Catholic truth, have come over from you to us: let them not seem to you not to have been cleansed of your contagion because they were not rebaptized by us. For those who are not yet baptized are washed from all sins in the Catholic Church by the washing of regeneration; but in those who received this sacrament outside, not for help but for judgment (since we do not violate the royal mark even in a deserter), there happens what is written: “Love covers a multitude of sins.” See how those who ought not to be baptized can be cleansed by the very love of Catholic unity, so that what was in them outside does not begin to be in them inside, but what harmed them outside begins to profit them inside. So we do not receive them from you as holy (for they are sanctified by coming over to us, who could by no means be holy by remaining with you), nor do we kill you as innocent, whom we want to live even as guilty.

But you, who rightly recall the testimony of the divine voice and object to us that God said, “You shall not kill the innocent and the just”: if you are innocent and just, why do you kill yourself? We do not call you innocent and just, and yet we do not want you killed; you think yourself innocent and just, and do not spare the innocent and just. Certainly you yourself said: “In the judgment of God the one who acquits the guilty and the one who kills the innocent are bound by equal crime and equal guilt.” Why, then, did you acquit the guilty Felician, a Maximianist? Why do you kill the innocent, yourself? We, however, neither acquit the guilty, but want him first corrected so that he may deserve to be acquitted; nor do we judge you innocent, whether you spare yourself or kill yourself, if you remain in the party of Donatus. For however much you boast of innocence, by killing yourself, an innocent man, you cannot be innocent; unless perhaps you answer me and say: “When I kill myself, I certainly do not kill an innocent man, because by the very will by which I resolve to kill myself I am made guilty in mind before I have killed the body.” If you say this, you speak the truth, and by accusing yourself in a wonderful way you defend yourself. For when you show that in killing yourself you first become guilty by your very purpose, then without doubt, the deed done, no one will convict you of having killed an innocent man. By this reasoning it follows that, while many innocent people are killed by others, no innocent person is killed by himself. For by the very thought with which he plots to kill himself he is first stripped of innocence, so that when he kills himself he does not die innocent. This would happen to you if you had been innocent before preparing to kill yourself. But as it is, since already before, as a heretic, you were not innocent, if you kill yourself it will not be the beginning of your iniquity but its increase.

Words of the letter: “For about the holy Emeritus of Caesarea,” he says, “a false report reached us, in keeping with his merit. But if it were so, hear the apostle saying: ‘If some of them fell from faith, did their unbelief nullify the faithfulness of God? Far from it.’” Reply to this: We must say about Emeritus of Caesarea what you were afraid to say. A false report was indeed spread about him, that he had become a Catholic; but just as you heard this, so you could have learned everything that happened. Why, then, did you choose to be silent about the praises of your fellow bishop, whose name was put to you as an example? Surely, if he did anything praiseworthy at so critical a moment, you certainly should not have kept silent about it. But since you do not want us to believe you could have envied his praises, why then were you silent, unless because you were afraid of blushing over him? Emeritus came, then, to Caesarea while we were there and present. He came not caught by anyone’s cleverness, not brought by another’s power; roused by his own will, he wished to see us. We saw him; we went together to the Catholic church; a very great crowd was present. He could say nothing for his own or your defense; he would not take communion; given time, he persisted; convicted, he fell silent; he left unharmed. What could have been gentler, for our mildness? What more unconquerable, for the Catholic truth? What more healthful, if you are wise, for your correction? For since he would not have come to us of his own accord unless to say something for you against us, he would surely have said it if he had found anything to say. For whatever he had prepared to say, the reason he came, was, with the help of the Lord’s mercy, refuted by our anticipating it before it was brought forward by his evasion. And certainly, if you think he could have answered but did not wish to, read what was done with him and answer yourself. If Emeritus had passed over into Catholic peace, you would say that he had not consented to the light of truth by divine mercy, but yielded to the weight of persecution out of human weakness. Finally, if he had been captured and brought against his will, you would boast at your pleasure that he had kept silent not for lack of an answer but with a plan to escape. As it is, since he came of his own accord, it was surely not his tongue but his case that failed him in his silence; and that he would not pass over into Catholic unity, confusion made his proud soul most stubborn. But this profited the strengthening and salvation of others as much as it did his own ruin and punishment. For if they had seen Emeritus in communion with us, they would suspect a frightened man; but when they saw him both remaining in the party of Donatus and yet silent against the Catholic faith, it became more apparent to them that by his silence he was crying out for us against his own. Or was not Emeritus, standing there with voice and mouth sound and free, a fit witness for our case against you: that Emeritus, I say, both an enemy and dumb?

But you thought you were consoling your people well, by apostolic authority no doubt. Not on account of Emeritus, who could do no more for you than, finding nothing to say for you, still not leave you; but on account of others who, having abandoned your error, are changed for the better and joined to the Catholic fellowship, you recalled that the apostle said: “If some of them fell from faith, did their unbelief nullify the faithfulness of God? Far from it.” It remains, indeed, that those who believed God are to be called fallen from faith, and those who believe men are to be said to hold the faith! The Lord said, “In your seed all nations will be blessed”: see whom those believe who pass over from you to us. Men said that the nations overseas perished through the sin of Caecilian: see whom those believe who persist in your fellowship. And you say that those have fallen from faith who followed the faithfulness of God, and that those have the faith of God who remain in the words of men. Where then is what the apostle at once added to this sentence you cited: “But God is true, and every man a liar,” if those have fallen from faith who believe what God, the true Lord, said, and those persist in faith who believe what lying man said?

Words of the letter: “You urge me to flight,” he says, “as if from the law; but only a doer of the law ought to be heard, since the apostle Paul says: ‘Not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law will be justified.’ For hear the Lord too saying that the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep, but the hireling, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and flees, and the wolf seizes them and scatters them.” Reply to this: See how the party of Donatus understands the Gospel! So the apostle was not a shepherd but a hireling, when he was let down in a basket through the wall and escaped the hands of the man who wanted to seize him; and you are a shepherd, who want to destroy with you, who seek to kill with you, those whom you call the Lord’s sheep, so that they perish by error in mind and destroy the body by fury; and you do not hear the Shepherd and Prince of shepherds saying, “The thief comes only to kill and destroy”? Is this why you came, you who had gone away; is this why you returned, you who had fled? This is the work of a thief and robber, not of a shepherd and guardian. Yet see, without our forcing you, that you have refused to let all your colleagues who fled be understood as hirelings rather than shepherds. But if there were sheep of the Lord with you, they would either come with you, so that they might have you as a shepherd once corrected, or, leaving you, they would flee to the shepherd. But the hireling whom the Lord means, on seeing the wolf, flees not in body but in mind, when out of fear he deserts justice; as your Secundus of Tigisi fled when, so as not to lose his primacy or his episcopate, he feared Purpurius of Liniata, who had confessed to murder and was all the more terrible. In body, however, even those good shepherds the apostles fled in persecution, and yet they did not therefore abandon the sheep of Christ in care and mind. If, then, you too were a shepherd, first you would not be on the wolf’s side; then you would have obediently heard, even through the mouth of any sinner, the command of your Lord, who ordered his servants to flee in persecutions, and would not argue against your Lord and say: “Only a doer of the law ought to be heard, since the apostle Paul says: ‘Not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law will be justified.’”

Why do you turn plain words to another sense? He denied that hearers of the law who are not doers are just before God; he did not forbid that people be heard when they speak the truth, lest he should speak, as you do, against his Lord, who said of certain people: “Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” You see how Christ commanded that the law be heard even through men who were hearers and preachers of the law but not doers, and that others be doers of it; and you say, “Only a doer of the law ought to be heard,” and, wishing to refute your supposed persecutor, you speak against your Creator. The Lord does say to the sinner, “Why do you recount my statutes and take my covenant in your mouth?”; but this is because it does him no good who says and does not do what he says; but it does good to him who hears good even through a bad man and does what he hears. Praise is not beautiful in the mouth of a sinner, but it is beautiful in the life and conduct of the doer, even if he has heard it from the mouth of a sinner. So, however much you think the tribune a sinner and not a doer of the law, obediently hear, not him, but, even through him, the one who says: “If they persecute you in one city, flee to another.” Why do you stand still? Hear and flee; Christ commands this, not the tribune. Unless perhaps you answer and say: “Christ does say, ‘If they persecute you in this city, flee to another’; but why should I leave this city, when neither is this man my persecutor nor am I a hearer of Christ?” And so, if you stay, you are a raging wolf; and if you flee, you are a frightened wolf. And since the bridegroom says, “If you do not know yourself, O beautiful among women, go out in the footsteps of the flocks and pasture your kids by the tents of the shepherds,” even if you boast that you are a shepherd, yet, because you have gone out from the Lord’s fold, you pasture your own kids, not the sheep of Christ.

Words of the letter: “Then,” he says, “what places will there be to receive priests, troubled on every side in this storm of persecution, to be kept in tranquillity as in a harbor, when the Lord has said: ‘When they begin to persecute you in this city, flee to another’? The apostles fled safely then, because the emperor had ordered no one to be proscribed for harboring them. But now those who harbor Christians, terrified by proscriptions, fearing dangers, not only do not receive them, but are even afraid to see those whom they venerate in secret.” Reply to this: I plainly praise this, that you recognize yourselves; but I grieve that you do not correct yourselves. For what could be plainer than this confession of yours, by which you declare well enough that you do not belong to the company of those to whom the Lord says, “If they persecute you in one city, flee to another”? This is surely what I said a little before you could answer me most truly, if you said: “Neither is this man my persecutor nor am I a hearer of Christ.” See, you say this most openly. For how are you a hearer of Christ, when he promises his hearers, that is, his followers, that until the end of the age, whenever they suffer persecution, there will not be lacking cities to flee to, saying: “But when they persecute you in this city, flee to another; for truly I tell you, you will not finish the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes”? But you, in this persecution which you complain you suffer, say that places are already lacking to you where you can flee and rest from this storm as in a harbor, speaking against the promise of Christ, who says that there will not be lacking cities to which his own may flee when they suffer persecution, until he comes, that is, until the consummation of the age. Since, then, he promised his own what you do not find, surely he lies, if you are his; but since he does not lie, you are not his. And therefore neither is the tribune to whom you write your persecutor; but he is the persecutor of your persecutor, that is, of your error, by which you are driven to do such things that you are of the kind of whom it is written that they suffered persecution from their own deeds. Accordingly, if you understand what those who love you persecute in you, you will without doubt flee the very bad deeds of yours from which you suffer persecution, and you will join those who, to set you free, persecute your persecutors; for they persecute nothing but your errors.

Words of the letter: “Almighty God,” he says, “having fashioned man through the maker of all things, the Lord Christ, as like God, left him to free choice. For it is written: ‘God made man and left him in the hand of his own counsel.’ Why now is what God bestowed being snatched from me by human command? Notice, most eminent man, what great sacrileges are committed against God, that human presumption takes away what he granted, and vainly boasts that it does this for God. It is a great insult to God if he is defended by men. What does he think of God who wishes to defend him by violence, except that he cannot avenge his own insults?” Reply to this: According to these most false and empty reasonings of yours, let the reins be slackened and let go, let all the sins of human license be left unpunished; with no barriers of laws set against them let the boldness to harm and the lust to wanton run riot; let no king restrain his kingdom, no general his soldier, no judge the provincial, no master his slave, no husband his wife, no father his son from the freedom and pleasure of sinning by any threats or punishments. Take away what sound doctrine wisely says through the apostle for the health of the world; and, to confirm the sons of perdition in a choice as much worse as it is freer, delete what the vessel of election says: “Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. For there is no power except from God; and those that exist are ordained by God. Therefore whoever resists the power resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist acquire judgment for themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good work but to evil. Do you want not to fear the power? Do good, and you will have praise from it; for it is God’s minister, an avenger in wrath on the one who does evil.” Delete these things, if you can; or, if you cannot delete them, despise them, as you do. Have the worst choice about all these things, so as not to lose free choice; or at least, since as men you blush before men, cry out, if you dare: “Let murders be punished, let adulteries be punished, let all other deeds of crime or lust, however great, be punished; sacrileges alone we want left unpunished by the laws of rulers.” Or do you say anything else when you say, “It is a great insult to God if he is defended by men. What does he think of God who wishes to defend him by violence, except that he cannot avenge his own insults?” Saying this, what else are you saying but: “Let no human power contradict or obstruct our free choice when we insult God”? O grief! Ancient times were cheated of such a teacher, since you were not yet born when holy Moses bore his own insults most gently, but avenged God’s most severely. But now you, more learned in heretical presumption, cry out most spitefully: “God made man and left him in the hand of his own counsel. Why now is what God bestowed being snatched from me by human command?”, demanding, of course, that, to insult God, who made man with free choice, free choice be left you by man. But those too who, by the decree of King Nebuchadnezzar, under the penalty of their own death and the destruction of their houses, were terribly forbidden to blaspheme the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and were to be sharply punished if they disregarded it, could have said what you yourself said: “It is a great insult to God if he is defended by men. What does he think of God who wishes to defend him by violence, except that he cannot avenge his own insults?” These words of yours they too could certainly have said, and perhaps did say, if not with the same freedom, then with no unlike emptiness.

Free choice, then, was given to man when he was created, but so that, if he did evil, he would suffer. Finally, those first human beings, when they had sinned, were condemned to death; and before death, the last even of the body, was supplied them, they were sent into exile from paradise. The emperor has decreed milder things against you because of Christian gentleness: he wished to inflict exile on you, not death. But you learned men, considering what is due to desert and what is lacking in the punishment, add death, not from his judgment but from your own. Do not perish forever while you want free choice to offend God granted to you by men in this time. Hear the apostle and you will have a great shortcut by which royal power cannot harm you: “Do good, and you will have praise from it.” From it the righteous before us had praise too: not only those who faithfully obeyed religious kings, but also those who endured impious kings as adversaries for the truth of God; the former the praise of obedience, the latter the praise of suffering; both, however, from it, but by doing good, not by resisting the powers. But what you do is not only not good; it is a great evil: to tear apart the unity and peace of Christ, to rebel against the Gospel promises, and to carry Christian standards, as in a civil war, against him of whom it was said, “He will rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth,” that is, against the true and supreme king of Christians. So let it suffice you, as an occasion for correction, that for such great evils of yours you receive far milder and lesser penalties, if you do not, of your own accord, inflict on yourselves what the emperor has not decreed; and do not wish free choice for licentious impunity to be granted you by men, lest you fall more unhappily into the hands of God himself. For your forebears too judged that in insults of this kind against God, the free choice of man should not be left unpunished by kings, since, though they had a bad case, they nevertheless brought Bishop Caecilian, by persecuting him, all the way to the judgment of the emperor Constantine.

Words of the letter: “But our faith,” he says, “which the Lord Christ left to the apostles, only these persecutions make most pleasing to us. ‘Blessed will you be,’ he says, ‘when men persecute you and curse you and say every evil against you for the sake of the Son of Man. Rejoice and exult, for your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers persecuted the prophets who were before you.’ If this was said only to the apostles, faith had its rewards only up to them; and what good would it be to those who would believe afterward? Hence it is clear it was said to all. Then the apostle Paul says: ‘Those who wish to live holily in Christ must suffer persecution.’ And the Lord said this in the Gospel: ‘The hour will come when everyone who kills you will think he is offering a victim to God. But they will do these things because they have not known the Father or me.’” Reply to this: These things would rightly be said by you, seeking the glory of martyrs, if you had the cause of martyrs. For the Lord does not call blessed those who suffer these evils, but those who suffer them for the sake of the Son of Man, who is Christ Jesus. But you suffer not for him but against him; for you suffer because you do not believe him, and you endure so as not to believe. How, then, do you boast that you hold the faith which the Lord Christ left to the apostles? Or do you want people to be so blind and deaf that they do not read or hear the Gospel, where they may know what faith about his church the Lord Christ left to the apostles? Divided and separated from it, you do nothing but rebel against the words of the Head and of the Body; and yet you boast that you endure persecution for the sake of the Son of Man and the faith he left to the apostles. Let us leave the rest and hear his last words on earth, where we may see what faith about the church he left to the apostles, what kind of testament, so to speak, he made, not about to end his life but to live without end, not to be laid in the tomb but to ascend into heaven. For rising from the dead, after he appeared to his disciples to be seen with eyes and handled with hands, he said: “It was necessary that what is written about me in the law and the prophets and the psalms be fulfilled.” Then he opened their mind to understand the Scriptures, and said to them: “For thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for Christ to suffer and rise on the third day, and for repentance and forgiveness of sins to be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” And likewise on the Mount of Olives, after which he said nothing more while on earth, he commended this as his last word, what was most necessary. For there would be many throughout all parts of the earth who would claim for themselves the name of the church, and who would bark, each from the corners of his own ruins, against the whole house which through the whole earth sings the new song, of which it is written: “Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.” For the apostles wanted to hear something else, and did not ask what was most necessary for them: “Tell us,” they say, “whether at this time you will restore the kingdom of Israel?” But he said: “It is not for you to know the times which the Father has set in his own power; but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” With these words a cloud took him up. He added nothing further to these words; he fixed this in the minds of his hearers the more firmly the later it came. This bride the bridegroom, departing, commended to his friends. This faith, then, about the holy church he left to the disciples. This faith, Donatists, you resist, and you contend that you endure persecution for the faith which the Lord Christ left to the apostles. This Son of Man, who commended with such care his church, beginning from Jerusalem and bearing fruit and growing through all nations, you contradict with an amazing shamelessness of blindness, and cry that you suffer evils for the sake of the Son of Man. Or perhaps you say this because you have found yourselves another son of man, by whose name you are called, of whose party you are said to be? You are wrong; it is not he. When he said that it is blessedness to suffer persecution for the sake of the Son of Man, the bridegroom was proclaiming himself, not an adulterer.

We too confess, as you say, that it was not said only to the apostles: “Blessed will you be when men persecute you.” For it applies to all; not to those who after them have suffered, or suffer, or will suffer any persecution whatever, but to those who suffer it for righteousness’ sake, as the apostles themselves did. For a little above he had said, “Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”; then he added the words which you wished to cite and to claim for yourselves in vain. For in vain do you think that this blessedness belongs to you, when you do not show in yourselves the righteousness to which the reward is due. Rather, on the contrary, you suffer even for iniquity, less from others, more from yourselves, so that before the judgment of God which is to come you yourselves pay yourselves in part what you deserve. Hence, since you yourself said that this was said not only to the apostles but to all, so that faith would not seem to have had its rewards only up to them: just as this was said not only to the apostles but to all who after them would suffer any evils for righteousness’ sake, so that too was said to all: “If they persecute you in this city, flee to another.” Why do you not do this, if you belong to the fellowship of those to whom these things were said? Even if you did it, you would not therefore belong to them, since robbers too can do it, whom the public laws have ordered to be sought out. Yet since you will not do it, you show by a shortcut that you do not belong to those to whom these things were said. And so that your very excuse may show you much more plainly to be strangers to that number of true Christians, you say that places of refuge, which he promised would not be lacking until the end of the age, are already lacking to you; in no way convicting him of a false promise, but showing that you do not belong to the company of those to whom he promised it, and therefore that you are not truthful martyrs but deceitful heretics. What more should we say to you, when your own tongue defeats you?

And as for what you added, that the apostle said, “All who wish to live piously in Christ must suffer persecution”: he did not say “must,” but “All,” he says, “who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution.” But who doubts that you do not belong to these? For if you too are among those of whom the apostle said this, why do you not do what the apostle himself did? For if the gates were shut against you, you ought to have been let down through the wall so as to flee the hands of the persecutors. The gates are open, and you will not go out. What persecution do you suffer, except from yourselves? Your persecutor loves you, and your fury persecutes you: he desires you to flee, it drives you to perish. And you understand the apostle’s words, “All who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution,” in such a way that you must confess that your forebears under the apostate emperor Julian did not live piously. For whoever became a Donatist in that time, until the pious care of Christian emperors rose again against your error, if he died before, did not live piously, because he did not suffer persecution. But if the apostle said this because, as is written elsewhere, the life of man on earth is a trial, and the devil does not cease to tempt pious and true Christians not only with the assault of adversity but also with the seduction of prosperity, so that the human spirit either succumbs to affliction or vanishes in pride: then surely, as long as one lives here, all who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution, so that either, overcome, they are seized by the devil, or, proved, they overcome the devil. But those whom he already possesses as seized captives he does not persecute to obtain them; he uses them because he has them.

Further, if only he is to be called a persecutor who torments with some pain or wishes to hold someone in order to torment him, do not think that the tormentor of the heart is lighter than the tormentor of the body, and consider what persecution he suffered who said in the psalm: “I saw the senseless and I wasted away.” This persecution righteous Lot suffered in Sodom even before the angels, his guests, thought to be men, were sought by the Sodomites for sexual immorality in his house. For a righteous man could not see them so publicly shameful, even before the outrage to his own house, without great torment of heart. Hence the apostle Paul too mentions such things among his persecutions, saying: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I do not burn?” Accordingly, the greater the love of Christ in us, the greater the pain of mind with which we see you having the sacraments of Christ, and being separated from the members of Christ, and rebelling against the peace of Christ. But as long as you live in this body, some hope of you is given us; but when you die in that dissension, we grieve for you much more bitterly. And further, when you kill yourselves, either by rushing on others’ weapons or by your own leaps from heights, drownings, and fires, it cannot be said enough with what sorrow you torment us. For the impious Absalom afflicted his holy father David more when he was killed than when he rebelled. For David wanted him taken alive, so that he who was raging in malice might be healed by repentance. So he was a persecutor of his father not only by dividing the people of God, nor only by bearing arms and making war against the law of God and against his father’s lawful kingship, but he persecuted his father’s heart much more by dying in that impiety. Finally, the best of fathers wept for the worst of sons, slain, when hope was ended, whom while alive he had not wept for because he did not despair of him. Learn, then, what the apostle means when he says: “All who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution.” If the Donatists had not plundered the houses of Catholics, if they had not burned Catholic churches, if they had not thrown the holy books of Catholics into those very fires, if they had not afflicted the bodies of Catholics with the most savage beatings, if they had not cut off the limbs of Catholics, if they had not put out their eyes, if, finally, they had not cruelly killed Catholics, we would still say most truly that we suffer from you this one most grievous persecution: that we see you senseless and waste away, weak and are weak, made to stumble and burn, lost and mourn. These evils of yours, which send you into eternal ruin, persecute us more bitterly than those which are inflicted by you on our bodies or property or houses or basilicas. You persecute us less when you rage against us than when you perish. Finally, in that persecution in which you rage against us, we rejoice with praise; but in this, in which you perish, if we rejoiced, we would perish with you. But as long as you live in this flesh, we cannot despair of you; but when you die in this impiety, above all when you kill yourselves in the horrible blindness of fury, our most bitter sadness is consoled only by what consoled holy David: the people of God gathered in unity, which had been divided by the tyranny of his wicked son. For it is far more tolerable that a much smaller number of your most stubborn people should perish by their own leaps, drownings, or fires, than that innumerable peoples, while those men hinder their salvation, should burn with them in the fire of eternal burning. So the church of Christ has never lacked, nor will lack, grounds on which, according to the apostle, those who wish to live piously in Christ suffer persecution: either by bearing the malice of the impious while they live in harmful ways, or by grieving over them when they perish.

So do not be deceived into thinking that it was said to you: “The hour will come when those who kill you will think they are doing a service to God,” or, as you set down this testimony, “will think they are offering a victim to God.” It is plain that this was not said of the persecutions which the Gentiles inflicted on the church. For the Gentiles thought they were doing a service to their many gods, who surely do not exist, when they did this to the one God. Hence what the Lord foretold to his own was either fulfilled through the Jews, who killed holy Stephen and many others while they thought they were doing a service to God, since they seemed to worship the one true God; or else it was said to us too, that is, to Catholics, about the various heretics raging everywhere, who, wherever, whenever, and however they can, think they are doing a service to God by killing Catholics; and above all about you, who have made a special name for yourselves in Africa from such victims. For if it had been said to you, you would certainly not kill yourselves, but would rather wait to be killed by us, who, as you say, think we are doing a service to God when we do it. But as it is, when you hasten to death so as not to be held by our people, you are afraid to live, not to be killed, because you are ashamed to be corrected or convicted of your error. Or perhaps you are the ones to whom both apply, because when you are killed, and that by yourselves, you think you are doing a service to God and giving him these victims of yourselves? To you, then, applies what follows, which you also cited. For the Lord at once added and said: “But they will do these things to you because they have not known the Father or me.” So when you kill yourselves, thinking you are doing a service to God, you have neither known the Father, whom you have not heard saying, “You shall not kill,” nor known the Son, whom you have not heard saying, “Flee.”

Words of the letter: “But they boast,” he says, “that they are dwellers in a warlike peace and a bloody unity. Let them hear the Lord saying: ‘My peace I give to you, my peace I leave to you; not as the world gives do I give to you.’ For the peace of the world between nations at variance is concluded by arms and the outcome of war; the peace of the Lord Christ, calm in wholesome gentleness, invites the willing; it does not compel the unwilling.” Reply to this: It is you who desire to make a warlike peace and a bloody unity, either by our violent deaths or by your voluntary deaths, not charging to yourselves what you do to us and charging to us what you do to yourselves. But we are compelled both to bear what you do to us and to be able to do nothing but grieve over what you do to yourselves, so long as the peace and unity of Christ comes about for the salvation of many, as it does in very many, even if, because of the fury of a few, it does not in all. For if you were willing to look not with an envious but with a faithful eye, you would see how those who have come to us from you rejoice in the true peace and unity of Christ, columns of so many and such great peoples; among whom, even if there are still some troubled by the very novelty, they too are gradually being healed of this weakness. And if some persist as pretenders, those whom we see to be sincere were certainly not to be left ungathered on their account; some of whom in your regions have appeared greater even than some of ours, when, given that freedom to perish, they refused to return to you. So, so as not to lose these, we had to gather the pretenders too, since we read in the Gospel that the servants gathered to their lord’s wedding guests both good and bad; especially since the spirit of pride, like a wicked wind, blew you off the Lord’s threshing floor before the time of winnowing, and from there we are trying, as far as we can with God’s help, to call you back to it. And you surely know how, by the brooms of diligence, the grain is dragged along together with earth when it is swept back onto the threshing floor.

As for your view that the unwilling are not to be compelled to the truth, you are wrong, knowing neither the Scriptures nor the power of God, who makes them willing while they are compelled unwilling. Did the Ninevites do penance unwillingly because they did it at their king’s compulsion? For the prophet had already announced God’s wrath to the whole city, walking through it for three days. What need was there, then, of the king’s command that God, who looks not at faces but at hearts, should be humbly entreated, unless because there were some among them who would neither care about nor believe the divine predictions unless frightened by earthly power? So by this command of royal power, against which your death is self-chosen, occasion is given to many for the salvation which is in Christ; who, even if they are brought violently to the supper of so great a householder and compelled to come in, yet inside they find reason to rejoice that they came in. For the Lord himself foretold that both would happen, and fulfilled both. For when certain people had been rejected, who are surely understood to be the Jews, because they had earlier been invited through the prophets and at the hour chose to make excuses, the Lord said to his servant: “Go out into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in here the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame.” And the servant said: “Lord, it has been done as you commanded, and there is still room.” And the lord said to the servant: “Go out into the roads and hedges, and compel them to come in, so that my house may be filled.” We understand the roads as heresies, the hedges as schisms; for roads here signify differing opinions, but hedges perverse opinions. Why then are you surprised if whoever enters this supper, neither brought in willingly nor driven in by force, dies of hunger not for bodily but for spiritual food?

Words of the letter: “We rejoice,” he says, “in the hatred of the world. In its pressures we do not succumb, but are glad. This world cannot love the servants of Christ, since it is known not to have loved Christ, as the Lord himself says: ‘If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you too.’” Reply to this: How, rejoicing in the hatred of the world, do you not succumb to its pressures but are glad, when you want to kill yourselves so as not to suffer any troubles at all, and choose to die, not killed by others for the truth of Christ, but by yourselves for the party of Donatus? This is the madness of the circumcellions, not the glory of martyrs. Since, then, your deeds are plain, why do you claim others’ words for yourselves? “This world,” he says, “cannot love the servants of Christ, since it is known not to have loved Christ.” We then do not belong to this world, because we love you; but you are not servants of Christ, who, returning evil for good and turning your malice on yourselves when you cannot exercise it on us, neither love us nor spare yourselves from killing. But when the Lord said, “If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you too,” he said it not to you but to those whom he commanded, if they were persecuted in this city, to flee to another, which you do not do. He said it to those for whom cities to flee to would not be lacking until the end of the age, cities which you complain are already lacking to you, and you will not confess that you are not those to whom these things were said.

Words of the letter: “But even if persecution ceases,” he says, “how is the number of martyrs to be filled up? For John says: ‘I saw the souls of those slain under the altar of God, crying out and saying: How long, O Lord, will you not judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth? And they each received white robes, and it was said to them that they should rest a little while longer, until the number of their brothers should be completed, who will begin to be killed as they were.’” Reply to this: If you wished to be martyrs under the altar of Christ, you would not offer a sacrifice to the devil by burning yourselves. For who rejoices at this fury of yours except the devil, who inspires it in you, and those who are of his party? It is he who threw that boy of whom we read in the Gospel sometimes into water, sometimes into fire; he too plunged that herd of swine headlong into the waves; he too, with most audacious temptation, suggested even to the Lord himself that he throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. You certainly belong to the devil, when you practise in your deaths the three kinds of death: water, fire, and the precipice. For if you did not lose your minds to madness, those very words which you cited from the holy book ought to call you back from this destruction which you bring on yourselves. For what do the souls of the martyrs say under the altar of God? “How long, O Lord, will you not judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” They ask that their blood be avenged, surely on those by whom it was shed: on others? And therefore your blood will be avenged on you.

And what is more foolish than your thinking that this prophecy about martyrs foretold to come was fulfilled only in the Donatists, as though after blessed John wrote this no martyrs were killed until the party of Donatus arose, who, when they cannot kill others, kill themselves, who do the works of robbers and demons and claim for themselves the glory of martyrs? But even if in so long an interval of time, that is, from John to these men, no true martyrs had been killed, we would say, if nothing else, that they would come in the times of Antichrist, in which that number of martyrs would be completed; and yet we would not believe that these men, guilty of others’ blood or their own, would be added to the number of the true martyrs to whom it was said that they should rest a little while until the number of their brothers should be completed, who would begin to be killed as they were: by others, of course, not by themselves as these men are, and therefore these are not “as they were.” We can also say most truly that the Catholics whom they kill in the times of the Donatists belong to the filling up of that number too. But since, after the apostle John, who wrote down those future things, such great slaughter of martyrs was made everywhere among so many nations by the impious killing them, what do these men, extorters of their own souls and torturers of others’, mean by boasting that what they read was foretold of the holy martyrs has been fulfilled in themselves? Prepare yourselves rather for your blood to be avenged not on those who desire either to take you or to have you flee so that you may live, but rather on yourselves. Or perhaps, so that this may not happen, you do not shed it, but either dash it on a precipice or choke it in a wave or turn it to ash? But you are wrong. It will be avenged on you in whatever way it is destroyed by you; for it would be avenged on you even if it were shed by others, not in the church of Christ but in the party of Donatus. Will you cry out to God to avenge your blood, and will he hear you except by condemning you? For how can it be avenged unless the one who dared to slaughter it is condemned? In this cry, then, you are nothing but your own accusers, because you are guilty of your own blood; and God will condemn none but you when he avenges your blood, dashed or choked or burned or slaughtered in any way, or, if you choose this, shed by you.

Words of the letter: “Is not this,” he says, “a persecution, which has driven so many thousands of innocent martyrs to death? For Christians, according to the Gospel willing in spirit but weak in flesh, finding a shortcut from the sacrilegious contamination of the furnaces, snatched away their own souls, imitating the example of the elder Razis in the books of the Maccabees, and not fearing in vain. For whoever has fallen into their hands has not escaped. But let them do as much as they like: what is certain is that those who act against God cannot be of God.” Reply to this: You confess most openly and most truly what persecution you suffer; for it is the one I have already mentioned, which is expressed clearly enough in the holy Scriptures about certain impious people, of whom it is said that they suffer persecution from their own deeds. This can indeed be said most fittingly of you, even if others’ hands were slaughtering you for your sacrileges. For robbers too, and any people guilty of capital crimes, when they are punished by just laws, are not to be said to suffer persecution except from their own deeds. But now, plainly, when Christian gentleness spares you, your madness so rages against you that, as you say, finding the shortcut of the furnaces, you snatch away your souls: it is excessive shamelessness if you deny that you suffer persecution in every way from yourselves, since you fulfill both, the reason for which you justly perish and the fact that you perish. And you speak of so many thousands of people who do this, as if this were not no small reason why Africa should be freed from this teaching of yours. For it is the kind of people whom you have been able to persuade to this evil, who used to do these things before too, especially when the license of idolatry was raging everywhere, when these men would rush on the weapons of pagans celebrating their festivals. For the pagan youths would vow to their idols how many each would kill. And these men, flocking from here and there, would thrust themselves on the hunting spears set against them, as in an amphitheater beasts on the hunters; they died raving, were buried rotting, and were venerated deceiving. Besides these there are huge rocks and the dreadful precipices of mountains made famous by the very frequent voluntary deaths of your people. They did it more rarely by water and fire; huge herds were consumed by precipices. I speak of things well known to the people of our age. For who does not know this kind of people, restless in horrible crimes, idle from useful works, most cruel in the deaths of others, most cheap in their own, terrorizing above all in the countryside, absent from farming, and for the sake of their food going round the rustic storehouses, from which they took the name circumcellions: the reproach of the African error, famous almost throughout the whole world?

Who does not know how many of this kind used formerly to go to their deaths in various ways and perish, and how few, by comparison with them, burn now in their own fires? But if you think we ought to be moved because so many thousands die in this way, how much consolation do you suppose we have in this, that from such great madness of the party of Donatus, in which not only the error of a wicked division but also this fury has become law, far and incomparably more thousands are being set free? For those who perish do not equal even the number of those of that very kind who are now held under the order of discipline and, having lost both the work and the name of circumcellions, serve in tilling the fields, keep chastity, and hold unity. How much less do these lost men equal the number of both sexes, not only boys and girls, young men and maidens, but also the married and the old, countless numbers of whom are passing from the wicked dissension of the Donatists into the true and Catholic peace of Christ! For those who burn themselves are not as many people as there are places full of people being rescued from the deadly plague of that error and fury by this effort to complete unity. Can it be, I ask you, sound counsel of mercy that all these be kept, together with those, for the eternal punishments of hell, so that those few, by comparison with these, should not be burned in the fires of their own furnaces? For we must work with great efforts and prayers that all may live with Christ; but if this cannot be done because of the fury of some, we must at least labor that not all perish with the devil.

Searching most shrewdly in the holy Scriptures for anything you could bring forward for this insane view of self-chosen death, you think you have found something, because it is written in the Gospel, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak”; as if each person ought to kill himself because he is too weak to endure sufferings at the hands of persecutors. You could not more quickly have said that your false martyrs are of the number of those of whom it is written, “Woe to those who have lost endurance,” and do not belong at all to those to whom the Lord says, “By your patience you will possess your souls.” And those of whom we read, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” were overcome by an unwilled sleep, not killed by a willed death. Read carefully and attend to what you are saying. Where is what the apostle says: “God is faithful, who will not let you be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make a way out, so that you may be able to endure”? Is this apostolic truth not to be believed, and must we have ourselves as enemies because we cannot endure other enemies? Far be this from Christian hearts. Plainly let Catholics believe the faithful apostle, or rather the faithful God himself, who does not let his own be tempted beyond what they can bear, but with the temptation makes also a way out so that they may be able to endure; let the Donatists not believe it; and so that they may not always disbelieve it, let them not be Donatists. For when they despair of obtaining patience from the Lord in any sufferings, and so seek the shortcut of the furnaces, where these men throw themselves, not to the beasts, as the most blessed Cyprian says, but to the flames, men whom no one has condemned, this is not counsel but fury, not wisdom but madness. Let them have their fires, those who do not say of the Lord’s help, “For from him is my patience.”

Certainly holy Job, when he was rotting from head to foot with an intolerable wound and tormented with monstrous pains, had this shortcut of yours ready to hand, by which he refused to snatch himself from such a life, full of dreadful calamities, in which he no doubt remained. The power was certainly there, but justice did not permit it. For it is in this sense that he says: “Oh that I could kill myself, or ask another to do this to me!” The just man denied that he could do what could not be done through justice. In that manner of speaking the apostle too says to the Galatians: “I bear you witness that, if it could have been done, you would have plucked out your eyes and given them to me.” For why could this not have been done, except because it could in no way have been done justly? So too the Lord, when through his angels he was urging just Lot, going out of Sodom, to hurry to Zoar, said: “For I cannot do anything until you go in there.” He said he could not do what he undoubtedly could by power, but could not by justice. For the most patient Job could, to say nothing else, have taken no food or drink and so ended that wretched and dreadful life; but this he could not do justly, since it is lawful for no one to kill himself, above all when, so as to be able to live, he is able to flee. Or would anyone doubt that that holy man, who said so much in his pains, could have asked someone to do this to him? For just as, suffering and rotting, he did not lack a hand to kill, neither did he lack a tongue to ask. Certainly he could have asked even his own wife to do this. Yet not even she suggested that this be done, though she desired him to die by blaspheming and God’s being angry; and so, though saying something against God by wicked counsel, she nevertheless did not dare to tell him to kill himself. The devil has more power over you, persuading you so easily of what he could not persuade a foolish woman, whom he had kept back as his servant to deceive her husband when everything else had been taken from him. So that just man said that he could not ask anyone to kill him, showing thereby that it is certainly not permitted. For what cannot be done justly, a just man cannot do, since by deciding on it he first loses his justice, so that what a just man cannot do, an unjust man can. So he said, “Oh that I could kill myself,” as though he said, “Oh that it were just; for then it could be done by a just man.” For he did not wish injustice for himself so as to be able to do what only an unjust man can; but if it could be, he would want this to be justice. Since that could not be, that this should be justice, the just man could not do what only injustice would do. And therefore it is not unjust for a just man to wish for death when life is most bitter; but if God does not grant the death he wishes, it will be just only to bear that most bitter life. So too it is not foreign to a just man to wish for life when a bitter death threatens; but when he sees he cannot obtain it, he says what the Lord said, transferring us into himself: “Yet not what I will, but what you will, Father.” But these things are to be said to those whom persecutors seek out to do evil, not to those whom people who love them seek out to share good things; to those, I say, these things are to be said who suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake, not to those who inflict it on themselves for unrighteousness.

Accordingly, that elder Razis too, whom these men, lacking examples for their crime, boast that they have found in the books of the Maccabees as one to imitate, ought to have done what we read in the same writings those seven brothers did, with their mother exhorting them: that, when seized and not turned away from the law of his Lord, he should accept everything laid on him, endure it in pain, and have patience in his humiliation. Therefore, unable to bear humiliation at the hands of enemies, he gave an example plainly not of wisdom but of folly, to be imitated not by the martyrs of Christ but by the circumcellions of Donatus. Yet if we consider more carefully, you appear strangers even to him. For he, when he was already being seized by enemies, had no free way of flight. Therefore he struck himself with a sword, and when he could not kill himself, he threw himself down from the wall; then, when he could no longer live, still breathing and moving his body by force, he reached, though bloodless, a steep rock by running, where, drawing out his entrails with both hands, he tore them, scattered them, and fell, so surrounded by the crowd that he could not escape even if he could live. You, then, who neither hear the Lord saying, “Flee,” nor imitate Razis, who wished to flee and could not, surely have neither the Lord as your precept nor Razis as your example. What of the fact that by your own reasoning this Razis is without doubt to be blamed? For you said that because of the Gospel saying in which the Lord says, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak,” you fled to the shortcut of the furnaces, because, of course, you are too weak to bear the hands of enemies if you were seized by them. So of the man who wounded himself gravely with a sword, who, wounded, made for the wall, who threw himself headlong from it, who could afterward run to the rock, stand on the rock, draw out his entrails, tear them, and scatter them: can it be said, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”? Not only did his spirit appear so willing, but his flesh so firm, that it is hardly credible that he wished and was able to do what he did. So this man ought to displease you, since he confounds the reason you give from weakness with his firmness. Further, if, able to flee but unwilling, he had heaped wood in his house and, when the enemies rushed in to seize him, had set fire to it and burned himself with his house, he would have given you an example, but would have gained great torment for himself. As it is, since he could not flee, he is perhaps somewhat less guilty of his own blood, in that he inflicted on himself the death which the enemy was about to inflict on him once seized.

But, you say, Razis was praised by the authority of the holy Scriptures. How was he praised? Because he was a lover of his city: this could be meant in a carnal sense too, namely of that earthly Jerusalem which is in slavery with her children, not of the Jerusalem above, our free mother. He was praised because he kept continence in Judaism: but the apostle says that such things were loss and dung to him compared with Christian righteousness. He was praised because he was called father of the Jews: this rather is why impatience of humiliation crept up on him as a man, so that he preferred to die rather than be subject to enemies. It was said that he chose to die nobly: better had he chosen to die humbly, for so he would have died profitably. Those are the words in which the history of the nations usually praises the brave men of this age, not the martyrs of Christ. It was said that he threw himself manfully from the wall into the crowds: nor do we say he did it womanishly. Although you, who have profited much from this example, have taught even your women to do this; but we admit that they too do it not womanishly but manfully, yet not healthfully, because not faithfully. Lastly, as for his being said to have called on the ruler of life and spirit to give these back to him again, that is, life and spirit: even then he asked for nothing by which the good are distinguished from the bad. For God will give these back also to those who have done evil, not in the resurrection of eternal life but in the resurrection of eternal judgment. So this Razis was praised as a lover of his city, as one very well spoken of, that is, of good reputation, because he was called father of the Jews and because he kept continence in Judaism. But this death of his, more wonderful than prudent, Scripture narrated as it happened; it did not praise it as something to be done. And it is for us, as the apostle admonishes, to test all things, hold what is good, and abstain from every kind of evil.

And this Scripture which is called that of the Maccabees the Jews do not hold as they do the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms, to which the Lord bears witness as to his witnesses, saying, “All that is written about me in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms had to be fulfilled”; but it has been received by the church not without profit, if it is read or heard soberly, above all because of those Maccabees who, as true martyrs, suffered such unworthy and dreadful things from persecutors for the law of God; so that from this too the Christian people might notice that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come that will be revealed in us, for whom Christ suffered, if those men endured such things so very patiently for the law which God gave through his servant, men for whom he had not yet given up his Son. And even this Razis has something to profit readers: not only that the mind may be exercised by judging rightly what it reads, but also that the human mind, or rather the Christian mind, may notice how much is to be borne from enemies through the ardor of love, when this man bore so much from himself through fear of humiliation. But the ardor of love comes down from the height of divine grace, while the fear of humiliation arises from love of human praise; and therefore the one strives by patience, the other sins by impatience. So we ought not, whatever we read in the Scriptures that men praised even by God’s testimony did, to approve it by consenting, but to discern it by considering, applying a judgment not of our own authority but of the divine and holy Scriptures; which do not permit us either to imitate or to praise all the deeds even of those men to whom a good and splendid testimony is borne there, if some were not rightly done by them, or no longer suit this time. But what need is there in this question to discuss anything about things which were right then and are not now, since what is at issue, that someone should inflict death on himself, especially one who is granted, or rather compelled, to live, is among those deeds which never can be right and never could have been, as we have shown well enough?

Accordingly, however the life of this Razis is taken by you as praised, his death does not have wisdom to praise it, because it does not have the patience worthy of God’s servants; rather that voice of wisdom which is not of praise but of detestation fits him: “Woe to those who have lost endurance.” For if you believe that all the deeds of those who are praised are to be imitated, is this Razis better than David? Why, then, does no good man propose to himself his deed in desiring another man’s wife and killing her husband as something to imitate, but rather as something to beware of and avoid? Is Razis better than Solomon? Do you like it, then, that we should propose as an example to imitate his wantonness toward women, by whose seductions he was led even to building temples to idols? Is Razis better than the apostle Peter, who, when he said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” was called so blessed by the Lord that he was counted worthy to receive the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and yet he is not believed to be imitated in what he heard when at once, in the same moment, he was rebuked: “Get behind me, Satan; for you do not mind the things of God, but those of men”? And to pass over these things which the holy Scripture of the church has blamed in the plainest words, and to speak of those which are only narrated and written down there, and about which no verdict of praise or blame is given in either direction, but which are left to us to judge: is Razis better than Noah? Yet who, being sober, would praise that man for lying drunk? Is Razis better than the patriarch Judah? Yet who would approve him, whom would it please, whom would it not most rightly offend in that sexual immorality, since he went in, not indeed to his daughter-in-law, for he did not know it, but to one whom he thought a prostitute? Is Razis better than Samson? Dare, then, to say, if you can, that the great divine secret of strength he had in his hair should have been betrayed to a coaxing woman. For as for his killing himself together with his enemies when he brought down the house on himself and them, he wished to share with them the death which he was soon to suffer from them, since he could not escape. And this he did not do of his own accord; it is to be attributed to the Spirit of God, who used him to do, when he was present to him, what he could not do when the same Spirit was absent. Just as Abraham’s deed, when he was willing to sacrifice his son, which at God’s command was obedience, what would it have been without God’s command but madness?

Taught by these sacred writings, the blessed Cyprian said in his confession that discipline forbids anyone to offer himself. See how much evil you do when you wish to kill yourselves, you who would be undisciplined even if you wished to offer yourselves to others desiring to do this to you. The one you call Savior commands flight; the persecutor permits flight: what, then, are you following, so as to perish in your own fires, except your own fury? And yet you say: “Is not this a persecution, which has driven so many thousands of innocent people to death?” Show how you are innocent, who divide Christ and kill yourselves. Show how you are driven to death, to whom flight is both commanded by God and allowed by men. Show how you snatch your souls from contamination by the shortcut of the furnaces, when rather you make them most contaminated by the sacrilege of the furnaces as by a sacrifice to the devil. Ask Christ: he commands you to flee. Ask the tribune: he permits you to flee. If you could ask Razis himself, he would answer us: “I could not flee.” So you have neither Christ as Savior, nor the tribune as persecutor, nor Razis as authority.

As for your saying that your people, when they killed themselves, did not fear in vain, since whoever fell into our hands or those of our people did not escape: I ask what he did not escape. If death, why do you inflict it on yourselves with your own hands, if you fear it from ours? But it is plain that you do not mean death. For how much we desire you to live you yourselves know; that is why you frighten us with your death. Accordingly, if you mean that none of you who fell into our hands escaped our communion, would that you spoke the truth! For very happily would they not escape the communion offered by Catholics, so as to escape the damnation prepared for heretics. But that what you say is false you could have considered even from your own Emeritus, who, when he came to us, was more easily convicted by the truth than compelled to take communion. There are others too, lesser in fame but equal in folly. For whoever was of like vanity, so as to become stubborn against the most manifest truth with most perverse shame, blushing to be thought inconstant, left us without Catholic communion. But you said, “Whoever has fallen into their hands has not escaped,” because you thought that the very few who persistently resist the plainest truth and leave go unnoticed. But by your own lights you have done Emeritus a very grave wrong, who has lost with you the praise of his hardness; as if he wished in vain to be among the few not consenting to the truth, because he did not deserve to be counted among those who go unnoticed. Which of us would not believe you envy your colleague? Or if you do not envy him, imitate him. Come to us as he did; hear what we say as he did; answer, if you can, what he could not; but if you will neither answer nor take communion, leave as he did. See, he left our hands unharmed; why do you say, “Whoever has fallen into their hands has not escaped”? See, he did not believe that places to hide would be lacking to him; why do you plan to burn? Do you not yet see that it is rather you who do not belong to God and who act against God, not only by the common plague by which you resist the unity of Christ, but especially you, who hasten to add even deaths to this great crime of yours?

Words of the letter: “But since,” he says, “the office of an executor did not befit your prudence, please attend briefly. Solid truth, I think, is one thing, the image of truth another. For truth stands firm by its own strength; an idol or likeness is what human presumption has made like the true, to the injury of the true; yet falsehood can never prejudge truth. I call worshipers of images those who do not hold the truth; I consider a pagan under another name one who makes for himself what he worships. Hence it is public and open that by threats, terror, and frequent persecutions they are known to have made for themselves faithless men to venerate, Gabinius and those like him, carried off from the freedom of nature, to whose worship the unwilling are compelled.” Reply to this: You add still words of blasphemy to your fury, and dare to say that the Catholic Church is a human fabrication, to which God says: “For I am the Lord who makes you, the Lord is his name.” And so that we may know that this is the Catholic Church spread throughout the whole world, he goes on and adds: “And he who delivers you, the God of Israel himself, will be called the God of the whole earth.” This most evident work of God you call a human fabrication, and you do not look back to see that you would in no way be separated from this church, which God promised he would make throughout the whole earth, unless you followed a man. We follow him who said to Abraham, “In your seed all nations will be blessed.” We follow him who said to his church itself what I recalled just now: “I am the Lord who makes you, the Lord is his name; and he who delivers you, the God of Israel himself, will be called the God of the whole earth.” Therefore, holding the church which spreads and grows through all nations and through the whole earth, we certainly do not follow a human fabrication but a divine promise and deed. What do you follow, that, divided from the communion of this divine promise and divine work, you wish to be of the party of Donatus? Did a man tell you, or God, that through the sin of Caecilian the promises of God perished from the world and remained in the party of Donatus? If God, read it to us from the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms, the apostolic and Gospel writings. Read, if you can, what at our conference you could not at all. But if men said these things, of whom it is said, “They have strengthened for themselves an evil word,” see the human fabrication, see what you worship, see whom you serve, see that for which you rebel, rage, and burn.

But Gabinius and the others, who recognized, chose, and held this church, desiring to have with the faithful not a human fabrication but the divine promise, foretold and fulfilled, would no longer suffer human troubles for a human fabrication. For whoever, for the truth and unity of Christ, has lost not only his property but even this life of his, provided others take it away and kill him, truly has faith, truly has hope, truly has love, truly has God; but whoever loses even the fringe of his garment for the party of Donatus has no heart. What wonder, then, if wise men, seeing losses and exiles set before them against the most stubborn age of a hardened custom, considered whether they ought to suffer these things for the party of Donatus against the Catholic Church, that is, for a human fabrication against a divine work, and saw that they certainly ought not, and recognized that what you call persecution was an occasion of correction for them, and did what is written: “Give a wise man an occasion, and he will be wiser.” So you see how emptily you told the man who, by the command of his most devout emperor, seeks your correction that the office of executor did not befit his prudence. For what better befits a religious soldier than that, in the very case in which he weighs the deception in which you wish to be, he himself should become salvation for many who are to be corrected?

Words of the letter: “To teach the people of Israel,” he says, “almighty God gave the proclamation to prophets; he did not command kings. The Savior of souls, the Lord Christ, sent fishermen, not soldiers, to instill the faith.” Reply to this: Listen, then, to the holy prophets and the holy fishermen, and you will not suffer the most religious kings as troublesome. For I have already shown above that it belonged to the king’s care that the Ninevites should appease God, whose wrath the prophet had announced. As long, then, as you do not hold the church which the prophets foretold and the fishermen apostles planted, so long kings who hold it most rightly judge that it belongs to their care that you not rebel against it with impunity. For God had kings too among the prophets; holy David, as you cannot fail to know, was a king. Listen, then, to the king prophesying, and you will fear no religious king’s anger. Listen, I say, to the prophet-king saying of Christ: “He will rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth”; and you will not fear a Christian king angry with you for blaspheming this church which, as was prophesied by a king, is displayed to the ends of the earth; since King Nebuchadnezzar too, though he was not a prophet, restrained with religious severity those who blasphemed the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Words of the letter: “God,” he says, “who alone can judge the living and the dead, never awaited the help of worldly soldiery.” Reply to this: God does not await the help of worldly soldiery when he rather grants a benefit to kings, inspiring them to take care that their Lord’s command is done in their kingdom. For those to whom it is said, “And now, kings, understand; be instructed, you who judge the earth; serve the Lord in fear,” perceive that their power must serve the Lord in such a way that by that power those are punished who will not serve his will. And as for your stirring ill will about soldiers: if indeed this care, as we have already shown, is demonstrated in the holy Scriptures to belong to kings, through whom are they to do this against the rebellious circumcellions and their mad partners or leaders, except through the soldiers under them?

Words of the letter: “But they do not know this,” he says, “these squatters on others’ property, who neither hear God saying, ‘You shall not covet your neighbor’s property,’ nor the Holy Spirit saying through Solomon: ‘Then the just will stand with great boldness against those who afflicted them and took away their labors. Seeing it, they will be troubled with dreadful fear, and will be amazed at the suddenness of unexpected salvation, saying among themselves, repenting and groaning in anguish of spirit: These are those whom we once held in derision and as a byword of reproach. We fools thought their life madness and their end without honor. How are they counted among the sons of God, and their lot among the saints? So we strayed from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness did not shine on us. We wearied ourselves in the way of iniquity and destruction, and walked through hard deserts, but the way of the Lord we did not know. What did pride profit us, or what did the boasting of riches bring us? All things have passed like a shadow.’ This faith, then, exhorts us to die gladly for God in this persecution.” Reply to this: Recognize your crime and do not claim for yourselves another’s name. Scripture said: “Then the just will stand with great boldness against those who afflicted them and took away their labors.” It did not say, “All who have suffered evils will stand,” but, “The just will stand”; just as the Lord too, when he said, “Blessed are those who suffer persecution,” would, had he not added “for righteousness’ sake,” have meant not only those who are crowned for their patience in the Lord but also those who are punished by just laws. Therefore, if you think these words written of the just apply to you, first show whether you are just. For you have great things to winnow among your righteous deeds: the division of Christ, the annulling of the sacraments of Christ, the desertion of the peace of Christ, war against the members of Christ, accusations against the spouse of Christ, denial of the promises of Christ. These are your righteous deeds, for which, no doubt, you will stand with great boldness against those who afflicted you and took away your labors. And now, when you begin to boast among your righteous deeds that you kill yourselves, what just man will be your equal? For then above all you will appear as ones to be avenged; but see on whom: on those, certainly, who killed you. So, to be avenged, you will be punished, and so you will stand against yourselves. Above all you will stand, you who shut yourselves in furnaces and crowd yourselves into cruel straits, so that whoever would help cannot get in and whoever would escape cannot get out. Far, far be it that they should stand with great boldness, when they will stand with so bad a conscience. Unless perhaps you think that God can spare you then for your crimes because you do not spare yourselves now. Hence even some of your nuns, being pregnant, threw themselves from rocks, and, their wombs bursting, betrayed by the crime of murder the crimes of sexual immorality too, thinking that if they punished themselves in this way God would no longer punish them in any way. Just as you too think that what could be committed by you in the sacrilege of schism and heresy, or in plundering, mutilating, blinding, killing, and finally even rebaptizing Catholics, and whatever other abominations, can be expiated in this way, by killing yourselves. But you are wrong; Judas too thought this. Or do you want to add this proof too, so that we may know more surely that it was your forebears rather who were the betrayers, because you imitate the death of the betrayer?

So by this too you confirm that the minutes are genuine which at the conference you contentiously refused to accept, in which Secundus of Tigisi, then bishop of the first see in Numidia, pardoned confessed betrayers; and those whose crimes of betrayal, manifest and confessed, he remitted when they were present at Cirta, with them he punished at Carthage, as betrayers, men unconvicted and absent. From this crime Secundus himself could not clear himself when Purpurius of Liniata charged him, when the same Purpurius said to him: “What did you do, you who were held by the curator and the council to give up the Scriptures? How did you free yourself from them, unless because you gave, or ordered to be given, something or other? For they did not let people go at random.” And Secundus, in his letter to Mensurius, which you yourselves produced and read, confessed without ambiguity, not that he handed over, but that the persecutors whom Purpurius of Liniata charged against him came to him, sent by the curator and the council, to make him hand over the Scriptures; and that when they asked him for them, he answered, “I am a Christian and a bishop, not a betrayer,” and would hand over nothing at all to them. This you want us to believe of him, though you yourselves see how incredible it is that, while that persecution was raging, a bishop detained or summoned to hand over the Lord’s Scriptures should have been let go when he had handed over nothing. Surely you were contending that bishops could not have met in the city of Cirta to ordain a bishop in time of persecution. How then was that persecution raging, if a bishop could be held to hand over the Scriptures and be let go unpunished when he had handed over nothing? And yet you cried out, describing the savagery of the persecution of that time, that not even twelve bishops could have been gathered in council to ordain a bishop and to draw up those minutes in which they forgave one another the crimes of betrayal and left them to the Lord to judge for the peace of the church; while you, saying that at this time you suffer such a persecution as never was, namely that places are lacking to you to flee to and hide in, nevertheless hold councils and ordain bishops, even in the place of those who have perished in their own fires, again men ready to perish in their own fires. And in a time of such great persecution, as you think and boast, you were able to gather in council even more than thirty, where Petilian too was present, who cried that in time of persecution not even twelve could have met.

Further, in that very council you decreed that those, whether bishops or presbyters, who entered communion with us unwillingly, provided they had not offered the sacrifice or preached among the people, should be eligible for pardon and be received back in their ranks; and so by this decree of yours you yourselves cut away entirely the whole strength of your slanders. For where now is your empty talk that even those who were not betrayers become betrayers through our communion, because, as you slander, those who at that time handed over the church’s books under pressure from impious authorities defiled us? Why then do you now acquit of crime those you know entered our communion unwillingly, if they have not offered the sacrifice or preached to the people? As if those first betrayers, under the terror and horror of savage tortures such as no one at all has now inflicted on you, handed over the holy books willingly, or offered the sacrifice there, or preached to the people. So you see that, just as you could pardon these, whom you most emptily accuse of becoming betrayers through our communion, if they did anything unwillingly, so your forebears too, in a much tighter necessity, could have pardoned by the same rule the true betrayers who handed things over. But they were driven by the faction of Caecilian’s enemies to condemn others absent and unheard, doing what the apostle says of such people: “For in judging another you condemn yourself; for you who judge do the same things.”

So since the Donatists have always loved to kill themselves and were themselves betrayers from the beginning, what wonder if they taught their descendants to love the betrayer’s death too? But to avoid this likeness they have never, or very rarely, killed themselves with a noose: quite in vain. For the one who drove Judas the betrayer to do it is the same who often threw that boy whom the Lord healed into water and fire, and plunged the herd of swine into the sea, and with audacious presumption suggested to the Lord himself a leap from the pinnacle of the temple. So, although you throw yourselves into a voluntary death in various ways, yet by killing yourselves at the instigation of the same devil you imitate the betrayer. Even if you are not betrayers, you have learned, by a wicked teaching from those who were and who made the schism in which you gladly are, to do to yourselves what the betrayer did to himself. See now with what righteousness you will stand against those who afflicted you, so that, if your deaths are avenged, they will most justly be avenged on none but yourselves.

And what are your labors which you boast are taken away from you? Or is it unjust that the churches which were yours, when they pass over into Catholic peace, should pass over with their property? For when they pass over to us, if you want to keep their property, you without doubt want to take away others’ property. But the Catholic mother says to you what the blessed apostle said to some: “For I do not seek what is yours, but you.” Yet how are you not contrary to yourselves, when you charge us with both: that we desire to possess your property and that we forcibly compel you to be with us? You do not see how contrary these two are to each other. For if we seek and hold you, unwilling, to our communion, how do we desire your property, which we certainly cannot have if you are in communion with us? But if we desire to obtain that, how do we seek you, so as to lose it if you are in communion with us? But we confess to you: our desire is called love. It seeks you in us; it desires to find you, correct you, and join you in the unity of Christ. So that we fear you will burn in your furnaces, we glow with its fire; it kindles us not only not to covet your property but to wish you to possess ours too, with us. Recognize it, and come, and do not choose to perish. Or if you are ashamed to come of your own accord, we serve your weakness, so that nothing may be lost to love. See, we want to hold you: why do you hasten to burn? We hold you for life, we hold you for salvation, we hold you for the unity, truth, and sweetness of Christ, and if you will not enter of your own will the supper of so great a householder, we compel you.

The contest is about righteousness, not money. So beware lest, while you think that what is written applies to you, “Then the just will stand with great boldness against those who afflicted them and took away their labors,” there happen to you about your labors not this but rather what is written in another place: “The just will eat the labors of the impious.” For the Maximianists will not stand against you, whose basilicas you took away when you could; nor will the pagans stand against you, whose temples you certainly overthrew and whose shrines you destroyed where you could, as we too did; nor will the musicians of demons stand against you, whose pipes and clappers you broke, as we too did. So neither will you stand against us. For in all such deeds plunder is not coveted, but error is overthrown. So, just as the Canaanites will not stand against the Israelites, though the Israelites took away their labors, but Naboth will stand against Ahab, because a sin was committed, not a command obeyed, when the unjust man took away the labors of the just; so heretics will not stand against Catholics when the orders of the Christian empire are carried out on the property of heretics, and their property is not taken away by Catholics but rather sought out and, as far as possible, much of it kept to be returned to them when corrected. But Catholics will stand not only against the Gentiles by whom the true martyrs were despoiled, but also against the circumcellions of the Donatists, because they too took away their labors. But about these monetary labors the case is easier, since even those to whom they belonged are passing over to Catholic peace. See, daily, if anyone makes the passage to us, we return to your people money, clothing, crops, vessels, farms, and houses: how will you return to us the limbs of our people?

Surely you will wake up at some point and see that neither are you those of whom it will be said, nor we those by whom it will be said, “These are those whom we once held in derision,” when rather we hold you in tears; nor will you be counted among the sons of God unless, leaving the party of Donatus, you hold this church which the Son of God displays as he foretold; nor is your lot among the saints, but among the heretics. For as to your thinking that others will say of you, “We fools thought their life madness,” I wonder that you are so foolish as not to say such things to yourselves now. The unclean and the unbelieving will indeed say these things then to the true and faithful saints, to those, certainly, whom they now think mad, because they will not enjoy the luxuries they see, while they believe what they do not see. But you, if you do not think your life madness, then certainly if you do not think this death which you want to make for yourselves madness, you are mad more desperately. But those words, “So we strayed from the way of truth,” and the rest, will indeed not be yours alone, but very much yours too. For you stray, as is plain, from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness does not shine on you; you weary yourselves in the way of iniquity and destruction, and walk through hard deserts, but the way of the Lord you do not know. As for what follows, “What did pride profit us, or what did the boasting of riches bring us? All those things have passed like a shadow,” I do not know whether anyone among the rest could say it more aptly and fittingly than your predecessor Optatus. So do not think yourselves what you are not and perish as what you are, since it is not this faith but your evil error that exhorts you, not to die gladly for God in this persecution, as you say, but to suffer wickedly for Donatus the persecution made by your deeds.

Words of the letter (in another hand): “I wish you well,” he says, “that, having perceived the truth, you may soften your mind and refrain from the destruction of the innocent.” Reply to this: You rather, having perceived the truth, soften your mind, so that it does not rage so as not to spare even yourselves. For what can easily be found gentler than the man to whom you wrote this, who both invited you to life and, if you would not live it with us, left you free to flee? You are harsh toward yourselves, you are pitiless, you are cruel without any regard for humanity, who do to yourselves what lovers of errors and persecutors of people are accustomed to do to their enemies, so that persecutors of errors and lovers of people may have cause to grieve most bitterly. And what do you mean by wishing him to refrain from the destruction of the innocent? You are not innocent; yet he gave you a way out, but you want to give yourselves destruction. For I think ignorance of the word deceived you, so that, wishing to say “destructions” (exitia), you said “exits” (exitus). So when you exhort him with your wish that the executor of the imperial laws refrain from the destruction of the innocent, you are working for him to spare deceivers and allow the innocent to be deceived with impunity. What else, then, but that the man for whom you think you wish well should keep faith neither with God nor with his emperor? Because, no doubt, by a justice not true but your own, cases of this kind ought not to belong to the emperors’ care so that a slanderous division might be healed, but ought to when it was being made, so that it might be confirmed. If this doctrine, which you have learned not from the holy Scriptures but from I know not where, seems just to you, that these things do not belong to imperial power, it should have come into your forebears’ minds when they sent the case of Caecilian, as accusers, to the judgment of the emperor Constantine. But as it is, since the lions did not harm Daniel because of his innocence, you want them to spare those who, by slandering him, threw him to the lions. But God does not judge as man does, in whose hand is the king’s heart, and he turns it where he wills. When the king’s heart is unbelieving, the good are either exercised or proved; but when it is believing, the bad are either corrected or punished. Which of these two applies in your case we have already said enough, and we have answered your letter sufficiently, passing over no point; and we trust, by the Lord’s mercy, that this will profit some of you, would that it might you too!

But if you are preparing any answer to this, read also the proceedings with Emeritus, which he himself could not answer, in case perhaps you can, as I advised you above to try. We also dealt with him about the case of the Maximianists, which we charged against you so often at the conference and to which you answered nothing, since about a matter most manifest and most recent you could find nothing to answer: how Maximian, whom you struck with a far heavier sentence than Caecilian, so as to call him a minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram, whom the earth swallowed alive for the crime of schism, did not pollute the partners of his schism to whom you gave a period of grace to return to your communion; an African did not pollute Africans, a living man the living, a known man the known, a partner his associates; and Caecilian polluted those overseas, polluted those far away, polluted the unknown, polluted those not yet born. Find, if you can, what to say: how you received back in their rank Felician of Mustis and Praetextatus of Assuras, whom you condemned with Maximian and ten others without any period of grace, against whom you litigated before two or, unless I am mistaken, three proconsuls to drive them from their basilicas, and, when you had already ordained another in Praetextatus’s place, after so long a time received them back in their ranks. By what justice, what reason, what face is a condemned Maximianist received back in his rank, and the Catholic world condemned unheard? By what justice, what reason, what face do you say one must beware lest Caecilian defile you, long dead and wholly unknown to you, once condemned by your forebears as judges and three times acquitted with your forebears as accusers, and did not think one must beware lest Felician defile you, condemned by the mouth of your universal council and received by all of you, especially by the favor of your predecessor? By what justice, what reason, what face do you annul the baptism given by the churches which the apostles planted by their labors, when you have accepted the baptism which Felician and Praetextatus administered outside your church for so long a time, while you were litigating against them as condemned men? For if what is written, “He who is baptized by a dead man, what does he gain by his washing?”, is to be understood as you are accustomed to misunderstand it and charge it against us, these men were lying among those dead, when they were baptizing, of whom your sentence of Bagai resounded with such a din: “The shores are full of the corpses of those perishing quite after the example of the Egyptians, for whom the greater punishment in death itself is that, after their soul has been wrung out by the avenging waters, they do not even find a burial.” What will you say to this? See, dead men baptize those whom you receive, and you do not die; and you slander us as dead, so that, refusing to be in communion with Catholic unity, you may truly die by your own fires. Answer this; you have time to think what to say. Let us at least confer on you this benefit, that while you think what to answer you think less about how to burn. But we do not want you, for lack of an answer, to think you must still say that worn-out and battered thing you are accustomed to say: “If we are such, why do you seek us?” For we answer: the Catholic Church ought rather to seek you, because you have perished, if you, lost men, sought out the lost Maximianists. For from your heart you say to us: “Why do you seek men guilty of so many and such great crimes?” But from the book of God we answer you: “Because love covers a multitude of sins.”

I have received your reply, Gaudentius, if indeed it should be called a reply, which you chose to send me so that, if you had kept silent, we would not say that you had been refuted. But to reply is not the same as not to keep silent. For if it is, you have plainly replied; but in such a way that even those who might hope something from you may know that you did not find what you ought to answer, and yet answered so as not to keep silent. So, while guarding against being called defeated, you brought it about that you were shown to be. To show this, your own writings suffice, if they are read by intelligent people and compared with mine by careful examination. But to teach it in other writings, so as to satisfy even slower minds, a somewhat longer discussion is needed, which indeed I will undertake if there is need and the Lord wills.

For now, meanwhile, since you tried to affirm by the testimony of the blessed Cyprian that you rather are the Catholics, consider a little what church he called Catholic when he was defending its unity. “The church of the Lord,” he says, “flooded with light, sends its rays through the whole world; yet it is one light that is spread everywhere, and the unity of the body is not divided. It extends its branches over all the earth in the abundance of its fruitfulness; it spreads wider its flowing streams: yet there is one head and one source, and one mother rich in the successes of her fruitfulness.” Why, then, do you both deceive yourselves and wish to deceive others with shameless lies? If by the testimony of this martyr your church is Catholic, show it sending its rays through the whole world; show it extending its branches over all the earth in the abundance of its fruitfulness. For hence it is named “catholic” by a Greek word: for what is called in Greek ὅλον is rendered in Latin “whole” or “universal.” So “through the whole” or “according to the whole” is καθ᾽ ὅλον, from which it is called catholic. If you know this, why do you pretend not to know it? But if you do not know it, why do you not ask those who know before you speak of what you do not know? And if Greek displeases you, find some language, not Greek, in which you can teach that καθ᾽ ὅλον does not signify “through the whole” or “according to the whole” or “according to the universal,” and then withdraw from the testimony of Cyprian. For he speaks against you, as you see from what he says. He says that the Catholic Church is sent and extended through the whole world and over all the earth, agreeing with its Greek name and definition. You are found to hold, think, and say something else, and while you lean on Cyprian as witness, you lie with Cyprian as witness.

So when you are asked what cause you had for leaving this true and genuine Catholic Church, which, flooded with the Lord’s light, sends its rays through the whole world and extends its branches over all the earth in the abundance of its fruitfulness, you find nothing just; you wash away your departure from this church by no cleansing of a credible excuse. For what do you say but, “Necessity compelled us, so that the just might leave the unjust”? Divine Scripture answers you: “A bad son calls himself just, but does not wash away his going out.” “His going out,” it says, that surely of which the apostle John says, “They went out from us,” he by no means washes away, does not defend, does not excuse, does not cleanse. For it belongs to the just in the Catholic Church only to tolerate most patiently the bad whom they cannot correct or condemn, and not, before the time, to go out from the Lord’s field because of the weeds, nor from the Lord’s threshing floor because of the chaff, nor from the Lord’s house because of the vessels for dishonor, nor from the Lord’s nets because of the bad fish, so that they do not try in vain to wash away their going out. If you wish to turn these Gospel sayings into another sense by any argument whatever, you contradict the same blessed Cyprian whose testimonies you use, as you did at our conference. For these are the words of the said martyr on this question, in the letter he wrote to Maximus and his fellow confessors: “Even if there seem to be weeds in the church,” he says, “our faith or our love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are weeds in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church. We must labor only to be able to be wheat, so that, when the wheat begins to be stored in the Lord’s barns, we may receive fruit for our work and labor. The apostle says in his letter: ‘In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and of earthenware, and some for honor, some for dishonor.’ Let us strive and labor as much as we can to be a vessel of gold or silver. But to break the earthen vessels is granted to the Lord alone, to whom a rod of iron has also been given. The servant cannot be greater than his lord, nor may anyone claim for himself what the Father granted to the Son alone, so as to think he can already carry the shovel or winnowing fork to winnow and clean the threshing floor, or separate all the weeds from the wheat by human judgment. This is proud obstinacy and sacrilegious presumption which perverse fury takes upon itself. And while some always take on themselves more than gentle justice requires, they perish from the church, and while they insolently exalt themselves, blinded by their own swelling they lose the light of truth.”

Surely now at least you see that at our conference you cried out against holy Cyprian and resisted him with contentions, asserting that the field of Christ, of which he says, “The field is the world,” is not the church but the world apart from the church, so that it could have weeds that are seen. For you said that there cannot be manifest weeds in the church, every time we set down this testimony of Cyprian; and you neither dared to resist him openly nor were willing to agree. Surely now at least you are waking up, hearing, and noticing that “even if there seem to be weeds in the church, our faith or our love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are weeds in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church.” Why, then, do you depart from the unity of this church by a wicked schism and persist in that same split with heretical presumption? See, here is Cyprian for you: agree with him or answer him. You see how by these words, in which he says that weeds are in the church and are seen, and yet the church should not be left on that account, he wipes out all the slanders of your writings, in which you went so far over the edge and threw yourself down headlong in your usual fashion as to say that Christians of the whole world could have perished by others’ sins even without knowing who had sinned; because, of course, we read in the holy Scriptures that one man stole from what was under the ban, and for this sin another people, unknowing, was punished. You do not know that those punishments of mortal bodies, that is, the deaths of men who were going to die anyway, served for a useful terror to the people, yet others’ sins, especially those they did not know, did those who died no harm to the detriment of the life to come. Would you really say this? Would you really dare to believe and say that anyone perishes before God by others’ sins, even unknown ones? Did you not fear even your own colleagues, who at our conference, while you kept silent, and perhaps, though you already thought this, did not dare to say it, fought with such great efforts of argument that the bad fish in the Lord’s nets are unknown to the fishermen, so that, of course, they would not perish by their contagion, as they would if they knew? Did it not come to your mind that, when we were arguing about the chaff of the Lord’s threshing floor, that is, the church, to be tolerated in one mixture until the time of winnowing, and Emeritus was pressed, he denied it and said, “You do not read ‘threshing floor’”? And when he was reminded more privately by his own and more openly by us, who cited from the Gospel that the Lord will come with his winnowing fork in his hand, who will clean his threshing floor and store the grain in the barn but burn the chaff with unquenchable fire, he at once corrected the error of forgetfulness by which he had denied that it was written; yet he did not turn from the schismatic or heretical perversity by which he denied that the bad should be borne by the good for the unity of the church, and at once said that by the name of chaff the hidden bad were signified, so that you might keep this point for your case with special care, that unknown bad people could stain none of the good. See, the excellent advocate of your party has lost his labors through your opposition. For he, to safeguard the salvation of the good, asserts that the bad remaining in the church are entirely unknown to the good, so that they do not destroy them if known and tolerated; but you said that the good perish even by the contagion of the unknown bad, and you did not fear the so many hidden scandalous, criminal, and impious people of yours from the beginning, who by your view have surely destroyed you and all yours without your knowing. But even now you did not tremble with any fear lest perhaps one of your people should sin without your knowing and destroy you while you speak these things. Or perhaps, since you understand that you have perished by your own known deeds, you do not fear for this reason to perish by others’ unknown ones?

What should I wish for you, but that we may be allowed to find you, so that you may not wish to perish? For what hope will remain, if your opinion is true, by which you think that each perishes both by his own sins, who commits them, and by others’ sins, who does not know whether they were committed: not only for us, who agree with the Lord Christ, the prophets, the apostles, and holy Cyprian that even known bad people, if we can neither correct nor punish them, are to be borne for the bond of unity, but also for you, who are pleased by a bodily separation from the bad before the time of harvest, winnowing, and the shore? For if this is so, surely your forebears too, who, as you think, separated themselves from the known bad, perished by the unknown. And not only to you, who, when you say that a man perishes by others’ crimes whether he knows them or not, without doubt allow no one to remain innocent, but also to Emeritus himself, who, thinking far more tolerably, binds men in the communion of the sacraments only to others’ known sins and frees them from unknown ones, the venerable Cyprian answered with a much truer voice: that the grain growing together does not perish by the weeds set not outside the church but in the church, and not hidden and unknown but plainly known and visible. For I think that one is blinded not in the flesh but in the mind itself who contends that what is seen is hidden. And when that most blessed man warns that one should not withdraw from the church because of the weeds in it, he does not warn because of those that are hidden, but rather because of those that are seen. For these are the ones that can trouble those who see them, unless wisdom makes them patient. For how would we learn that we ought not to withdraw because of hidden ones, which we do not know exist at all? “Even if there seem to be weeds in the church,” he says. “Seem,” he says; they are not believed by suspicion. And so that no one might think “seem to be” was said as though they were not but seemed to be, he makes plain by the words that follow what he meant: “Our faith or our love,” he says, “ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are weeds in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church.” He does not say “we suspect, we think, we believe, we suppose,” but “we see.” For those too believed them not covered but saw them uncovered who said to the householder, “Do you want us to go and gather them?”, of which it had been said, “When the blade had grown and produced fruit, then the weeds appeared too.” To them he answered: “No, lest perhaps, while you wish to gather the weeds, you root up the wheat with them,” and, “Let both grow until the harvest.” And yet you say (in which what else do you do but contradict the Lord?) that only the weeds have grown through the world, and that the grain has dwindled and perished in almost the whole world; when the church, growing, has not yet reached some nations. But it is necessary that it reach them, and that the gospel be preached in the whole world, and then the end will come, which the Lord foretold, without any ambiguity, would happen.

You see that the church, by the testimony of Cyprian, is both called Catholic from “whole” and is not without manifest bad people, because of whom, however, he warns that it is not to be left. In it the good are many in themselves, but compared with the weeds or chaff certainly few. For not outside it but within it is fulfilled what the Lord himself says: “Because iniquity has abounded, the love of many will grow cold.” But there too is the people spread everywhere to whom it is said: “Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved.” Those, however, who have faith like a grain of mustard seed, by which even mountains are moved, are very rare indeed. It was of such faith that the Lord was speaking when he said, “Do you think the Son of Man will come and find faith on the earth?”, not of the apostasy of the whole world, as you most perversely understand.

Further, about baptism, which you think exists only in the church, and for which you charge us because we hold that those coming from heresies, if they are already baptized, are not to be baptized again: it is enough that you could by no means answer how Felician could baptize when condemned and set outside your church, whom you wished in vain to place among those to whom you gave a period of grace. Read the sentence of your council of Bagai, in which, after many most bitter things said to them, far heavier than were said against Caecilian when your forebears condemned him absent and innocent, their manifest and undoubted condemnation was added in these words: “Know therefore that, guilty of a notorious crime, Victorianus of Carcabia, Marcianus of Sullecthum, Beianus of Beia, Salvius of Ausafa, Theodorus of Usula, Donatus of Sabrata, Miggin of Elephantaria, Praetextatus of Assuras, Salvius of Membresa, Valerius of Melzi, Felicianus of Mustis, and Martialis of Pertusa, who by a deadly work of perdition glued together a filthy vessel from collected dregs, and also the clerics once of the church of Carthage who, while taking part in the crime, played pander to an unlawful incest, have been condemned by the judgment of God presiding, by the truthful mouth of the universal council.” And then the period of grace begins to be extended to the others in these words: “But those whom the shoots of the sacrilegious branch did not pollute, that is, who out of modest shame for the faith withdrew their own hands from the head of Maximian, we have allowed to return to mother church.” What needed to be said about these things has already been said sufficiently in my earlier letter to you. Anyone who reads it and pays a little attention cannot doubt that you could not answer this point at all.

So it seems to you in vain that the councils of Agrippinus and Cyprian are to be followed on this question, since you disregarded them when you received, without any repetition of baptism, those baptized outside your communion by condemned men against whom you were litigating to exclude them from the basilicas. As for the view of Cyprian and his colleagues, who then held that those coming from heretics ought to be baptized, it would take long to discuss it as it deserves. But solve for me, if you can, this short question. When Cyprian, bishop of the church of Carthage, was rebaptizing those coming from heretics, Stephen, then bishop of the church of Rome, was receiving heretics in the same baptism they had received outside; and both, doing these different things, remained in Catholic unity. Tell me whether at that time the church, when by your account it was receiving men guilty of all crimes without baptism through Stephen and his countless colleagues throughout the world who shared the same view, had perished by the contagion of the bad or had not. For you cannot call these bad people hidden, though you assert that even the hidden harm and kill. So whoever, a murderer or even a parricide, an adulterer, one guilty of incest, an idolater, finally a not timid betrayer of the holy books, or a cruel torturer and violent extorter to have them handed over, and the last burner of them by order or by hand, baptized among heretics, came to Stephen and his colleagues, was, by your account, received without baptism. You see, then, that all the crimes of men, if what you hold about baptism is true, were then gathered into the church without baptism. Answer whether Cyprian was stained by these crimes in that same unity; answer whether the church perished or did not perish. Choose what you think. If it had already perished then, what church gave birth to Donatus? But if it could not perish with so many added to it without baptism, answer, I ask you, what madness persuaded the party of Donatus to separate itself from it as though avoiding the communion of the bad.

But far be it that, because the most blessed Cyprian thought otherwise about baptism than the truth showed, earlier by custom and later by reasoning examined more carefully, any of us who understand this as he did not should dare to put himself above him. For his many other great merits, and his spirit full of preeminent love, by which he remained most peaceable with colleagues who thought differently, and his glorious martyrdom in the unity of the church, showed well enough that he was a fruitful branch in the root of Christ, which the Father pruned even of this fault, so that it might bear greater fruit. For so Jesus himself says: “The branch that bears fruit in me, my Father prunes, that it may bear greater fruit,” showing that even in fruitful branches the Farmer who is in heaven finds something to prune. For which of us can be compared with the apostle Peter, though we have never compelled the Gentiles to live like Jews, which he was doing when he was not walking rightly toward the truth of the gospel? Hence, corrected by the salutary admonition of Paul, the later apostle, he gave posterity a more useful example of humility than if there had been nothing in him to correct.

Set in this church, then, which neither could nor can perish by the contagion of the bad, whether hidden or even manifest, we fear no slanders about any people. For if they are bad, the good either do not know them, without doubt; or, when they are made manifest by their own evidence, condemn them by the church’s laws; or else, if they know them and cannot condemn them because they have not been accused and convicted before them, they tolerate them for the peace of the church, not only blamelessly but even praiseworthily, and do not, by tearing the Lord’s nets because of bad fish, damnably separate themselves before the time of the shore. For if they should wish to do this, besides the countless testimonies of the divine Scriptures by which they are forbidden to do it, the most blessed Cyprian, whom you brought as a witness, certainly holds them back, crying out and solemnly declaring that “even if there seem to be weeds in the church, our faith or our love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are weeds in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church”; warning us not only by word but also by his own example, who for the bond of unity bore with colleagues of his who seized estates by treacherous frauds and increased their gain by multiplying usury, whose avarice he understood, according to the apostle, to be not some light vice but idolatry; and he was not made such by their contagion. He departed from them by unlikeness of conduct, not by division of the sacraments; and he did not touch the unclean, but by abhorring their deeds, not by gathering a people apart. But you, while you understand carnally what was said through the prophet Isaiah, “Depart, and go out from their midst, and be separate, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing,” and other things said similarly in the Scriptures, while, I say, you understand these things not spiritually but carnally, you appear exactly such as are condemned, as the same prophet proclaims, who say: “Do not touch me, for I am clean.” Finally, while you perversely judged that others’ sins must be avoided, you committed others of your own: dividing peoples by a sacrilegious schism, and holding with a wicked spirit a sacrilegious heresy against God’s manifest promises, fulfilled, about the church spread through the whole world. For if, as you think, criticizing us over a word, one and the same society of the lost could not be both schism and heresy at once, the most blessed Cyprian would not have said, in the very letter from which I set down this testimony about the weeds placed in the church, to those confessors whom he congratulated on being set free from the Novatianist division: “I grieved greatly and was gravely distressed that I could not be in communion with those whom I had once begun to love, after the schismatic and heretical error took you up as you came out of prison.” So do not, against the plainest truth, either deceitfully evade both or choose for yourself whichever of them seems milder to you, since you are both a schismatic by sacrilegious departure and a heretic by sacrilegious doctrine.

Nor flatter yourselves that we do not annul your baptism. It is not yours but the Catholic Church’s, which we hold; from it, when you departed, you took it with you, not indeed to your salvation, but to your ruin. For the Lord’s vessels remained holy even among foreigners, so that the king who dared to use them with contempt was punished by God’s anger; and the ark of the covenant, captured by enemies, by no means lost the power of its holiness. If, then, those holy things, which were then among strangers in such a way that they ceased to be among their own, could nevertheless by no means lose the force of holiness, how much more do the Christian sacraments not lose it, when they pass over to heretics in such a way that they also remain with us! This is what I said in writing to you, which we also said to you at the conference, and you thought it better to evade it, since you could not refute it: that, as the apostle says of certain people, “They hold the truth in unrighteousness,” so you too hold the truth of divine baptism in the unrighteousness of human error; and this truth, which is not yours, we certainly must not annul because of your unrighteousness. And since the apostle himself is understood to have said of the idolatrous Gentiles, “who hold the truth in unrighteousness,” you, as if answering me, demanded that I prove what, of the sacrilege of the Gentiles, the apostle does not annul, what of their profane rite he does not condemn; as if he could fail to annul and condemn what is sacrilegious and profane, as we do your schism and your heresy. Yet certain sayings of truth which some philosophers of the Gentiles hold about the unknown God the apostle not only did not destroy, but even used as testimony when there was need. For speaking to the Athenians he says of God: “For in him we live and move and are, as some of your own have said.” This truth of wisdom, which the most blessed Paul not only did not destroy but even used to instruct them, they held in the unrighteousness of their idolatry, which apostolic teaching overturned by apostolic devices. So we too do not annul, but recognize, the true things which your forebears received in the Catholic Church and handed down to you; but your sacrilege we either annul at your conversion or detest in your obstinacy.

And yet you have settled the whole question, and all that is at issue between us, by expounding quite carefully a single word of the tribune. For when I had said, “Nor is it read in the tribune’s letter that the name of God was invoked by you in truth,” since I had not read that very word there at all, you answered: “You are mistaken, or rather you mislead; for the tribune’s words are: ‘lest so great a work, the house of the Lord, where the name of God and of his Christ has been invoked by you so often, be said to have been burned through your religion established there.’ Understand that ‘religion’ is said in truth; in falsehood it is called ‘superstition.’” When would I have noticed this, when would I have reasoned so, when would I have proved one thing from another in this way? I confess, this escaped the edge of my wit, such as it is; and so believe me that I could have been mistaken there, not, as you said, that I wished to mislead about a word. So the tribune, as a military man, erred in saying “through your religion” to one whom he knows or believes to be a heretic, since heresy is not religion but superstition, and religion is properly said not in falsehood but in truth. Accordingly, by this exposition of yours, the true worship of God is called religion, but the false superstition. Listen, then, to yourself, obey yourself, and you will by no means refuse to follow us. For writing to the same tribune, at the very opening of your first letter, you set down and said, “To the honorable Dulcitius, tribune and notary, much to be longed for by us, if you so wish, Gaudentius, bishop,” and at once added, “I have received the writings of Your Religiousness.” Why, then, do you still hesitate to come to us? See, the tribune Dulcitius, though a man of our communion, is nevertheless, by your testimony, not superstitious but religious, and therefore, by your exposition, holds not a false but the true worship of God. So it is he rather than you who is in the Catholic Church, since you did not err in this word at all, so much so that you even expounded that religion differs from superstition as much as truth from falsehood. But that man, as I said, a military man and less learned in these proper meanings of words, did not know what religion was; for far be it that I should say he was misleading you by flattery. But you, who reproach those you argue against from the prophet and cry, “Woe to those who call bitter sweet and sweet bitter, who call light darkness and darkness light”: if what Dulcitius holds with us is superstition, why did you call it religion? But if you spoke the truth, why do you reject the Catholic religion by holding a heretical superstition? Follow, then, your own testimony, especially since your own people too, when they learn of it, will perhaps not be in communion with you, because by this word you entered communion with the tribune Dulcitius. Come, brother Gaudentius, do not lose the opportunity which the Lord has given you even through your own tongue. Or perhaps you are angry because I call you brother? For you rejected this name from us even at our conference, where you showed that we are those whom the Lord commanded through the prophet, “Say, You are our brothers, to those who hate you and who detest you,” and that you are among those who hate and detest those to whom the Lord says this. You certainly cannot deny that you called “religion” that in which the tribune Dulcitius is. He sent you that letter precisely so that you would not kill yourself and would enter communion with the church in which he is. If, then, his is religion, yours is superstition. For although you have both said this of each other, you choose rather that he should have spoken falsely than you.

Wherefore, according to this most true testimony and most true exposition of yours, since it is religion which the tribune Dulcitius holds, it is surely religion by which the emperor’s command drives you to our communion. From this it follows that it is religion too by which the Christian emperor judges that it belongs to his care that there be no sinning against divine things with impunity; though you do not want him to care for anything but what is contained in the earthly commonwealth. Hence too, forgetting what you had read, you said that the king of the Ninevites did not order the people to do penance. For these are your words to me: “Why do you deceive the wretched? God commanded Jonah; the Lord sent a prophet to the people; he ordered nothing of the kind to the king.” Notice, then, what is written, and be angry with none but yourself, who either do not recall the divine Scriptures or rather yourself deceive the wretched: “Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, as the Lord had spoken. Now Nineveh was a great city, about a three days’ journey. And Jonah began to enter the city about one day’s journey, and he preached and said: Yet three days, and Nineveh will be overthrown. And the men of Nineveh believed the Lord, and proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least. And when the word reached the king of the city of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his garments, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And it was proclaimed by the king and by the nobles, saying: Let men and beasts, sheep and oxen, taste nothing, nor graze, and let them not drink water. And men and beasts put on sackcloth; they cried earnestly to the Lord, and each turned from the way of his wickedness and from the iniquity that was in his hands.” Do you hear at last that a king took care of what it displeases you should belong to the care of kings? Certainly so that what was being done less than it ought should be done earnestly. Now the Ninevites were not forced to penance by the king’s command through confiscations and proscriptions or the terror of soldiers, because they obediently did what was ordered. So we do not show that the people suffered these things, because neither can you show that the king was disregarded. Accordingly, whoever obeys kings commanding with religious fear what is according to God, beginning from fear and advancing to love, receives peace from the Lord, not as the world gives peace; for the world gives peace for temporal advantage, but the Lord for eternal salvation. So, since it is religion in which the tribune Dulcitius is (for you will not deny your own words), the party of Donatus, from which his religion wishes you rescued, is superstition. It is superstition that you seek to kill yourself, which his religion strongly forbids; it is superstition that you blame the emperor’s care in these matters, which his religion has undertaken to carry out.

So since the case has been finished by your own word, I beg you by the God of religion, the God of truth, that your error too may at last be finished. That, brother, is the church of Christ which at this time is spreading by growing through the whole world, containing both bad and good, to be separated by the final winnowing. And to address you at the last rather in the words of him whom you wished to bring as a witness to the Catholic name: it is the church which, flooded with the Lord’s light, sends its rays through the whole world; it is the church which extends its branches over all the earth in the abundance of its fruitfulness. Accordingly, “even if there seem to be weeds in it, our faith or our love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are weeds in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church. We must labor only to be able to be wheat, so that, when the wheat begins to be stored in the Lord’s barns, we may receive fruit for our work and labor. The apostle says in his letter: ‘In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and of earthenware, and some for honor, some for dishonor.’ Let us strive and labor as much as we can to be a vessel of gold or silver. But to break the earthen vessels is granted to the Lord alone, to whom a rod of iron has also been given. The servant cannot be greater than his lord, nor may anyone claim for himself what the Father granted to the Son alone, so as to think he can already carry the shovel or winnowing fork to winnow and clean the threshing floor, or separate all the weeds from the wheat by human judgment. This is proud obstinacy and sacrilegious presumption which perverse fury takes upon itself. And while some always take on themselves more than gentle justice requires, they perish from the church, and while they insolently exalt themselves, blinded by their own swelling they lose the light of truth.” These are the words of the most blessed Cyprian, not mine; the words, that is, of him whom you set before us at the opening of your writings as a most choice witness to the Catholic name and commended most copiously at length; or rather, through him, since they are true and divine, they are the words of God. See what to hear, see what to beware of, so that with the help of the Savior’s mercy we may together hold Catholic love, together love Catholic peace, together grow everywhere with its wheat, together bear with the weeds until the end, together live without end in the barn. You surely see that, without any defense of Caecilian or of any people whom you think should be accused, the Catholic Church stands by its own strength and firmness; although our conference cleared Caecilian’s case, and as to the others whom you slander, either the accusation is doubtful or the condemnation unjust. But it is very foolish to set the case of the church, propped and fortified by divine testimonies, in the cases of men, with reasoning gone astray; since, even if we saw those men most plainly to be bad and could not separate them from the sacraments of the church, yet our faith or our love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we saw these too among the weeds in the church, we ourselves should have to withdraw from the church. If you think of replying, do not abandon the case and wander about in superfluous things. Look at what has been said; answer what has been said, not by deceitful evasion but by reasoned argument. For what you achieved by that long reply, or rather how you achieved nothing, I will show more carefully in another work, if it seems necessary and the Lord grants it.