Against the Letters of Petilian

You know that we have often wished to bring the sacrilegious error of the Donatist heretics into open view, and to refute it, not so much out of our own mouth as out of theirs. That is why we even sent letters to some of their leading men: not letters of communion, of which they long ago made themselves unworthy by dissenting from the Catholic Church, but not insulting letters either; peaceable ones, so that, once the question that tore them away from the holy communion of the whole world had been discussed with us and the truth considered, they might be willing to be corrected, and might not defend the headstrong perversity of their forebears with a more foolish obstinacy, but be restored to the Catholic root for the fruit of love. But since it is written, “With those who hated peace I was peaceable,” they rejected my letters just as they hated the very peace that the letters sought to serve. Now, however, when I was in the church of Constantina, with Absentius present and my colleague Fortunatus, its bishop, the brothers handed me a letter which they said the bishop of that same schism had given to his presbyters, as the heading of the letter also claimed. When I read it, I was so astonished that with its very first words it cut off the whole communion of his own party at the root, that I was unwilling to believe the letter belonged to the man whom report commonly proclaims to excel among them in learning and eloquence. But since some were present while I read who knew the polish and ornament of his style, they began to persuade me that the language was certainly his. Whoever's it was, I thought it must be refuted, so that whoever wrote it should not seem, to the unlearned, to have written something against the Catholic Church.

This, then, is the first thing he set down in his letter: he says that we charge them with a double baptism, we who under the name of baptism pollute our souls with a guilty washing. But what good is it to go over all his insulting words? Since proving a case is one thing and dealing with abuse by refuting it is another, let us rather attend to the way he wished to show that we do not have baptism, and that therefore he does not repeat what was already there but gives what was not there. For he says: “For it is the conscience of the giver that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver.” What if the conscience of the giver is hidden, and perhaps stained? How will it be able to cleanse the conscience of the receiver, if, as he says, the conscience of the giver is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver? For if he says that whatever evil lies hidden in the giver's conscience does not concern the receiver, that ignorance will perhaps avail so far as this: that the receiver, not knowing it, cannot be stained by the conscience of the one who baptizes him. Let it be granted, then, that another's stained conscience, when it is unknown, does not stain; but can it also cleanse?

From what source, then, is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it, especially since he goes on to say: “For he who has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt”? Look: a faithless man stands ready to baptize, and the one to be baptized does not know of his faithlessness. What do you think he will receive, faith or guilt? If you say faith, you will grant that it can happen that someone receives faith, not guilt, from a faithless man, and the saying “he who has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt” will be false. For we find that someone can receive faith even from a faithless man, if he does not know the giver's faithlessness. He did not say, “he who has received faith from a man who is openly or knowingly faithless,” but, “he who has received faith,” he says, “from the faithless receives not faith but guilt”; and that is certainly false when someone is baptized by a hidden faithless man. But if he says that even when the faithless baptizer is hidden, the person receives from him not faith but guilt, then let them rebaptize those who are shown to have been baptized by men who long lay hidden among them in their crimes and were afterwards exposed, convicted, and condemned. For whomever such men baptized while they lay hidden, they could hand on to them not faith but guilt, if whoever has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt. So let those people be baptized by good men, that they may receive faith, not guilt.

But how will they be secure even about these, if it is the conscience of the giver that is looked to, a conscience hidden from the eyes of the one about to receive? So by their view that spiritual salvation becomes uncertain, since, against the holy Scriptures, which say, “It is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in man,” and, “Cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man,” they take the hope of those to be baptized away from the Lord God and persuade them that it must be placed in a man. The result is that salvation is not uncertain but altogether nonexistent, because “salvation belongs to the Lord,” and “vain is the salvation of man.” So whoever puts his hope in a man, even one he knows to be righteous and innocent, is cursed. That is why the apostle Paul rebukes those who said they were Paul's, and says, “Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

Therefore, if those who wished to be Paul's were in error and would have perished had they not been corrected, what hope at last is there for those who seek to be Donatus's? For what these men are after is that the origin, root, and head of the baptized person should be none other than the one by whom he is baptized. So it comes about that, since it is very often uncertain what kind of man the baptizer is, with an uncertain origin, an uncertain root, and an uncertain head, all hope too is uncertain. And since it can happen that the giver's conscience is wicked and stained without the receiver knowing it, it follows that with a wicked origin, a wicked root, and a wicked head, the hope of the baptized person also proves vain and empty; for this man sets it down in his letter and says, “For everything consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have something as its head, it is nothing.” And since he wants the origin, root, and head of the baptized person to be understood as the man by whom he is baptized, what good does it do the wretched baptized man that he does not know how bad his baptizer is? He does not know that he has a bad head, or no head at all. Yet what hope is there for one whose head, whether he knows it or not, is very bad or none at all? Does his very ignorance become a head to him whose baptizer is either a bad head or none? Whoever thinks so is truly without a head.

So we ask, since he said, “He who has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt,” and at once joined to it, “For everything consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have something as its head, it is nothing”: we ask, I say, when that faithless baptizer is hidden, if the one he baptizes then receives faith and not guilt, if his baptizer is not then his origin, root, and head, who is it from whom he receives faith? Where is the origin from which he springs, where the root from which he grows, where the head from which he begins? Or perhaps, when the one baptized does not know that the baptizer is faithless, is it then Christ who gives faith, then Christ who is the origin, root, and head? O human rashness and pride! Why do you not rather allow that Christ always gives faith, making a Christian by giving it? Why do you not allow that Christ is always the origin of the Christian, that the Christian fixes his root in Christ, that Christ is the Christian's head? For even when spiritual grace is imparted to believers through a holy and faithful minister, it is not the minister himself who justifies, but that one alone of whom it is said that he “justifies the ungodly.” Nor was the apostle Paul the head and origin of those he had planted, or Apollos the root of those he had watered, rather than he who had given them the growth; for Paul himself says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth; so neither the one who plants is anything, nor the one who waters, but God who gives the growth.” Nor was Paul their root, but rather he who said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” And how could he be their head, when he says that we who are many are one body in Christ, and in many places proclaims most plainly that Christ himself is the head of the whole body?

Therefore, whether someone receives the sacrament of baptism from a faithful or a faithless minister, let all his hope be in Christ, so that he may not be cursed as one who puts his hope in man. Otherwise, if each is reborn in spiritual grace such as the one by whom he is baptized, and if, when the man who baptizes is plainly good, he himself gives faith and is himself the origin, root, and head of the one being born, but when the faithless baptizer is hidden, each then receives faith from Christ, then draws his origin from Christ, then is rooted in Christ, then glories in Christ as head, then all who are baptized ought to strive to have faithless baptizers and not to know it. For however good the baptizers they have, Christ is beyond comparison better, and he will be the baptized person's head only if the baptizer is secretly faithless.

But if it is utter madness to believe this (for Christ always justifies the ungodly by making a Christian out of the ungodly; faith is always received from Christ; Christ is always the origin of the regenerate and the head of the church), what weight do those words have, whose inner sense empty readers do not attend to, but only how they sound? But one who takes in not only the sounds with his ear but also the meaning with his mind, when he hears, “It is the conscience of the giver that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver,” will answer: “A human conscience is often unknown to me, but I am sure of Christ's mercy.” When he hears, “He who has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt,” he will answer: “Christ is not faithless, from whom I receive faith, not guilt.” When he hears, “For everything consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have something as its head, it is nothing,” he will answer: “My origin is Christ, my root is Christ, my head is Christ.” When he hears, “Nor does anything regenerate well unless it is regenerated by good seed,” he will answer: “The seed by which I am regenerated is the word of God, which I am admonished to hear obediently even if the one through whom I hear it does not himself do what he tells me; for the Lord says, making me secure: ‘Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.’” When he hears, “What perversity can it be that one guilty of his own crimes should make another innocent?” he will answer: “No one makes me innocent but he who died for our sins and rose for our justification. For I do not believe in the minister through whom I am baptized, but in him who justifies the ungodly, so that my faith is reckoned to me as righteousness.”

When he hears, “A good tree bears good fruit, a bad tree bears bad fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns?” and, “Every good man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and the evil man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth evil things,” he will answer: “This, then, is good fruit: that I be a good tree, that is, a good man, so that I may yield good fruit, that is, good works. But this will be given me not by the one who plants or the one who waters, but by God who gives the growth.” For if the good tree is the good baptizer, so that his good fruit is the one he has baptized, then whoever has been baptized by a bad man, even one not manifestly bad, cannot be good, since he sprang from a bad tree (a good tree is one thing, a tree hidden but still bad is another). Or if, when the bad tree is hidden, whoever has been baptized by it is born not of it but of Christ, then those baptized by hidden bad men are justified in a holier way than those baptized by manifestly good men.

Again, when he hears, “He who is baptized by a dead man, his washing does not profit him,” he will answer: “Christ lives; he dies no more, and death will no longer have dominion over him; of whom it was said, ‘He it is who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.’” Those are baptized by the dead who are baptized in the temples of idols. For even they do not think they receive the sanctification they suppose from their priests, but from their gods; and since these were men and are dead in such a way as to be neither upon the earth nor in the rest of heaven, those people are truly baptized by the dead, even if these words of holy Scripture can also be truly examined and profitably discussed and understood in some other way. For if in this place I take the dead man to be a sinful baptizer, the same absurdity will follow, that whoever has been baptized even by a hidden ungodly man has been washed in vain, as though baptized by a dead man. For it does not say, “he who is baptized by a manifestly dead man,” but says without qualification, “by a dead man.” But if they consider someone dead when they know him to be a sinner, but alive even if, though wicked, he lies hidden very cunningly in their communion, then first, in accursed pride, they claim more for themselves than they grant to God: when a sinner is known to them he is called dead, but when he is known to God he is reckoned alive. Next, if the sinner known to men is to be called dead, what will they answer about Optatus, whom they long knew to be a criminal and were afraid to condemn? Why are those whom he baptized not said to have been baptized by a dead man? Or was he alive because God was his companion? They themselves are accustomed to boast of and praise this as a witty and elegant saying of some leading colleague of theirs, not understanding that, like the proudest Goliath at his end, they are cutting off their own head with their own sword.

Finally, if they want to call dead neither the hidden criminal nor the manifest one who has not yet been condemned by them, but only one who is both manifest and condemned, so that whoever is baptized by him is baptized by a dead man and his washing profits him nothing, what will they say about those whom, “with the truthful mouth of their plenary council,” as they put it, they condemned along with Maximian and the others who ordained him? I mean Felicianus of Musti and Praetextatus of Assuras, of whom I speak for the moment, who are named among the twelve who ordained Maximian and set up an altar against the altar at which Primian stands. These, surely, they count among the dead. Witness that famous sentence of their council, which, when it was read out among them for decision, they once acclaimed with mouths wide open, but now, if we happen to read it to them, they fall silent; whereas they ought rather not to have rejoiced at first over its eloquence, so as not to lament later over its disgrace. For there they speak of the Maximianists, excluded from the fellowship of their communion, thus: that by the truthful wave the shipwrecked limbs of some have been cast upon the rough rocks, and, quite after the example of the perishing Egyptians, the shores are full of corpses, for whom in death itself the greater punishment is that, after their life has been wrung out by the avenging waters, they do not even find burial. So these men mock their own schismatics, calling them both dead and unburied. But surely they ought to have wished them buried, so that Optatus the Gildonian, advancing with a military column over the multitude of unburied corpses lying on the shore, like a raging wave leaping beyond its bounds, should not afterwards suck Felicianus and Praetextatus back inside.

I ask them whether, by coming over into their sea, these men came back to life, or still remain dead there. For if they are corpses all the same, then the washing can in no way profit those who are baptized by these dead men. But if they came back to life, how does the washing profit those whom they baptized before, while they lay lifeless outside, if “He who is baptized by a dead man, what does his washing profit him?” is to be understood as they think? For those whom Praetextatus and Felicianus baptized while still in communion with Maximian, they now hold inside, not rebaptized, mixed into their communion together with those same baptizers of theirs, Felicianus and Praetextatus. On the occasion of this deed, if they were not nursing the primacy of their obstinacy but considering so certain a ruin of their spiritual salvation, they surely ought to wake up and, with soundness of mind recovered, breathe again in Catholic peace, if only, laying aside the swelling of pride and overcoming the fury of stubbornness, they would consider with what monstrous sacrilege the baptism of the churches overseas, which we know from the holy books were founded first of all, is cursed, while the baptism of the Maximianists, whom they condemned with their own mouth, is accepted.

But our brothers themselves, the sons of the churches I have mentioned, neither knew then nor know now what was done in Africa so many years ago; so the crimes charged against the Africans by the other side, even if they were true, could not defile them, since they were ignorant of them. But these men, openly separated and divided, though they are said even to have been present at Primian's ordination, condemned Primian, ordained another bishop against Primian, baptized outside Primian, rebaptized after Primian, and returned to Primian with their own people, baptized by them outside and rebaptized by no one inside. If so great a union with the Maximianists does not stain the Donatists, how could the mere report about the Africans stain foreigners? If lips that condemned one another meet without crime in the kiss of peace, why is anyone from churches across the sea, very remote even in their own judgment, condemned by them, so that he is not kissed as a faithful Catholic but exsufflated like an ungodly pagan? If they made peace by receiving the Maximianists for the sake of their own unity, look, we do not blame them, except that they cut their own throats by their own judgment: while for the unity of their cutting-off they gather together again what had been cut off from them, they scorn to sew that very cutting-off back on to the true unity.

If for the unity of the party of Donatus no one rebaptizes those baptized in an abominable schism, and those guilty of so great a crime that in their council they compared them with those ancient authors of schism whom the earth swallowed alive are either not punished when separated or, when condemned, are restored in full, why, for the unity of Christ, which is spread through the whole world, of whom it was foretold that “he shall rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth,” and what was foretold is seen and proved to be fulfilled, why, I say, for this unity is the true and complete law of that inheritance not acknowledged, which resounds from the books we share: “I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession”? (For the unity of Donatus they are not compelled to recall what they had scattered; they are admonished to hear what the Scriptures cry out.) Why do they not understand that this was done to them by God's mercy: that since they accused the Catholic Church with false charges, by whose contagion, as it were, they did not wish their excessive holiness to be defiled, they were compelled, through the reign of Optatus the Gildonian, to receive back and associate with themselves real and very great crimes condemned by the truthful mouth, as they say, of their plenary council? Let them at last perceive how they are filled with the real crimes of their own, who invent false ones against their brothers. And even if they had spoken the truth, they ought at last to perceive how much must be borne for the sake of peace, and to return for the peace of Christ to the church that did not condemn things unknown, if for the peace of Donatus they were pleased to recall things condemned.

So, brothers, let this one thing that was done among them concerning the Maximianists suffice us for admonishing and correcting them. We do not ransack old archives, we do not air ancient bookcases, we do not send our proof off to distant lands; we set aside all the documents of our forebears, we postpone the testimonies that cry out through the whole world.

Look at the cities of Musti and Assuras! There still remain in this life and in this province those who separated and those from whom they separated, those who set up an altar and those against whom they set it up, those who condemned and those who were condemned, those who received and those who were received, those who were baptized outside and were not rebaptized inside. If these things stain for the sake of unity, let the stained hold their tongue; if they do not stain for the sake of unity, let the corrected drop the quarrel.

Now let the man who wrote the words of his letter laugh at them himself. Having used ignorantly and falsely the testimony he cites as written, “He who is baptized by a dead man, what does his washing profit him?”, he tries to show us how far a traitor, though living, is to be held dead, and he adds: “That man is dead who did not deserve to be born by true baptism; that man is likewise dead who, though begotten by a lawful baptism, has mixed himself with a traitor.” If, then, the Maximianists are not dead, why do they say in their plenary council that the shores are full of the corpses of these perishing men? But if they are dead, from where does the baptism they gave get its life? Next, if Maximian is not dead, why is there rebaptism after him? But if he is dead, why did Felicianus of Musti, who ordained him, not die with him, while a man overseas could die along with some African colleague or other who was a traitor? Or if Felicianus too is dead, how is it that those whom he baptized outside while dead now live with him inside among you, not rebaptized?

Then he added: “Both lack the life of baptism, both the one who never had it at all and the one who had it and lost it.” So the one whom the Maximianist Felicianus or Praetextatus baptized outside never had it, and they themselves had lost what they had. When, then, these men were received with their people, who gave those they had baptized what they did not have, and who gave back to the baptizers themselves what they had lost? But if they took the form of baptism away with them, but lost the power of baptism itself through the evil schism, why do you exsufflate that very form, which is always and everywhere holy, in Catholics whom you have not heard, and embrace it in Maximianists whom you have punished?

But whatever he thought he was saying in accusation about Judas the traitor, what does it have to do with us? They do not prove us traitors; and even if the handing over of the books were proved against some who died in our communion before our time, it would not stain us in any way, since we disapprove of it and it displeases us. For if they themselves are not stained by crimes which they condemned and then received, how much less can we be stained by crimes we have heard of and disapprove! So however much he inveighs against traitors, let him count them accused by me in as many words. But I do make this distinction: he accuses before me a man long dead, whom no inquiry of mine has judged; I show him sticking close beside one whom he condemned, or at any rate one separated by sacrilegious schism, and received without any loss of his rank.

“You most wicked traitor,” he says, “have come forth as a persecutor and executioner of us who keep the law.” If the Maximianists kept the law when they separated from you, then you too may be a keeper of the law, since you are separated from the church that is spread through the whole world. But if you are speaking of persecutions, I answer quickly: if you suffered anything unjustly, it does not concern those who, though others wickedly do such things, nevertheless tolerate them commendably for the sake of the peace of unity. So you have nothing to charge against the Lord's grain, which bears with its chaff until the final winnowing; you would never have left it if you had not, as lighter chaff, flown off in the wind of temptation even before the winnower came. But not to depart from this one example, which the Lord has thrown back in their faces to shut their mouths and, if they are wise, to correct them, or, if they remain in their perversity, to confound them: if those who suffer persecution are more righteous than those who inflict it, then the same Maximianists are more righteous, whose basilica was razed to the ground, who were severely harassed by the military retinue of Optatus, and against whom, as is well known, the Primianists obtained orders from the proconsul to exclude them all from the basilicas. So if, while the emperors detested their communion, they dared so much to persecute the Maximianists, what would they do if communion with the kings allowed them to accomplish anything? But if they did these things to correct the wicked, why are they surprised if Catholic emperors decree, with greater power, that those should be pressed and corrected who try to rebaptize the whole Christian world, when they have no reason for dissent? For they themselves bear witness that the wicked must be tolerated for the sake of peace, even if they were bringing true charges, since they received those whom they had condemned, with their ranks and with the baptism given outside. Let them consider at last what the enemies of Christian unity, spread through the whole world, deserve to suffer from the Christian powers of the world. So now, if correction is slow, let shame at least be present, so that when these same men begin to read what they write, laughter may not overcome them, as they do not recognize in themselves what they want to be seen in others, nor recognize in themselves what they charge against others.

What, then, does he mean by setting down in his letter the Lord's words to the Jews: “Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you will kill and crucify and scourge”? For if they want themselves to be understood as the wise men, scribes, and prophets, and us as persecutors of the wise men and prophets, why do they refuse to speak with us, since they are sent to us? Indeed, the man who wrote the letter we are now answering would perhaps not do it if we pressed him to acknowledge it as his by signing it with his own hand; so much do they fear that we may hold any words of theirs. For when we wanted somehow to get the later part of that same letter, since those who gave it to us had not been able to copy the whole, no one we asked was willing to give it, once they learned that we were answering the part we had obtained. So when they read how the Lord says to the prophet, “Cry aloud, do not spare, and write their sins with my pen,” these true prophets who are sent to us fear and guard against nothing so much as our hearing their cry; which, surely, they would not fear if they were telling the truth about us. Not without reason, as it is written in the psalm, “the mouth of those who speak wicked things is stopped.” For if they do not accept our baptism because we are a brood of vipers, as he set down in his letter, why did they accept that of the Maximianists, of whom their council speaks thus: that the hollow of a poisoned womb long covered the harmful offspring of a viper's seed, and the moist clots of the conceived crime slowly warmed into the limbs of asps? Was it not also said of them in the same council, as follows, that “the poison of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known”? And yet they now hold inside both these men, with their rank intact, and those they baptized outside.

So all this about the brood of vipers, the poison of asps under their lips, and the other things said against those who have not known the way of peace, if they wanted to speak truly, applies rather to themselves; for they received the baptism of those against whom they said these things in the council's sentence, for the sake of the peace of Donatus, and they repudiate the baptism of the church of Christ spread through the whole world, from which that very peace came to Africa, to the sacrilegious injury of the peace of Christ. Who, then, are rather the false prophets who come in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves? Those who either do not know of the wicked in the Catholic Church and are in communion with them innocently, or who tolerate for the peace of unity those whom they cannot separate from the Lord's threshing floor before the winnower comes? Or those who do in schism what they blame in the Catholic Church, and who, while pretending to flee in unity things that are to be tolerated and uncertain besides, accept in their own cutting-off things manifest and condemned by themselves?

Finally, it has been said, and he himself also cited it: “By their fruits you will know them.” So let us consider the fruits. You charge us with the handing over of the books; we charge you with that very thing, with much more probability. Not to run through many cases: in this same city of Constantina your forebears, at the very beginning of their schism, ordained Silvanus bishop. While he was still a subdeacon, he was set down in the municipal records as a most manifest traitor. If you also bring forward some documents against our forebears, fairness demands that we believe both to be true or both to be false. If both are true, you are beyond doubt guilty of schism, since you pretended to flee in the communion of the whole world crimes which you had in the little fragment of your own cutting-off. But if both are false, you are beyond doubt guilty of schism, since on account of false charges of handing over the books you are stained with the monstrous crime of separation. And if we bring forward some documents and you none, or we true ones and you false ones, there is no need to discuss how thoroughly your mouths are shut.

What if the holy and true church of Christ were to convict and overcome you even if we had no documents, or false ones, about the handing over of the books, and you had some true ones? What would remain for you then, except to love peace if you are willing, or, if you are not, at least to be silent? For whatever you might produce now, I could say very easily and very truly that you ought at that time to have proved it to the full and Catholic unity of the church, already spread and established through so many nations, so that you would remain inside and those you convicted would be driven out. If you tried to do this, you were beyond doubt unable to prove it, and, defeated or angry, you separated yourselves with monstrous sacrilege from the innocent, who could not condemn things uncertain. But if you did not even try, then with a most accursed and ungodly blindness you cut yourselves off from the wheat of Christ, which grows through the whole field, that is, the whole world, until the end, because you were offended by a few tares in Africa.

Lastly, the Testament is said to have been handed over to the flames by certain men in time of persecution. Now let it be read aloud, from wherever it has been brought out. Surely at the beginning of the testator's promises this is found said to Abraham: “In your seed all nations will be blessed,” and the truthful apostle interprets what this means: “In your seed,” he says, “which is Christ.” No one's handing over has made void the faithfulness of God. Be in communion with all nations, and then boast that you preserved the Testament from destruction by fire. But if you will not, which party is rather to be believed to have pressed for burning the Testament, if not the one that will not agree with it once it is brought out? For how much more surely, without any sacrilegious rashness, is he judged to have succeeded the traitors who now persecutes with his tongue the Testament which they are said to have persecuted with fire! You charge us with persecution: the Lord's grain answers you, either it was done justly, or our chaff did it. What do you say to this? You charge that we do not have baptism: the same grain of the Lord answers you that the form of the sacrament profits some nothing even inside, as it did not profit Simon Magus after his baptism, and much more profits nothing those who are outside; yet it is proved to be in them when they go away from here, because it is not given again when they return. Can you, then, except most shamelessly, cry out against this grain and call them false prophets clothed in sheepskins, but inwardly ravenous wolves, since they either do not know the wicked in Catholic unity or tolerate for the sake of unity those they know?

But if we consider your fruits, I pass over the tyrannical domination in the cities and especially on other people's estates; I pass over the fury of the Circumcellions, and the sacrilegious and profane cult of the corpses of those who threw themselves over cliffs, the drunken revels, and the ten years' groaning of all Africa under one Optatus the Gildonian. I pass over these things, because there are some among you who proclaim that these things displease them and always have. But they say that they tolerate them for the sake of peace, because they cannot suppress them; and in this they condemn themselves by their own judgment, for if they loved peace they would not tear unity apart. For what madness is it to want to abandon peace in peace itself and to want to keep it in dissension? So because of those who pretend not to see the evils of the same party of Donatus which everyone sees and blames, so much so that they even say of Optatus himself, “What did he do? Who accused him? Who convicted him? I do not know, I did not see, I did not hear”: because of these, then, who pretend not to know what is manifest, the Maximianists arose, in whose case their eyes may be opened and their mouths shut. Openly they separate, openly they set up altar against altar, openly in council they are called sacrilegious and vipers and swift to shed blood and comparable to Dathan and Abiram and Korah, and are condemned and cursed in harsh words; openly they are received back in their ranks together with those they baptized. These are the fruits of those who do these things for the peace of Donatus, so that they cover themselves with sheepskin, and who refuse the peace of Christ in the whole world, so that inwardly they are ravenous wolves.

I think I have passed over none of the things he set down in his letter, at least of those I could find in the part we obtained; let them bring out the remaining part too, in case there is something there that cannot be refuted. As for these answers we have given with the Lord's help, I urge you, beloved, not only to give them to those who ask, but to press them even on those who do not. Let them answer if they wish; and if they do not wish to answer us, let them at least send letters to their own people, but not order them to be hidden from us. If they do that, they very plainly display their fruits, by which they are shown to be ravenous wolves clothed in sheepskins, who secretly lie in wait for our sheep and are afraid to answer the shepherds openly. We charge them only with the crime of schism, in which all of them are wholly involved, not with the crimes of some of them, which some of them may answer displease them. But they, if they do not charge us with other people's crimes, have nothing to charge; and therefore they cannot defend themselves at all from the crime of schism, because, whether on account of false charges invented by themselves or even on account of true ones, but still the crimes of chaff, they separated themselves by an abominable rupture from the Lord's threshing floor and from the innocence of the grain growing through the whole world.

Unless perhaps you expect me also to refute what he put in about Manichaeus. In this matter nothing displeases us except that he blamed a most pestilential and pernicious error, that is, the heresy of the Manichees, with a very light and almost nonexistent reproof, an error which the Catholic Church defeats with the strongest proofs of truth. For the inheritance of Christ, established in all nations, is safe against all disinherited heresies. But as the Lord says, “How can Satan cast out Satan?”, so how can the error of the Donatists overthrow the error of the Manichees?

Therefore, dearest friends, although this error is overcome by being refuted in many ways, and dares to resist the truth not with any assertions of any kind of reason but only with obstinate impudence, still, so that a multitude of proofs may not burden your memory, hold on to this one act concerning the Maximianists; nail it to their foreheads; force it into their mouths to check their deceitful tongues; with it, as with a three-pronged weapon, slaughter their slander as a three-headed beast. They charge us with handing over the books, they charge us with persecution, they charge us with false baptism: answer everything from the Maximianists alone. They think it is hidden that their forebears handed the holy books over to the flames; but since the sacrilege of schism exceeds the crime of handing over, they received in their ranks the Maximianists, defiled by the sacrilege of schism. This at least they cannot hide. Again, they think the most violent persecutions which they carry out against anyone they can, wherever they can, are hidden; but since spiritual persecution exceeds bodily persecution, they received in their ranks the Maximianists, whom they persecuted bodily and of whom they themselves said, “Their feet are swift to shed blood.” This at least they cannot hide. Lastly, they think the question of baptism, by which they deceive the wretched, is hidden; but while they say that all who are baptized outside the communion of the one church do not have baptism, they received in their ranks the Maximianists together with those whom they had baptized in schism outside these men's communion. This at least they cannot hide.

“But these things,” they say, “do not stain when done for peace, and it is good to bend the rigour of severity to mercy, so that broken branches may be grafted in again.” So the whole case is concluded, lost for them and won for us: for if the name of peace is taken up as some shadow of defence for tolerating the wicked in schism, then beyond doubt true peace itself is violated, with a horrible crime and without any defence, through the unity of the whole world. Hold on to these things, brothers, to be pursued and preached with unwearied gentleness: love men, kill errors; be confident of the truth without pride; contend for the truth without cruelty; pray for those whom you refute and convict. For the prophet prays to God for such people, saying, “Fill their faces with shame, and they will seek your name, O Lord.” The Lord has indeed already done this, filling their faces most plainly with the shame of the Maximianists; it remains for them to learn to blush to their salvation. For so they will be able to seek the name of the Lord, from whom they have turned away most ruinously while exalting their own name in its place. May you live and persevere in Christ, and be multiplied and abound in the love of God, toward one another and toward all, dearest brothers.

Those who were able to read or hear it remember that we answered adequately the first parts of Petilian's letter, which were all we had found. But since afterwards the whole letter was found by the brothers, copied, and sent to us so that we might answer all of it, this duty of our pen was not to be shirked: not because he says anything new that has not already been answered often and in many ways, but for the sake of slower brothers, who cannot apply what they have read somewhere to every parallel case. So I will humour those who insist that I answer every point, so that we may argue as if in alternating speeches face to face. I will set down the words from his letter under his name and give the answer under my own, as though they had been taken down by stenographers while we were debating. In this way no one will be able to complain that I have passed over anything, or that he could not understand because the speakers were not distinguished; and at the same time the Donatists themselves, who refuse to argue with us in person, will not escape, through the letters they have published to their own people, the truth that answers them point by point, just as if they were speaking with us face to face.

At the very beginning of his letter Petilian said: “Petilian, bishop, to his dearly beloved brothers, fellow presbyters and deacons, ministers appointed with us throughout the diocese in the holy gospel: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Augustine answered: I recognize the apostolic greeting. Consider what you are saying; but notice where you learned what you say. So Paul greets the Romans, so the Corinthians, so the Galatians, so the Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Thessalonians. What madness is it, then, to refuse to share the greeting of peace with those churches in whose letters you learned the peaceable greeting?

Petilian said: “They charge us with a double baptism, those who under the name of baptism have polluted their souls with a guilty washing; than whom, filthy as they are, all dirt is cleaner, who through a perverse cleanness have come to be defiled by their own water.”

Augustine answered: We are neither defiled by our water nor cleansed by yours; but the water of baptism, when it is given to anyone in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, is neither ours nor yours, but his of whom it was said to John: “He on whom you see the Spirit descending like a dove and remaining on him, this is he who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.”

Petilian said: “For it is the conscience of the giver that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver.”

Augustine answered: Then we are secure about the conscience of Christ. For if you put any man in that place, the cleansing of the receiver will be uncertain, because the conscience of the one who washes is uncertain.

Petilian said: “For he who has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt.”

Augustine answered: Christ is not faithless, from whom a faithful man receives faith, not guilt. For he believes in him who justifies the ungodly, so that his faith is reckoned as righteousness.

Petilian said: “For everything consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have something as its head, it is nothing; nor does anything regenerate well unless it is regenerated by good seed.”

Augustine answered: Why do you want to set yourself up in place of Christ, under whom you do not want to place yourself? He is the origin and root and head of the one being born; about him we have no fear, as we might about any man, that perhaps he is a hypocrite and very wicked, and that we spring from a very wicked origin, rise from a very wicked root, are conformed to a very wicked head. For what man can be secure about a man, when it is written, “Cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man”? The seed by which we are regenerated is the word of God, that is, the gospel; hence the apostle says, “For in Christ Jesus I begot you through the gospel.” Yet he allows even those who proclaim the gospel impurely to proclaim it, and rejoices in this, because, although they proclaimed it impurely, seeking their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, what they proclaimed was pure. And the Lord had said of some such people, “Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” So if what is pure is proclaimed purely, the proclaimer himself too, because he is joined with the word, begets the believer along with it; but if he himself is not regenerated, yet what he proclaims is pure, the believer is born not from the minister's barrenness but from the fruitfulness of the truth.

Petilian said: “Since these things are so, brothers, what perversity can it be that one guilty of his own crimes should make another innocent, when the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘A good tree bears good fruit, a bad tree bears bad fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns?’ and again, ‘Every good man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and every evil man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth evil things’?”

Augustine answered: No man, even if he is not guilty of his own crimes, makes another innocent, because he is not God. Otherwise, if the innocence of the baptized is expected to come from the innocence of the baptizer, each person will be the more innocent the more innocent the man he finds to baptize him, and he himself will be just as much less innocent as the one by whom he is baptized; and if perhaps the one who baptizes holds a hatred against someone, that too will be charged to the one baptized. Why, then, does the wretch run to baptism? To have his own sins forgiven, or to have another's laid on him? Or, like a merchant's ship, to unload some goods and take on others? But we usually understand the good tree and its good fruit, and the bad tree and its bad fruit, as men and their works, as is shown next in the words which you too quoted: “The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and the evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil things.” But when a man preaches God's word or administers God's sacrament, he does not, if he is evil, preach or administer from what is his own; he will be counted among those of whom it was said, “Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” They say what is God's, but they do what is their own. For if it is as you say, that the baptized themselves are reckoned the fruit of those who baptize, you are announcing a great evil for Africa, if as many Optatuses have sprouted up as Optatus baptized.

Petilian said: “And again, ‘He who is baptized by a dead man, his washing does not profit him.’ He did not declare the baptizer to be a lifeless dead body or a man's corpse stiffly laid out, but one not having the Spirit of God, who is compared to a dead man, as he shows in another place to a disciple. The gospel testifies that his disciple said, ‘Lord, let me bury my father’; Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.’ The disciple's father was not baptized: he consigned a pagan to pagans. Unless he said this of unbelievers, a dead man cannot bury a dead man. So he is dead, not by any death, but struck by his own life; for one who lives so as to be guilty is tormented by a dead life. To be baptized by a dead man, then, is to have taken up death, not life. We must consider and say how far a traitor, though living, is to be held dead. That man is dead who did not deserve to be born by true baptism; that man is likewise dead who, though begotten by a lawful baptism, has mixed himself with a traitor. Both lack the life of baptism, both the one who never had it at all and the one who had it and lost it. For the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘Seven spirits more wicked will come upon him, and that man will be worse than before.’”

Augustine answered: Inquire more carefully how the testimony you cited from Scripture was said and how it is to be understood. That all the wicked are customarily called dead in a mystical sense is clear. But Christ, whose baptism is true, the baptism you call false because of men's vices, lives, sitting at the right hand of the Father; he will no longer die even by the weakness of the flesh, and death will no longer have dominion over him. Whoever is baptized with his baptism is not baptized by a dead man; and even if the ministers are deceitful workers, seeking their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, proclaiming the gospel impurely and preaching Christ out of contention and envy, and are to be called dead because of their iniquities, still the sacrament of the living God does not die even in a dead man. For that Simon, baptized by Philip in Samaria, who wanted to buy the gift of God with money, was dead; but the baptism he had was alive, to his punishment.

How false your statement is, “Both lack the life of baptism, both the one who never had it at all and the one who had it and lost it,” you may see from this: those who apostatize after baptism and return through repentance are not given baptism again; it would be given again if they had lost it. And how, by your reckoning, do your own dead baptize? Or are drunkards not dead (to say nothing of other things and mention only what is known to all and seen daily), since the apostle says of a widow, “She who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives”? Next, have you forgotten how eloquently you said in that council of yours in which you condemned Maximian with his sponsors and ministers: “Quite after the example of the perishing Egyptians, the shores are full of corpses, for whom in death itself the greater punishment is that, after their life has been wrung out by the avenging waters, they do not even find burial”? And yet whether one of them, Felicianus, has come back to life is your affair; but he has with him inside among you those whom he baptized outside while dead. So, just as he is baptized by the living who is clothed with the baptism of the living Christ, so he is baptized by the dead who is wrapped in the baptism of the dead Saturn or of anyone else; to say briefly for the moment how the words you cited can be understood without difficulty for any of us. For as you take them, you are not freeing yourselves but trying to entangle us with you.

Petilian said: “We must consider, I say, and declare how far a faithless traitor, though living, is to be held dead. Judas was an apostle when he betrayed Christ; and the same man, having lost the rank of apostle, died spiritually, to die afterwards by his own noose, as it is written: ‘I repent,’ he said, ‘because I have betrayed innocent blood,’ and he went away and hanged himself with a noose. The traitor perished by a noose, and left a noose for such men; of whom the Lord Christ cried to the Father, ‘Father, those whom you gave me I have kept all, and none of them perished except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.’ For long before, David had pronounced this sentence on the one who was to betray Christ to the faithless: ‘Let another take his bishopric; let his wife be a widow and his children orphans.’ See how great the spirit of the prophets is, that it saw all future things as present, so that the traitor was condemned many ages before he was born. Finally, so that the sentence pronounced might be fulfilled, the holy Matthias received the bishopric of the lost apostle. Let no fool, no faithless man, argue from this: Matthias carried off a triumph, not an injury, he who carried off the spoil of the traitor from the victory of the Lord Christ. With this done, then, why do you claim a bishopric for yourself, heir of a more wicked traitor? Judas betrayed Christ in the flesh; you, raging in the spirit, handed the holy gospel over to sacrilegious flames. Judas handed the lawgiver over to the faithless; you handed the law of God, as if its remains, over to men to be destroyed. If you loved the law, you would be put to death for the laws of God like the young Maccabees, if death can be the word for men whom, by dying for the Lord, it makes immortal. One of those brothers answered the sacrilegious tyrant with this voice of faith: ‘You indeed, wicked and ungodly man, destroy us out of this present life; but the King of the world, who reigns forever and of whose kingdom there will be no end, will raise us, who have died for his holy laws, to the life of eternal life.’ If you burned the will of a dead man, would you not be punished as a forger? What will become of you, then, who have burned the most holy law of God the Judge? Judas repented of his deed at least in death; you not only do not repent, but you have even come forth, most wicked traitor, as a persecutor and executioner of us who keep the law.”

Augustine answered: See the difference between your abusive words and our truthful assertions. Pay attention a little. Look, you have heaped up the crime of handing over the books, and with most invidious words, like a fluent inventor, you have compared us to the lost Judas. When I answer you very briefly, “I did not do what you say; I did not hand over; you make false charges; you will never prove it,” does not all this smoke of grand words vanish at once? Or perhaps you will try to prove it? Then you should have done that first, and afterwards risen against us, as against men convicted, with whatever mass of invective you liked. There is one vanity; hear another.

When you yourself were speaking of the foretold condemnation of Judas, you said, “See how great the spirit of the prophets is, that it saw all future things as present, so that the traitor was condemned many ages before he was born”; and you did not see that the same prophecy, with steadfast, certain, and unshaken truth, by which it was foretold that one disciple would betray Christ, also foretold that the whole world would believe in Christ. Why did you notice in the prophecy the man who betrayed Christ, and not notice there the world for which Christ was betrayed? Who betrayed Christ? Judas. To whom did he betray him? To the Jews. What did the Jews do to him? “They pierced,” he says, “my hands and feet; they counted all my bones. They looked and stared at me; they divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” Read a little further in the same psalm how great is what was bought at so great a price: “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before him; for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he will rule over the nations.” But who could suffice to recall the other countless prophetic testimonies about the world that was to believe? Yet you praise the prophecy because you see in it the man who sold Christ, and do not see in it the possession that Christ, when sold, bought. There is a second vanity; hear a third.

Among the many words of your invective you said: “If you burned the will of a dead man, would you not be punished as a forger? What will become of you, then, who have burned the most holy law of God?” In saying this you did not consider what surely ought to have moved you: how it could happen that we burned the Testament and yet stand in the inheritance that is written down in that Testament, while you, strangely, kept the Testament and lost the inheritance. Is it not written in that Testament, “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession”? Join in communion with this inheritance, and charge me with whatever you like about the Testament. For what madness is it that you refused to hand the Testament over to the flames only in order to argue against the testator's words? We, though we have in our hands the ecclesiastical and municipal records in which we read that it was rather those who ordained another bishop against Caecilian who were traitors of the divine books, still do not insult you; we do not inveigh against you, nor lament the ashes of the holy pages in your hands, nor set the burning tortures of the Maccabees against the sacrilege of your pride, saying, “You should rather have handed your own limbs to the fire than God's words.” For we do not want to be vain, stirring up an empty din against you with other men's misdeeds, which you either do not know of or disapprove. But that we see you separated from the communion of the whole world, a crime that is very great, manifest, and belongs to all of you: if I wanted to heap it up, time would fail me sooner than words. And if you want to defend this, you will charge the whole world with things which, if they are to be charged, show further grounds for accusing you, and if they are not to be charged, do not defend you. Why, then, do you swell against me about handing over the books, which is neither mine nor yours if the agreement stands that we do not charge each other with others' deeds, and if it does not stand, is yours rather than mine? Yet even with that agreement standing, I think I say with full justice that he should be judged the associate of the one who betrayed Christ who, with the whole world, has not given himself up to Christ. “Therefore,” says the apostle, “you are Abraham's seed, heirs according to the promise”; and again he says, “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ”; and he shows that the same seed of Abraham extends to all nations from what was said to Abraham: “In your seed all nations will be blessed.” So I think what I ask is just: that we pay some attention to the Testament of God, which has long been opened, and judge that the one we do not find to be a fellow heir of the betrayed is himself the heir of the betrayer; let him belong to the seller of Christ who denies Christ as the buyer of the world. Indeed, when after the resurrection he showed himself to the disciples and offered his limbs to be touched by the doubters, he said to them, “For thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” See from what inheritance you are estranging yourselves, see what heir you are resisting! Would he really have spared Christ as he walked on earth, who contradicts him as he sits in heaven? Do you still not understand that whatever you charge against us, you charge against his word? A Christian world is promised and believed; it is fulfilled and contradicted. Consider, I beg you, what you deserved to suffer for so great an impiety; and yet if you suffered anything, I do not know, I did not see, I did not do it. You, who today do not suffer the force of my persecution, give me an account of your separation. But again and often you will say things which, if you do not prove them, concern no one, and if you prove them, do not concern me.

Petilian said: “Fenced about by these crimes, you cannot be a true bishop.”

Augustine answered: By what crimes? What have you proved, what have you shown? Even if you had shown the crimes of some people or other, what does that have to do with the seed of Abraham, in which all nations are blessed?

Petilian said: “Did the apostles persecute anyone, or did Christ hand anyone over?”

Augustine answered: I could indeed say that Satan himself is worse than all evil men, and yet the apostle handed a man over to him for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus; and likewise others, of whom he says, “whom I handed over to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme.” And the Lord Christ scourged the dishonest traders and drove them out of the temple, where the testimony of Scripture is also attached: “Zeal for your house has consumed me.” Look, we find the apostle a hander-over and Christ a persecutor. I could say this and throw you into no small turmoil, so that you would be forced to examine not the complaints of those who suffer but the intention of those who act. But do not trouble yourself about it; I do not say these things. I say that if anything was done wrongly to you, perhaps by the chaff of the Lord's harvest, which is likewise in all nations, it has nothing to do with the seed of Abraham, which is in all nations. So give an account of your separation; but first consider what sort of people you have whom you do not want charged against you, and see how unjustly you act in charging us with others' deeds, even if you proved what you say. So there will be no reason for your separation.

Petilian said: “But some will say, ‘We are not sons of a traitor.’ A man is the son of the one whose deeds he follows. For they are most certainly sons, and like their parents too, whom not this flesh and blood but character and deeds like their parents' have begotten.”

Augustine answered: A little while ago you were saying nothing against us; now you have begun to say something even for us. For this proposition of yours binds you to this: unless you convict us, with whom you are dealing today, of being traitors and murderers and whatever else you charge, whatever such thing you show in those who preceded us in time cannot harm us at all; for we cannot be the sons of those whose deeds we do not share. And see what you have committed yourself to. Even if you should convict some man of our own time, living with us, of such guilt, it in no way prejudges all the nations that are blessed in the seed of Abraham, from which you are found sacrilegious by separating yourself. So, unless (which cannot be done) you know all who are everywhere, and not only learn the character and deeds of all but also show them to be as evil as you say, you have no ground for charging the world, which is among the saints, with some parents or other whom you prove them to resemble. Nor will it help you at all, even if you could show that those who are not such men share common sacraments with those who are; first, because you ought to look at yourselves, at those with whom you celebrate them, to whom you give them, from whom you receive them, though you do not want them charged against you. Next, if all who imitate the deeds of Judas, who was a devil among the apostles, are his sons, why should we not call sons of the apostles those who share with such men not their deeds but the Lord's sacraments, as the apostles received the Lord's supper with that traitor? They are thus far unlike you, because you charge men who keep unity with what you yourselves do after tearing unity apart.

Petilian said: “The Lord Christ says of himself to the Jews: ‘If I do not do the works of my Father, do not believe me.’”

Augustine answered: I have already answered above; this is both true and for us, against you.

Petilian said: “He likewise rebukes the false and lying thus: ‘You are sons of the devil; for he was an accuser from the beginning and did not stand in the truth.’”

Augustine answered: We do not usually read, “he was an accuser,” but, “he was a murderer.” And we ask how the devil was a murderer from the beginning, and we find that he killed the first man not by drawing a sword or using any bodily force, but by persuading him to sin and casting him out of the happiness of paradise. What paradise was then, the church is now. So they are sons of the devil who kill men by leading them astray from the church. And just as we know from God's words where paradise was planted, so we have learned from Christ's words where the church is: “through all nations,” he says, “beginning from Jerusalem.” Whoever separates a man from this whole into any part whatever is convicted as a son of the devil and a murderer. But see also to whom the phrase you yourself set down about the devil applies, “He was an accuser and did not stand in the truth.” For you accuse the world of the crimes of others, whom you have been able to accuse rather than convict, and you have not stood in the truth of Christ. For he speaks of the church through all nations beginning from Jerusalem, but you, in the party of Donatus.

Petilian said: “A third time also he likewise names the madness of persecutors with this name: ‘Brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you will kill and crucify and scourge in your synagogues, until there comes upon you all the righteous blood that you have shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar.’ Are they truly sons of vipers in the flesh, and not rather serpents in mind, scourging with three-tongued malice, deadly touch, and breath of poison? Truly they have become vipers who have vomited deaths on innocent peoples with their bites.”

Augustine answered: If I say these things were said of people like you, you will answer, “Prove it.” Well then, have you proved it? Or if you think things are proved by being said, there is no need to repeat them: recite those very words to yourself, as said by us against you; look, I too have proved it, if that is proving. And yet learn what proving is. I do not look for evidence from outside to prove you vipers. Look: this itself is viperish, to have in one's mouth not the firmness of truth but the poison of cursing, as it is written, “The poison of asps is under their lips.” And since this can be said anywhere by anyone against anyone, as if it were asked whose lips, he added at once, “whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.” So when you say such things against men scattered through the whole world whom you do not know at all, many of whom have never heard the name of Caecilian or of Donatus, and you do not hear them answering in silence, “Whatever you say has nothing to do with us; we did not see, we did not do it; we have no idea what you are talking about”: you who want nothing else than to say what you cannot prove at all, what is your mouth but full of cursing and bitterness? Now see whether you can show that you are not vipers, unless you show that all the Christians of all nations are traitors and murderers and are not Christians. Indeed, even if you could know and show the lives and deeds of individual men spread through the whole world, still, before you do it, when you throw these charges about rashly, your mouth is viperish, your mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Show now, if you can, what prophet, what wise man, what scribe we have killed and crucified and scourged in our synagogues. Consider how, with all the labour you spend, you will never prove that Donatus and Marculus were prophets or wise men or scribes, because they were not. And even if you could, what would you do to show that men were killed by us whom we ourselves do not know, much less the world which you curse with a poisonous mouth? Or how can you show that we have a mind like that of their killers, when you cannot even show that they were killed by anyone? Consider all this; see whether you can prove any of it either about the world or to the world. Yet because you do not cease to curse it, you show to be true in yourselves what you falsely throw at it.

But if we wanted to prove you killers of prophets, we would not go far afield to gather, place by place, the slaughters which your raging chiefs of the Circumcellions and the very bands of drunken madmen have not only committed since the beginning of your schism but do not cease to commit. I argue from what is close at hand. Let the divine words be brought out which are in both our hands and yours: let us hold as killers of the prophets those whom we find contradicting the tongues of the prophets. What can be said more quickly, what shown more readily? You would act more mildly if you drove a sword through the bowels of the prophets than in trying to kill the words of the prophets with your tongue. The prophet says, “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord.” Look, it is being done; look, it is being fulfilled; but you not only shut unbelieving ears against what is said, you also thrust out raging tongues against what is already being done. Abraham heard it said, “In your seed all nations will be blessed,” and he believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. You see it done and you cry out against it, and you do not want it reckoned to you as unrighteousness, which would rightly be reckoned to you even if you were refusing to believe something not yet done but only said. Indeed you not only do not want it reckoned to you as unrighteousness, but if you suffer anything for this impiety you want it reckoned to you as righteousness. Or if these are not persecutions of the prophets because they are done not with the sword but with the word, why was it divinely said, “Sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword”? But when shall I gather from all the prophets all the testimonies to the church spread through the whole world, all of which you try to kill and extinguish by contradicting them? But you are bound, because “their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” Still, I will recall that one saying from the mouth of the Lord, who is the witness of witnesses: “Everything,” he says, “must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms.” What these things are, let him point out himself. “Then he opened their minds,” it says, “to understand the Scriptures, and said to them: ‘For thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’” See what is written in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms about the Lord; see what the Lord himself disclosed about himself and about the church, showing himself and promising her. But you, who resist such manifest testimonies and, since you cannot delete them, try to distort them, what would you do if you found the limbs of the prophets, you who rage so against the words of the prophets that you do not even hear the Lord, who fulfils, makes manifest, and expounds the prophets? For as far as you can, you strike even him, when you yourselves do not yield.

Petilian said: “Of you persecutors David also says this: ‘Their throat is an open grave; with their tongues they have dealt deceitfully; the poison of asps is under their lips; their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known; there is no fear of God before their eyes. Will not all who work iniquity know, who devour my people as they eat bread?’”

Augustine answered: “Their throat is an open grave,” from which the deaths of lies breathe out; for “the mouth that lies kills the soul.” But if nothing is truer than what Christ said, that his church is through all nations beginning from Jerusalem, nothing is more false than what you say, that it is in the party of Donatus. And the tongues are deceitful of those who, though they know their own deeds, say not only that they are righteous men but also that they justify men, which was said of the one who justifies the ungodly, that he may be righteous and the one who justifies. We have said enough already about the poison of asps and the mouth full of cursing and bitterness. As for feet swift to shed blood, you said the Maximianists had them too; witness the sentence of your plenary council, cited so often in proconsular and municipal proceedings. Yet they, as far as we hear, killed no one bodily. So you understood that blood is shed also by the spiritual slaughter of souls with the sword of schism, which you condemned in Maximian. See, then, whether your feet are not swift to shed blood, when you cut men off from the unity of the world, if you were right to say this of the Maximianists because they cut some off from the party of Donatus. Have we, then, not known the way of peace, who are eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and do you know it, who so resist the word of Christ which he spoke with his disciples after the resurrection, so full of peace that he began it by saying, “Peace be with you,” that you are convicted of saying nothing else to him than this: “What you said about the unity of all nations is false; what we say about the crime of all nations is true”? Who would say such things if the fear of God were before their eyes? So see whether, by saying these things daily, you are not trying to finish off with your teeth, like a meal of bread, the people of God spread through the whole world.

Petilian said: “The Lord Christ also warns: ‘Beware of false prophets; they come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruits you will know them.’”

Augustine answered: If I ask you by what fruits you know us to be ravenous wolves, you will name other men's crimes, never proved even in those to whom they are ascribed. But if you ask me by what fruits we know that you rather are ravenous wolves, I charge you with the crime of schism, which you will deny and I will prove at once: for you are not in communion with all nations and with those churches founded by apostolic labour. Here you will say, “I am not in communion with traitors and murderers.” The seed of Abraham answers you: “Those crimes are either not true or not mine.” But I set this aside for the moment; show the church. At once I will hear that voice which the Lord warned us to shun in false prophets who point to parts and try to estrange men from the whole: “Look, here is the Christ; look, there.” But do you really think the true sheep of Christ, to whom it was said, “Do not believe it,” have so little sense that they would hear the wolf saying, “Look, here is the Christ,” and not hear the shepherd saying, “through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem”?

Petilian said: “So, so, wicked persecutor: whatever veil of goodness you cover yourself with, whatever name of peace you wage war with kisses under, with whatever word of unity you entice the human race, you who deceive and mislead to this day are truly the son of the devil, since you show your father by your conduct.”

Augustine answered: Consider these things said by us against you; and to learn to whom they rather apply, recall what I said above.

Petilian said: “Nor is it so surprising that you unlawfully take to yourself the name of bishop. This is the devil's true habit: to deceive in such a way as to claim for himself the name of holiness; as the apostle proclaims: ‘Nor is it surprising,’ he says, ‘if Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light, and his ministers as ministers of righteousness.’ So it is not surprising that you falsely call yourself bishop. For those lost angels too, lovers of worldly virgins, who were corrupted by corrupting flesh, though stripped of divine powers they ceased to be angels, still keep the name of angels and always think themselves angels; released from the divine service, they passed like the rest into the devil's army, while the great God cried, ‘My spirit shall not remain in these men forever, because they are flesh.’ To these guilty ones and to you the Lord Christ will say, ‘Go into the eternal fire, which my Father prepared for the devil and his angels.’ If there were no evil angels, the devil would not have angels; and the holy apostle says they are to be condemned by holy men in that judgment of the resurrection: ‘Do you not know that we shall judge angels?’ If they were true angels, men would have no judgment over God's angels. So also the sixty apostles who, with the Lord Christ's twelve left behind, fell away from the faith as apostates, are still thought apostles by wretched men, to such an extent that from among them Manichaeus and the others entangle many souls in many devilish sects, having come forth to catch them. For certainly the lost Manichaeus, if indeed he was one, must be placed among those sixty, if his name as apostle is not contained among the twelve. But in the place of Judas the traitor Matthias was substituted, and by the voice of Christ Paul was ordained as the thirteenth, who calls himself the last of the apostles, so that no one later should be believed an apostle. For he said, ‘For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.’ And do not flatter yourselves on this point: the Jew had done these things, though you too destroy us like pagans. For you wage war unlawfully, you against whom it is not lawful to fight back. For you desire to live with us killed; but for us victory is to flee or to be killed.”

Augustine answered: How you have set down the testimonies of the Scriptures, or how you have understood them, is your affair; it has nothing to do with the matter now in hand. For you certainly said all this to prove that there are false bishops, as there are false angels and false apostles. We too know that there are false angels and false apostles and false bishops and, as the true apostle says, false brothers. But since each side can throw these things at the other, there is need to prove something, not to talk emptily. To whom the charge of deceit applies, recall what we said above, and you will find it; we will not weary readers by repeating the same things too often. And yet what has this to do with the church spread through the whole world, whether it is something you could say about its chaff, which is with it through the whole world, or what you said about Manichaeus or the other devilish sects? For if whatever is said even about the chaff that is still with it does not concern the wheat, how much less do monstrosities so long ago and so openly separated concern the members of Christ spread through the whole world!

Petilian said: “The Lord Christ commands us: ‘When men persecute you in this city, flee to another; and if they persecute you in that, flee to another. For truly I say to you, you will not finish the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes.’ If he forewarns us about Jews and pagans, you who call yourself a Christian ought not to imitate the dreadful deeds of the Gentiles. Or do you serve God by our being killed by your hands? You are wrong, you are wrong, wretched men, if you believe this; for God does not have executioners for priests.”

Augustine answered: Fleeing from city to city before persecution was commanded or permitted not to heretics or schismatics, which is what you are, but to preachers of the gospel, which you resist. To prove this easily: you are certainly in your cities now, and no one persecutes you. So you must come forward and give an account of your separation. For truth ought not to yield to falsehood in the way that the weakness of the flesh is excused when it gives way to the violence of persecution. So if you suffer persecution, why do you not leave the cities you are in, to fulfil what you cite from the gospel? But if you do not suffer persecution, why are you unwilling to answer us? Or if you perhaps fear that you will suffer persecution if you answer, how then do you imitate those preachers to whom it was said, “Look, I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves,” to whom it was also said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul”? And how are you not acting against the command of the apostle Peter, who says, “Always ready with an answer for everyone who asks you a reason for your faith and hope”? Lastly, why do you even, unprovoked, attack the Catholic churches with most violent mobs wherever you can, as the facts themselves show in countless examples? But you say that you defend your places, and resist with clubs and slaughter by whatever means you can. Why did you not hear there the voice of the Lord saying, “But I say to you, do not resist evil”? Or if it can happen that the violent are sometimes rightly resisted by bodily force, and that the command we hear from the Lord, “But I say to you, do not resist evil,” is not thereby violated, why can it not also happen that, through ordered and lawful authorities, the godly should expel the ungodly and the just the unjust from sees that are unlawfully seized or held to God's injury? For the false prophets did not suffer persecution from Elijah in the same way as Elijah himself from a most wicked king; nor, because the Lord was scourged by persecutors, are those whom he himself scourged and drove out of the temple to be compared with his sufferings. It remains, then, that you admit that nothing else needs to be examined except whether you separated yourselves from the communion of the world justly or impiously. For if it is found that you did it impiously, do not be surprised if God does not lack ministers through whom you are scourged, because you suffer persecution not from us but, as it is written, from your own deeds.

Petilian said: “Again the Lord Christ cries from heaven to Paul: ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad.’ He was then called Saul, so that baptism might afterwards give him his name. For you, then, it is not hard to persecute Christ so often in his priests, though the Lord himself cries, ‘Do not touch my anointed ones.’ Count up the many deaths of the saints, and you have killed the living Christ that many times. In short, even if you were not sacrilegious, as a murderer you cannot be holy.”

Augustine answered: Defend yourselves against the persecution suffered at the hands of your people by those who separated from you with Maximian, and there you will find our defence. For if you say you did not do it, we read out the proconsular and municipal records. If you say you did right to them, why are you unwilling to suffer such things yourselves? If you say, “But we did not make a schism,” then let that be investigated, and until it is settled whether it is so, let no one accuse persecutors. If you say that even schismatics ought not to have suffered persecution, I ask whether they ought not even to be expelled by the established authorities from the basilicas in which they lie in wait to lead the weak astray. If you say they ought not even to be expelled, first give the basilicas back to the Maximianists, and then deal with us. If you say they ought, then consider what those deserve to suffer from the established authorities who, by resisting them, resist God's ordinance; as the apostle says plainly, “For he does not bear the sword in vain; he is an avenger, for wrath, on the one who does evil.” But if, after the truth has been examined with full care, it is found that schismatics ought not to suffer anything through public courts nor be driven from the places of their snares and deceits, and you say that you are displeased that the Maximianists suffered these things at the hands of some of your people, why should not the Lord's grain cry out more freely from the whole field of the Lord, that is, from the whole world: “What the tares or our chaff commit has nothing to do with us, because it displeases us”? If you admit that it suffices for your cleansing that whatever evil is done by your people displeases you, why then did you separate yourselves? Here your very defence accuses you. For if you do not separate yourselves from the wicked of the party of Donatus because each will carry his own load, why did you separate yourselves from the wicked of the world, whom you suppose or pretend to exist? Was it so that you might all alike carry the load of schism?

And yet we ask you which of yours you can prove were killed by ours. I recall no law given by the emperors that you should be killed. As for those about whom you usually stir up the greatest odium, Marculus and Donatus, it is uncertain, to put it mildly, whether they threw themselves down, as your teaching does not cease to do by daily examples, or were thrown down by order of some authority. For if it is incredible that the teachers of the Circumcellions inflicted on themselves their customary kind of death, how much more incredible that Roman authorities could have ordered an unaccustomed punishment! So on this matter, which you think so invidious, if what you say is true, what does it have to do with the Lord's wheat? Let the chaff that has flown outside accuse the chaff that has stayed inside; for it cannot all be separated except by the last winnowing fork. But if it is false, what wonder if the chaff, carried off as by a light breath of dissension, attacks even the Lord's wheat with false charges? So on all such invidious charges this grain of Christ, which was ordered to grow with the tares through the field, that is, through the whole world, answers you with free and secure voice: “If you do not prove what you say, it concerns no one; if you prove it, it does not concern me.” From this it follows that whoever has separated himself from this unity of the grain on account of the crimes of the tares or the chaff cannot, because of the very evil of dissension and schism, defend himself even from the crime of murder, since Scripture says, “Whoever hates his brother is a murderer.”

Petilian said: “So, as we said, the Lord Christ cried to Paul: ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad.’ And Paul said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he was answered, ‘I am Christ of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.’ And he, trembling and astonished, said, ‘Lord, what do you want me to do?’ And the Lord said to him, ‘Rise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.’ And after some words: ‘Saul rose from the ground, and when his eyes were opened he saw nothing.’ O blindness of the eyes, avenger of fury, you darken the light of the persecutor, to depart by baptism alone! Let us see, then, what he did in the city. ‘Ananias,’ it says, ‘went in to Saul, and when he had laid his hands on him, he said: Brother Saul, the Lord has sent me, Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, that you may see and be filled with the Holy Spirit. At once something like scales fell from his eyes, and he received his sight, and rising he was baptized.’ Since, then, Paul, freed by baptism from the crime of persecuting, received innocent eyes, why are you, persecutor and traitor, blinded by a false baptism, unwilling to be baptized by those whom you pursue?”

Augustine answered: You prove neither persecutor nor traitor the man you want to baptize again. And even if you prove someone so, a persecutor and traitor is still not to be baptized again if he has already been baptized with Christ's baptism. Paul had to be baptized because he had never been dipped in such baptism. So what you chose to bring in about Paul has nothing in common with the case you are pleading against us. But had you not brought it in, you would have found no room for the childish declamation in which you said, “O blindness, avenger of fury, to depart by baptism alone!” How much more forcefully must one cry out against you: “O blindness, avenger of fury, which, being compared not to Paul but to Simon, does not depart from you even when baptism has been received!” For if persecutors are to be baptized by those they persecute, let Primian be baptized by the Maximianists, whom he persecuted most vigorously.

Petilian said: “But you persistently object that Christ said to the apostles, ‘He who has once been washed has no need except to wash his feet, but is wholly clean.’ If you examine these words fully, you are held by what follows. For he spoke thus: ‘He who has once been washed has no need except to wash his feet, but is wholly clean; and you are clean, but not all.’ He said this because of Judas, who was going to betray him. So whoever has become a traitor has lost baptism. Then, after the apostle who betrayed Christ had himself been condemned, he confirmed the eleven more fully thus: ‘You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you; abide in me, and I in you.’ And again he said to these eleven: ‘My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you.’ Since, then, these things were said to the eleven apostles after the traitor had been condemned, as we said, you traitors likewise have neither peace nor baptism.”

Augustine answered: If, then, a traitor has lost baptism, let anyone baptized by you who afterwards becomes a traitor be baptized again if he wants to return to you. If you do not do that, you yourselves show us clearly that the saying is false, “Whoever has become a traitor has lost baptism.” For if he lost it, let him return and receive it; but if he returns and does not receive it, he had not lost it. Next, if it was said to the apostles, “You are already clean,” and, “My peace I give to you,” because the traitor had already gone away, then that supper of so great a sacrament, which he gave to all before Judas went out, was not clean and peaceful. If you dare to say that with your eyes shut, what can we do but rather cry out ourselves: “O blindness, avenger of the fury of those who want to be teachers of the law, as the apostle says, understanding neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertions”? Yet if the blindness of obstinacy did not hinder you, it was not hard to understand: you would see that the Lord did not say in Judas's presence, “You are not yet clean,” but, “You are already clean.” He added, “but not all,” because one was there who was not clean. Yet if Judas polluted the rest by his presence, it would not have been said to them, “You are already clean,” but, as I said, “You are not yet clean.” After he went away, he said to them, “You are already clean,” and did not add, “but not all,” because the one had already left; even in his presence, as was said to them, they were clean, but not all, because there was one unclean man there. So by these words the Lord rather declared that in one company of men receiving the same sacraments, the uncleanness of some cannot harm the clean. Surely, if you think there are men like Judas among us, say these words to us: “You are clean, but not all.” But you do not say this; because of some unclean men you say, “You are all unclean.” The Lord did not say this to the disciples in Judas's presence; so whoever says it did not learn what he says from the good Teacher.

Petilian said: “But if you say that we make baptism twice, it is rather you who do so, you who kill the baptized. We do not say this because you baptize, but because, in killing each one, you cause him to be baptized in his own blood. For when the martyr's blood is wrung out, the baptism of water or of the Spirit becomes, as it were, double. For the Saviour himself, first baptized by John, declared that he was to be baptized again, no longer with water or Spirit but with the baptism of blood, by the cross of his passion, as it is written: ‘Two disciples, the sons of Zebedee, came to him, saying: Lord, when you come into your kingdom, make us sit one at your right hand and the other at your left. Jesus answered them: You ask a hard thing. Can you drink the cup that I am to drink, and be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? They said to him: We can. And he said to them: The cup that I am to drink you can drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized you will be baptized,’ and so on. If these are two baptisms, by your spite you praise us, we confess it. For when you kill our bodies, we do not make baptism twice, but we are baptized with our baptism and with blood, like Christ. Blush, blush, persecutors: you make martyrs like Christ, whom, after the water of true baptism, blood bathes as a baptizer.”

Augustine answered: First we answer quickly that we do not kill you, but you kill yourselves with a true death when you cut yourselves off from the living root of unity. Next, if all who are killed are baptized in their own blood, then all robbers, the unjust, the ungodly, criminals who are executed after condemnation, are to be held martyrs, because they are baptized in their own blood. But if none are baptized in their own blood except those killed for righteousness' sake, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven, please see that one must first ask why you suffer, and only then what you suffer. Why, then, are the cheeks puffed out before the deeds are defended? Why does the tongue roar before the life is proved? If you made a schism, you are ungodly; if you are ungodly, you die as a sacrilegious man when you are punished for ungodliness; if you die as a sacrilegious man, how are you baptized in your own blood? Or do you say, “I did not make a schism”? Then let us examine that. Why do you cry out before you prove it?

Or do you say, “Even if I am sacrilegious, I ought not to be killed by you”? The question of the atrocity of my deed, which you never truly demonstrate, is one thing; the question of the baptism of your blood, of which you falsely boast, is another. For I do not kill you, nor do you prove that you are killed by anyone; and if you prove it, whoever killed you does not concern me, whether he acted justly according to an authority lawfully given him by the Lord, or, like the chaff of the Lord's harvest, committed a crime from some evil greed. In the same way the man does not concern you who in recent times, with intolerable power, attended even by soldiers, not because he feared anyone but so that he might be feared by all, oppressed widows, ruined orphans, betrayed others' patrimonies, broke up others' marriages, arranged the sale of the property of innocent people, and shared the proceeds of what was sold with its weeping owners. I might seem to be saying these things of my own invention, if it were not recognized, without naming him, whom I mean. If these things are true, then as they do not concern you, so whatever you say does not concern us, even if you spoke the truth. But if a false report has lied about that righteous and innocent colleague of yours, then no credence at all should be given to report sown about innocent men as traitors of the books or as killers of men. Add to this that I am recalling a man who lived with you, whose anniversary you used to throng with such celebration, to whom you joined the kiss of peace amid the sacraments, into whose hands you placed the Eucharist, to whom, when he in turn gave it, you held out your hands, whose deaf ears you were afraid to offend with a free voice amid such great groaning of Africa; one of you was greatly praised because he touched him, even obliquely and very wittily, by saying that he had God as companion. But you charge us with men with whom we did not live, whose faces we did not see, in whose time we were boys or perhaps not yet born. What great iniquity and perversity is this, to want to lay on us the loads of strangers, when you are unwilling to carry those of your friends? Divine Scripture cries out: “You saw a thief and ran along with him.” If the man you saw did not defile you, why do you charge me with one I could not see? Or do you say, “I did not run along with him, because his deeds displeased me”? But surely you approached the altar with him. Come now, to defend yourself, make a distinction and say that it is one thing to run together into sin, as the two elders ran together in lying in wait for Susanna's chastity, and another to receive the Lord's sacrament with a thief, as the apostles received even that first supper with Judas. I favour the defence; but why do you not notice how much more easily, by this defence of yours, you would acquit the nations and the ends of the earth, through which the inheritance of Christ is spread? For if you could see a thief and share the sacraments with the thief you saw and yet not share his sin, how much less could the most remote nations share evil deeds with African traitors or persecutors, even if you were telling the truth and proving it, although they held the sacraments in common with them! Or do you say, “I saw him as a bishop, but I did not see him as a thief”? Say what you like; I favour this defence too, and by it the world is acquitted of your charges. For if you were allowed not to know the life of a man you knew, why is the whole world not allowed not to know men it did not know? Unless perhaps Donatists may be ignorant of what they do not want to know, while the nations may not be ignorant of what they cannot know.

Or do you say, “Theft is one thing, handing over the books or persecution another”? I grant that it is another thing, and there is no need now to labour to show the difference. Consider the short way. If he did not make you a thief, because theft does not please you, who can make traitors or murderers of those who are displeased by handing over or by murder? So first confess that you are whatever evil Optatus was, whom you knew, and then charge me with whatever evil were those whom I did not know. Do not say to me, “But those are great things, these small.” You must first confess even the small things about yourself, not so that I may confess too, but so that I may even allow you to say some great things or other about me. Did Optatus, whom you knew, make you a thief because he was your colleague, or did he not? Answer one of the two. If you say, “He did not,” I ask why he did not: because he was not one himself, or because you do not know, or because it displeased you? If because he was not one himself, much more ought we not to believe that those of whom you accuse us were such as you say. For if one must not believe of Optatus what Christians and pagans and Jews, and finally both ours and yours, say, how much less must one believe what you say of anyone! If because you do not know, all nations answer you: “Much more do we not know whatever you charge against us about those men.” If because it displeased you, they answer you in the same words: “Though you have never proved them, such things displease us.” But if you say, “Look, Optatus, whom I knew, did make me a thief, because he was my colleague and I used to approach the altar with him while he committed these things; but I do not care, because it is a light sin, while those men made you a traitor and a murderer,” I answer that I do not grant that I too have been made a traitor and a murderer by others' sins because you have confessed that you were made a thief by another's sin; for you were made a thief not by our judgment but by your own mouth. We say that each carries his own load, as the apostle bears witness; but you, not because you committed theft or consented to theft, but because you supposed that what another did concerned you, have of your own accord put your shoulders under the load of Optatus. For as the apostle says, speaking about foods, “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean through him; but to him who thinks something unclean, to him it is unclean,” so by the same rule it can be said that others' sins do not concern those whom they displease, but if anyone thinks they concern him, they concern him. So you do not hold us as traitors or murderers, even if you prove something of the kind about those who share the sacraments with us; but we hold you a thief, even if whatever Optatus did displeases you, not by our slander but by your own verdict. And so that you do not think this light, read the apostle saying, “Nor will thieves possess the kingdom of God.” Those who will not possess the kingdom of God will certainly not be on the right among those to whom it will be said, “Come, blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” If they are not there, where will they be but on the left, among those to whom it will be said, “Go into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”? In vain, then, do you make yourself secure by thinking light a sin that separates from the kingdom of God and sends into eternal fire. How much better to take refuge in the true confession and say: “Each of us will carry his own load, and the last winnowing fork will separate the chaff from the wheat”!

But no doubt you fear that someone will say to you at once: “Why, then, while you try to lay others' loads on others, have you dared to separate yourselves from the Lord's harvest throughout the world before the last winnowing?” So you, who are displeased by the deeds of your people, while you guard against being charged with the schism that you all made, entangle yourselves even in sins you did not commit; and while the eloquent Petilian fears that I may be allowed to say that I am not such as he thinks Caecilian was, he is himself forced to say that he is such as he knows Optatus was. Or are you not such as all Africa cries out that he was? Then neither are we such as those whom you charge against us, as your error suspects or your fury defames or the truth proves them; much less is the Lord's grain through all nations, which has not even heard the names of these men, of that kind. There is, then, no reason why you should perish in so great a crime of separation and sacrilege of schism. And yet if you suffer anything by divine judgment for so great an impiety, you even say that you are baptized in your own blood; so that it is not enough that you feel no compunction at being divided, unless you also boast at being punished.

Petilian said: “But you persist in the same thing: ‘He who has once been washed has no need except to wash his feet.’ Once is what has an author; once is what truth confirms.”

Augustine answered: Baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit has Christ as its author, not any man; and Christ is the truth, not any man.

Petilian said: “For since you, being guilty, commit falsehoods, I do not make a second baptism of what you yourself do not make even once.”

Augustine answered: You do not prove us guilty; and if a guilty man baptizes with a false baptism, then all who are baptized by those who are already guilty among you, not only openly but secretly, do not have true baptism. For if the one who gives baptism gives something of God's, how does he give something of God's when he is already guilty before God, if a guilty man does not give true baptism? For you wait until he is guilty in our eyes too, as though what he is to give were yours.

Petilian said: “For if you mix false things with true, falsehood often imitates the truth in the same footsteps. So, so a painting imitates the nature of a man, and the false face of truth expresses the real with colours. So, so the brightness of a mirror seizes the face, so as to give it back, and imitates it to the eyes; so, so it offers to those who approach their own features, so that the face of the one approaching meets itself in turn; and so strong is the clean deceit that the eyes looking through recognize themselves as if in another. The image of a shadow too, when it stands, largely doubles things, dividing unity by a lie. Is it therefore true, because the figure lies? But it is one thing to paint a man, another to beget one. For who fashions false infants for a father who longs for sons, or who would expect true heirs from the lie of a painting? Surely it is the mark of a mad mind to abandon what is true and love a painting.”

Augustine answered: Are you not ashamed to say that the falsity of a man, even the most deceitful man, harms the baptism of Christ? God forbid that the Lord's grain, which was ordered to grow among the tares through the whole field, that is, this world, until the harvest, that is, until the end of the age, should be believed to have perished by your curses. But even in those very tares, which we are commanded not to gather up but to tolerate until the end, and in the very chaff, which will be wholly separated only by the last winnowing fork, does anyone dare to say that the baptism given and received in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is false? Those of your colleagues or presbyters whom you depose from office when convicted by the testimony of pregnant women (since such examples are not lacking anywhere): I ask whether, before they were convicted, they were deceitful or truthful. You will surely answer, “Deceitful.” Why, then, did they both have and give true baptism? Why did human deceit not corrupt the divine truth in them? Is it not most truly written, “For the holy Spirit of discipline will flee from deceit”? Since, then, the Holy Spirit fled from these deceitful men, why was the truth of baptism with them, unless because the Holy Spirit fled from the man's deceit, not from the truth of the sacrament? Further, if even the deceitful have true baptism, the one who has it, though he received it from a most deceitful baptizer, has the same thing that the truthful have. So you ought to see that it is rather your speech that is coloured with childish paints, and therefore whoever neglects the living word and delights in such cosmetics is the one who loves a painting instead of the truth.

Petilian said: “But the apostle Paul says, ‘One God, one faith, one baptism.’ We profess one; for it is certain that those who think there are two are mad.”

Augustine answered: You say these things against us, but in your madness you do not know it. For those speak of two baptisms who think that the righteous have one and the unrighteous another, whereas it belongs neither to the one nor to the other, but to Christ, one in both; although they themselves are not one, but the one thing which is one the former have for salvation, the latter for destruction.

Petilian said: “But to make a comparison: to the mad the sun seems double, although a dark cloud often runs against it, and its discoloured face, struck by the brightness, seems to send out rays of its own as the sun's rays come back from it. So, so in the faith of baptism it is one thing to seek images, another to recognize the truth.”

Augustine answered: What are you saying, I ask? When a dark cloud, struck by the sun's rays, reflects them, do two suns, as it were, appear to the mad and not to all who look? And when it seems so to the mad, it seems so to them alone. But let it not trouble you that I give this warning: see rather whether it is not mad to say such things and to talk like this. Still, what you meant to say is clearly this: that the righteous have the reality of baptism and the unrighteous an image. If so, I venture to say that there was an image in that man of yours to whom not God but a certain Count was god, and the reality either in you or in the one who elegantly aimed that saying at him, when he said to him, “to whom God is companion.” So distinguish those whom each of them baptized: approve the true baptism in the one group, and from the other shut out the image and bring in the reality.

Petilian said: “But to run through these lesser points: does he declare the law who is not a magistrate of the court? Or is what he says law, when a private person disturbs public laws? Is not the guilty man rather not only of no use, but held liable along with what he forges, as a forger?”

Augustine answered: What if this private person and forger gives someone a law of the emperor? When the man compares it with those who have it and finds it to be the same, does he not attend not to the one from whom he received it but to what he received? When a forger gives something from his own forgery, it is false; but when something true that belongs to another is given by someone, even if given by a forger, though he is not truthful, what is given is true.

Petilian said: “Or if someone knows a priest's prayers by heart, is he therefore a priest because with sacrilegious mouth he publishes the priest's prayer?”

Augustine answered: You say this as though we were now asking who is a true priest, and not what is true baptism. For a man to be a true priest, he must be clothed not with the sacrament alone but also with righteousness, as it is written, “Let your priests be clothed with righteousness.” But one who is a priest by the sacrament alone, as the high priest Caiaphas was, the persecutor of the one and truest Priest, though he himself is not truthful, still what he gives is true, if he gives not what is his but what is God's; as was said of Caiaphas himself: “He did not say this of himself, but being high priest he prophesied.” And yet, to use the comparison you yourself put forward, if you hear from someone, even a profane man, a priest's prayer formed from the words and mysteries of the gospel, can you say to him, “It is not true,” though he himself is not only not truthful but no priest at all? For the apostle Paul said that a certain testimony of some prophet or other of the Cretans, who was not counted among God's prophets, was true. He says: “One of them, their own prophet, said: Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies. This testimony is true.” If, then, the apostle himself attested the testimony of some foreigner or other because he found it true, why should we not, wherever we find what is Christ's and true, even if the one with whom it is found is perverse and deceitful, distinguish the vice that the man has from the truth that he has, not as his own but as God's, and say, “This sacrament is true,” as Paul said, “This testimony is true”? Do we therefore say, “The man himself is truthful,” because we say, “This sacrament is true”? Did the apostle count that prophet among the prophets of God because he confirmed as true what he found true in him? Likewise the same apostle, when he was at Athens, noticed among the altars of demons a certain altar on which was written, “To an unknown god,” and he took up this testimony to build them up in Christ, mentioning it in his speech and adding, “What you worship in ignorance, this we proclaim to you.” Because he found that altar among the altars of idols, or set up by sacrilegious men, did he therefore condemn or reject what was true in it? Or, because of the true thing he had read on it, did he persuade them to follow the sacrileges of the pagans as well? Then, when he wanted to make known the Lord himself, unknown to them but known to him, in a way suited to their understanding, as he judged fitting, he said among other things: “And indeed he is not far from each one of us; for in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own have said.” Here too, because he found testimonies of the truth among sacrilegious men, did he either approve them because of these, or condemn these because of them? But you must always be in error, as long as you violate God's sacraments because of men's vices, or think that we, because of God's sacraments, which we will not violate in you, take on also the sacrilege of your schism.

Petilian said: “For all power is from God, not in the man who has power; as the Lord Jesus Christ answered Pontius Pilate: ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above’; and again, as John says: ‘A man can do nothing unless it has been given him from heaven.’ Show us, then, traitor, when you received power to counterfeit the mysteries.”

Augustine answered: You rather show when the whole world, through which Christ's inheritance is spread, and that great multitude of nations where the apostles founded churches, lost the power to baptize. You will never show it; not only because you slander them and do not show them to be traitors, but because, even if you showed it, the crime of any wicked men whatever, whether unknown, or deceitful, or to be tolerated like tares or chaff, cannot overturn the promises of God, so that all nations should not be blessed in the seed of Abraham; and from these promises you make yourselves strangers, since you refuse to have the communion of unity with all nations.

Petilian said: “For although baptism is one, it is consecrated in three stages. John gave water without the name of the Trinity, as he himself declared, saying: ‘I baptize you in the water of repentance; another will come who is stronger than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he baptizes you in the Holy Spirit and fire.’ Christ gave the Holy Spirit, as it is written: ‘He breathed in their face and said: Receive the Holy Spirit.’ And the Paraclete himself, fire blazing with crackling flames, came upon the apostles. O true divinity, which was seen to set alight, not to burn! As it is written: ‘Suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of a mighty wind rushing, and it filled the whole house where the apostles were sitting. And there appeared to them divided tongues as of fire, and it sat upon each of them; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in various tongues, as the Holy Spirit gave them utterance.’ You, then, persecutor, do not have even the water of repentance, since you hold the power not of John who was killed but of Herod who killed him. You, then, traitor, do not have Christ's Holy Spirit; for Christ was handed over to death, Christ did not hand over to death. For you the fire in the Spirit is alive in the underworld, able, raging with hungry tips, to blow on your limbs forever, not to finish them, as it is written of the infernal punishment of the guilty: ‘Their fire will not be quenched.’”

Augustine answered: You are that abusive railer, not a truthful disputant. Will you never stop saying such things, which, if you do not prove them, concern no one, and if you do prove them, do not concern at all the unity of the world, which is in the saints as in the grain? If we too chose to repay curses with curses, perhaps we too could rail eloquently; we too could say “with crackling flames,” though what is said ineptly does not sound eloquent to me at all. We too could say “raging with hungry tips”; but we do not want the tips of our pens, when read by any sane person, to be judged hungry for the sap of seriousness, nor the reader himself, feeding on no useful thoughts in them, to labour under a pointless fast. Look, I say that your Circumcellions burn with flames of fury that are not crackling but precipitating. If you answer, “What has that to do with us?” why should you not in turn hear, when you have charged whomever you please, “We too do not know them”? If you answer, “You will not prove it,” why should the world not answer you in turn, “Nor do you prove it”? So let us agree, if you please, that you will not charge us with the wicked whom you think ours, nor I you with yours. So you will see that, with this pact so just, agreed and confirmed, you have nothing to charge against the seed of Abraham in all nations. But I plainly find a great thing to charge you with: why, then, did you impiously separate yourselves from the seed of Abraham that is in all nations? This you have no way of defending. For we each clear ourselves of others' crimes; but that you are not in communion with all the nations that are blessed in the seed of Abraham is both a great crime and the crime not of some of you but of all.

And yet you know and recall that the Holy Spirit came in such a way that those whom he had then filled spoke in all tongues. What did that sign and wonder mean? Why is the Holy Spirit now given in such a way that no one to whom he is given can speak in all tongues, unless because that miracle then foreshadowed that all nations would believe and so the gospel would be in all tongues? This too was foretold so long before in the psalm: “There are no speeches or words where their voices are not heard.” This was said because of those who, on receiving the Holy Spirit, were to speak in all tongues. But because it signified that the gospel would be in all the tongues of the nations and that the body of Christ would sound in all tongues through the whole world, it went on to say, “Their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” That is why the true church is hidden from no one. Hence what he himself says in the gospel: “A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.” And so in the same psalm it is joined on: “He has set his tabernacle in the sun” (that is, in open view, as we read it said in the books of Kingdoms, “What you did in secret, you will suffer in the sun”), “and he, like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, has rejoiced as a giant to run his course; his going out is from the highest heaven” (there you have the Lord's coming in the flesh) “and his return to the height of it” (there you have the resurrection and ascension), “and there is none who can hide himself from his heat”: there you have the coming of the Holy Spirit, whom he sent in fiery tongues to show the fervour of love; which surely he does not have who does not keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace with the church that is in all tongues.

Now as for your saying that baptism is indeed one but consecrated in three stages, and your dividing these three among single persons, so that you assigned the water to John, the Holy Spirit to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fire third to the Paraclete sent from above: consider for a moment how great an error this is. You were led to think so because John says, “I indeed baptize in water, but he who comes after me is greater than I; he baptizes you in the Holy Spirit and fire.” You did not choose to consider that the three are not fitted singly to three, the water to John, the Spirit to Christ, the fire to the Paraclete, but rather that these three belong to two: one to John and the other two to the Lord. For it was not said, “I indeed baptize you in water, but he who comes after me is greater than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he baptizes you in the Holy Spirit; and the Paraclete who is to come after him, he baptizes you in fire,” but: “I indeed,” he says, “in water; but he who comes after me, in the Holy Spirit and fire.” He assigned one to himself, two to him. So you see how the number deceived you. Pay further attention. You said that one baptism was consecrated in three stages, by water, Holy Spirit, and fire, and you set three persons to the three, John to the water, Christ to the Spirit, the Paraclete to the fire. If, then, John's water belongs to the same baptism whose unity is commended, those whom the apostle Paul found baptized by John ought not to have been baptized at his command; for they already had water belonging, as you say, to the same baptism. It remained for them to receive the Spirit and the fire, which John lacked, so that the baptism consecrated, as you assert, in three stages might be completed. But since they were ordered by apostolic authority to be baptized, it is clearly declared that John's water did not belong to the baptism of Christ, but served for the time required by another dispensation.

Finally, what made you think that, after you wished to prove that the Holy Spirit was given by Christ and had brought forward the testimony from the gospel that, rising from the dead, he breathed on the face of the disciples, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” you should want to show that last fire, named together with baptism, in the fiery tongues shown at the coming of the Paraclete? For you said, “And the Paraclete himself, fire blazing with crackling flames, came upon the apostles,” as if the Holy Spirit whom he gave by breathing on the face of the disciples were one, and the one who came upon the apostles after his ascension another. Are there, then, two Holy Spirits? What utter madman would say that? So Christ himself gave the same Holy Spirit, whether by breathing on the face of the disciples or by sending him from above on the day of Pentecost with a definite commendation of the sacrament. Therefore it was not that Christ gave the Holy Spirit and the Paraclete fire, so that what was said, “in the Holy Spirit and fire,” might as it were be completed; but the same Christ gave the Holy Spirit, whom he showed by his breath while on earth and by fiery tongues while in heaven. And so that you may know that what was said, “He baptizes you in the Holy Spirit,” was not fulfilled when he breathed on their face, so that they would then seem to be waiting to be baptized no longer in the Spirit but in fire when the Paraclete came, recall a very plain scripture and see what the Lord himself said to them when he ascended into heaven: “John indeed baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit, whom you are also to receive not many days from now, at Pentecost.” What is clearer than this testimony? But according to your sense he should have said, “John indeed baptized with water; but you were baptized with the Holy Spirit when I breathed on your face, and next you will be baptized in fire, which you are to receive not many days from now,” so that, of course, those three stages by which you say one baptism is consecrated might be completed. So it turns out that you still do not know what is meant by the words, “He baptizes you in the Holy Spirit and fire,” and that you rashly want to teach what you do not know.

Petilian said: “But to discuss fully the baptism of the Trinity: the Lord Christ said to his apostles, ‘Go, baptize the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I command you.’ Whom do you teach, traitor? Whom do you condemn? Whom do you teach, traitor? Whom do you kill? In short, whom do you teach? The one you have made a murderer? How, then, do you baptize in the name of the Trinity? You cannot call God Father. For since the Lord Christ said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God,’ you who do not have peace of mind do not have God as Father. And how do you baptize in the name of the Son, you who betray and do not imitate the Son of God himself by any sufferings or crosses? And how do you baptize in the name of the Holy Spirit, when the Holy Spirit came upon those apostles who had not been traitors? Since, then, God is not your begetter, and you are not born of the true water of baptism, none of you has been born at all; you ungodly ones have neither father nor mother. Ought I not, then, to baptize you, men of this sort, even if, as the Jews as it were baptize the flesh, you washed a thousand times?”

Augustine answered: You had certainly proposed to discuss fully the baptism of the Trinity, and you had made us very attentive; but of course, as is easiest for you, how quickly you turned to your usual abuse! This you do with real abundance. You set before yourself whom you will, and inveigh against them as much as you will; and in this great breadth of speech you are squeezed into the narrowest straits by one very short word: “Prove it.” This is what the seed of Abraham says to you; since all nations are blessed in it, they do not care when they are cursed by you. Still, since you are dealing with baptism, which you think true when it is in a righteous man and false when it is in an unrighteous man, look, if I too, following your rule, discuss the baptism of the Trinity, I can say, I think, more abundantly that the man to whom God is companion does not have God as Father, nor believes any to be his Christ but the one for whose sake he suffered, nor has the Holy Spirit, he who in a very different way set wretched Africa on fire with fiery tongues. How, then, does he have baptism, or how does he give it in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit? Surely you now see that baptism can be in an unrighteous man and given by an unrighteous man, not unrighteous but righteous and true, not because it is his but because it is God's. And I make no false charge against you about this man, as you never stop doing to the world about some people or other, and, what is more intolerable, without proving anything even about them. But I do not know how it can be tolerated that you not only slander holy men about unrighteous men, but also lay a charge against holy baptism itself, which must be holy in anyone unrighteous, by the contagion of men's sins, so as to say that baptism is such as the man by whom it is held or given or received. Further, if a man becomes such as the one with whom he approaches holy things, and the sacraments themselves become such as the men in whom they are, it is consolation enough for holy men to hear a false charge from you in common with holy baptism. Only see how you are condemned by your own mouth, if your sober men are drunkards by contagion from your drunkards, and your merciful men robbers by contagion from your robbers, and whatever is found among you in wicked men, those who are not such are compelled to be; and baptism itself is unclean in all your unclean men and varies with the variety of their uncleanness, if it is compelled to be such as the one by whom it is held and given. These things are certainly false, and therefore they do us no harm when you say them against us without looking at yourselves; but they harm you, because, being false, they do not fall on us when you say them against us, but, because you think them true, they fall back on you.

Petilian said: “For if the apostles were allowed to baptize those whom John had washed with the baptism of repentance, shall I not be allowed to baptize you sacrilegious men?”

Augustine answered: Where, then, is what you said above, that John's baptism was not one and Christ's another, but one baptism consecrated in three stages, of which John gave the water, Christ the Spirit, the Paraclete the fire? Why, then, did the apostles repeat the water in those to whom John had already given water belonging to the one baptism consecrated in three stages? You surely see how necessary it is for each one to know what he is saying.

Petilian said: “For the Holy Spirit cannot be implanted in anyone by the laying on of the bishop's hand unless the water of a pure conscience has gone before as begetter.”

Augustine answered: In these few words of yours there are two errors. One does not much concern the question we are discussing, but it convicts you of ignorance: for the Holy Spirit came upon the hundred and twenty without anyone's laying on of hands, and upon Cornelius the centurion and those with him even before they were baptized. The other error in these words of yours destroys your whole case. For you say that the water of a pure conscience must go before as begetter, so that the Holy Spirit may follow. So either all water consecrated in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is of a pure conscience, not because of those by whom it is ministered or received but because of him who, himself spotless, instituted this baptism; or, if nothing makes the water one of a pure conscience but the pure conscience of both the ministering man and the receiver, what do you do about those whom you find baptized by men who, not yet exposed, bore a stained conscience? Especially if among those baptized someone should appear who confessed that he had a bad conscience when he was baptized, because he hoped perhaps through that occasion to reach some disgraceful end? When it has been made clear to you that neither the minister nor the receiver of baptism had a pure conscience, will you judge that he must be baptized again? You will never say this, never do it. The purity of baptism, then, is wholly distinct from the purity or impurity of the conscience of either giver or receiver. So dare to say now that a man had a pure conscience who was a cheat, a robber, an oppressor of orphans and widows, a breaker-up of marriages, a betrayer, seller, and divider of others' patrimonies. Dare to say too that those had a pure conscience who in such times could hardly have been lacking, if any sought baptism from him not for Christ's sake or for eternal life but to win earthly friendships and satisfy earthly desires. Further, if you dare not say that these had a pure conscience, then if you find any baptized from that number, give them the water of a pure conscience which they did not receive; and if you do not do so, stop throwing at us what you do not know, so that you are not forced to answer against yourselves what you do know.

Petilian said: “This Holy Spirit could certainly not come upon you, whom not even the baptism of repentance washed, but the water of a traitor, to be repented of, which is the truth, polluted.”

Augustine answered: Not only do you not prove us traitors, but your fathers could not prove our fathers traitors either. And if they had been proved so, they would certainly not have been our fathers, by your earlier assertion, since we would not have followed their deeds; nor, on their account, would we be torn away from the fellowship of unity and from the seed of Abraham in which all nations are blessed. But if Christ's water is one thing and the traitor's water another, because Christ was not a traitor, why should not Christ's water be one thing and a robber's water another, since Christ was certainly not a robber either? So baptize after your robber, and I will baptize after a traitor who is neither mine nor yours; or, if documents produced are to be believed, both mine and yours; but if the communion of the world is to be believed rather than the party of Donatus, not mine but yours. But by the better and sounder judgment, since according to the apostle's word each of us will carry his own load, that robber is not yours, as far as you are not robbers, nor is any traitor either ours or yours, as far as we are not traitors. And therefore we are Catholics, who by this judgment do not desert unity; but you are heretics, who because of the crimes of certain men, true or false, refuse to keep love with the seed of Abraham.

Petilian said: “But that these things done by the apostles may shine before us, we are taught by their Acts, as it is written: ‘It happened that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul, having passed through the upper parts, came to Ephesus; and finding some disciples, he said to them: Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? And they said: We have not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit. And Paul said: Into what then were you baptized? And they answered: Into John's baptism. And Paul said: John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus Christ our Lord. When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; and when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in various tongues and prophesied. There were about twelve men in all.’ If, then, they were baptized so as to receive the Holy Spirit, why do you, if you want to receive the Holy Spirit, not take on true newness after your lies? If we do wrong in doing this, why do you seek us out? Or at least, if it is a crime, condemn Paul first; Paul washed what had already been, but we baptize in you what does not yet exist. For you, as we have often said, do not dip with true baptism, but defame with the empty name of a false baptism.”

Augustine answered: We do not accuse Paul, who gave men Christ's baptism because they did not have Christ's baptism, but John's baptism, by their own answer; for when asked into what they had been baptized, they answered, “Into John's baptism,” which does not belong to Christ's baptism and is no part or stage of it. Otherwise, either the water of Christ's baptism was then repeated, or, if Christ's baptism was then completed through two waters, it is less complete now, because that water which was given by John is not given. Either of these opinions is impious and sacrilegious. So Paul gave Christ's baptism to those who had not Christ's baptism but John's.

Why John's baptism was necessary at that time, though it is no longer necessary now, we have said elsewhere, and it does not concern the matter between us now, except only to show that John's baptism was one thing and Christ's another; just as that baptism was another in which the apostle says our fathers were baptized in the cloud and in the sea, when they crossed the Red Sea through Moses. For the Law and the Prophets up to John the Baptist had sacraments foretelling a thing to come; but the sacraments of our time testify that what those proclaimed as coming has come. So John, the nearest of all who went before, was the herald of Christ. And because all the righteous and the prophets of earlier times longed to see fulfilled what they perceived, by the Spirit's revelation, would come (as the Lord himself says, “For many righteous men and prophets longed to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it”), John was therefore called more than a prophet, and none greater was said to have been born of women; because to the earlier righteous it was granted only to foretell Christ, but to him both to foretell him absent and to see him present, so that it was found open to him what they had longed for. And so the sacrament of his baptism still belongs to the foretelling of Christ, but plainly the very last; for up to him there were foretellings of the Lord's first coming, of which coming there are now announcements, no longer foretellings. But the Lord, teaching the way of humility, deigned to receive the sacraments of his own foretelling which he found here, not to help his own cleansing but as an example of our devotion, to show us with what devotion we ought to receive those sacraments that testify he has already come, since he himself did not disdain to receive those by which he was prefigured as coming. And so John, though nearest and his contemporary within a year, still went before Christ when he baptized, as Christ came. For this reason it was said of him, “Look, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way,” and he himself preached, saying, “One stronger than I comes after me.” So too the circumcision on the eighth day, given to the fathers, foretold our justification in the stripping off of fleshly desires through the Lord's resurrection, which took place after the seventh day, that is the Sabbath, on the eighth, that is the Lord's day, which was the third day after his burial; yet the infant Christ received that same foretelling circumcision of the flesh. And just as the Passover which the Jews celebrated by killing a lamb foretold the Lord's passion and passing from this world to the Father, and yet the same Lord celebrated with his disciples that very Passover which belonged to that foretelling, when they suggested to him, “Where do you want us to prepare the Passover for you?”, so he also received John's baptism, which was the nearest foretelling of him. But just as the circumcision of the flesh of the Jews is one thing and what we celebrate on the eighth day of the baptized another, and the Passover which they still celebrate with a sheep is one thing and what we receive in the Lord's body and blood another, so John's baptism was one thing and Christ's baptism is another. By the former these things were foretold as coming; by the latter those things are proclaimed as fulfilled; and although Christ received the former, they are not necessary for us, because we have received him who was announced through them. But anyone who, at the Lord's recent coming, had received the former needed to be instructed in the latter too; while anyone instructed in the latter did not need to be driven back to the former.

So do not make a fog about John's baptism. Whether its cause and reason are what I have set out, or some better and surer one is given, this at least is plain: John's baptism was one thing and Christ's another, and the former was called John's baptism, as both the answer of those you mentioned shows and the Lord's own words when he says to the Jews, “Is the baptism of John from heaven or from men?” But this baptism is not called Caecilian's or Donatus's or Augustine's or Petilian's, but Christ's baptism. For if you think us shameless because we do not want anyone baptized after us, while we see that men were baptized after John, who is beyond comparison greater than we, are John and Optatus perhaps equal? It seems ridiculous, and yet I think you believe them not equal but Optatus greater: for the apostle baptized after John, while you dare to baptize no one after Optatus. Or is it because Optatus was in your unity? With what heart this can be borne I do not know, if the friend of the Count, to whom the Count was god, is said to have been in unity and the friend of the Bridegroom outside unity. But if John was supremely in unity and was far more excellent and greater not only than Optatus but than all of you and all of us, and yet the apostle Paul baptized after him, why do you not baptize after Optatus? Unless perhaps your blindness forces you into these straits, to say that Optatus could give the Holy Spirit and John could not. If you do not say this, so that your madness may not be laughed at even by the mad, what will you answer as to why men had to be baptized after John but no one is to be baptized after Optatus, except that those had been baptized with John's baptism, while whoever are baptized with Christ's baptism, whether they are baptized by Paul or by Optatus, there is no difference between the baptism of the one and of the other, though there is so great a difference between Paul and Optatus? Return, then, you transgressors, to your heart, and do not weigh divine sacraments by men's character and deeds. For they are holy through him whose they are; but handled worthily they bring reward, handled unworthily, judgment. And although those who handle God's sacrament worthily and those who handle it unworthily are not one, it is one, whether handled worthily or unworthily; not so as to become better or worse itself, but for the life or death of those who handle it. As for your saying that in those whom Paul baptized after John he washed off what had already been, you would certainly not say it if you considered a little what you were saying. For if John's baptism had to be washed off, it was without doubt dirty. Why should I press you further? Recall or read where John received it from, and you will find against whom you have poured out this blasphemy. When you find it, let your breast at least be beaten, if your tongue is not bridled.

Now as to what you think you say elegantly, “If we do wrong in this, why do you seek us out?”: do you never remember that none are sought but those who have perished? Or does not seeing even this belong to perdition itself? For that sheep too could say just as absurdly to the shepherd, “If I do wrong in straying from the flock, why do you seek me?”, not understanding that the very reason why it thinks it should not be sought is the one reason why it is sought. And who seeks you, whether through his Scriptures or through Catholic and peaceable tongues or through the scourges of temporal troubles, but he who dispenses this mercy to you in all things? So we seek you in order to find you; for we love you so that you may live as much as we hate your error so that it may perish, which destroys you as long as it does not itself perish. And would that we may so seek you as also to find you, and say joyfully of each one of you, “He was dead and has come to life; he was lost and is found!”

Petilian said: “If you say you hold the Catholic Church, catholicos is what is called in Greek ‘single’ or ‘whole.’ Look, you are not in the whole, because you have given way into a part.”

Augustine answered: I indeed have attained very little of the Greek language, almost nothing; yet I am not shameless in saying that I know that holon means not “one” but “whole,” and kath' holon “according to the whole,” from which the Catholic Church took its name, as the Lord himself says: “It is not for you to know the times which the Father has set by his own authority; but you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit coming upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the whole earth.” See where the name Catholic comes from. But you strike so blindly against the mountain which, according to Daniel's prophecy, grew from a small stone and filled the whole earth, that you say to us that we have given way into a part and are not in the whole, though our communion is spread through the whole world. But just as, if you told me that I was Petilian, I would find no way to refute you except either to laugh at you as joking or grieve for you as mad, so I see I must do now; and since I do not believe you are joking, you see what remains.

Petilian said: “But there is no part of darkness with light, nor part of bitterness with honey; there is no part of life with death, no part of innocence with guilt, no part of water with blood, nor part of dregs with oil, though theirs is a muddy kinship; but all that is rejected will flow off. That is the bilge of vices, as John says: ‘They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would surely have remained with us.’ Gold is not with its dross; all precious things are purified, for it is written: ‘As the furnace tests gold, so the trouble of tribulation tests the righteous.’ Cruelty is no part of gentleness, nor sacrilege of religion; nor can the party of Macarius be ours in any way, because it stains by the likeness of our rite. For a hostile battle line, which fills up the name of enemy, is not a part. If it is truly called a part, it will incur the fitting sentence of Solomon: ‘Let their part perish from the earth.’”

Augustine answered: To throw these words about and prove nothing, what is that but raving? You notice the tares throughout the world and do not notice the wheat, though both were ordered to grow throughout the whole. You notice the seed of the evil one, which will be separated at harvest time, and do not notice the seed of Abraham, in which all nations are blessed. As if you were already a cleansed lump, pure honey, strained oil, refined gold, or the very appearance of a whitewashed wall! To say nothing of other vices, do drunkards make part of the sober, or are the greedy counted in the part of the wise? If gentle men hold the name of light, where will the fury of the Circumcellions be counted except in darkness? Why, then, is baptism given by such men valid among you, and the same baptism of Christ not valid when given by anyone in the world? You surely see that you have been separated from the communion of the world to this end: not that you are all drunkards, or all greedy, or all violent, but that you are all heretics, and therefore all ungodly and all sacrilegious.

But who in his right mind would call the whole world, rejoicing in Christian fellowship, the party of Macarius? But because we say you are of the party of Donatus, you look for a man whose party you can say we are of, and in great straits you name someone or other who is perhaps known in Africa but unknown in the other parts of the world. So look, the whole seed of Abraham answers you from the whole earth: “We do not know at all this Macarius whose party you say we are.” Answer in turn that you do not know Donatus. But if we say you are the party of Optatus, which of you can say he does not know Optatus, except perhaps by face, as with Donatus? But no doubt you rejoice in the name of Donatus; do you also rejoice in the name of Optatus? What good is Donatus to you, then, when Optatus has defiled you all? What good is Donatus's sobriety to you, when you are polluted by the drunkenness of the Circumcellions? What good is Donatus's innocence, in your opinion, when you are stained by Optatus's rapacity? For this is your error: you think a man's iniquity has more power to defile another than a man's righteousness to purify another. So if two share the divine sacraments together, one righteous, the other unrighteous, yet so that the one does not imitate the other's iniquity nor the other the first's righteousness, you say not that both become righteous from this but that both become unrighteous, so that even the holy thing they receive together becomes unclean and loses its own holiness. Where has iniquity found such advocates for itself, by whose raving it is thought so victorious? Why, then, do you applaud yourselves on the name of Donatus in the error of so great a perversity, in which Petilian does not deserve to be what Donatus was, but Donatus himself is forced to be what Optatus was? But let the house of Israel say, “The Lord is my portion”; let the seed of Abraham in all nations say, “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance.” For it knows how to speak in the gospel of the glory of the blessed God. For you too, through the sacrament that is in you, prophesy without knowing it, like Caiaphas the Lord's persecutor. For what is makarios in Greek is beatus, “blessed,” in Latin. So we are plainly of the party of Macarius, of the Blessed One. For what is more blessed than Christ, whose we are, to whom all the ends of the earth remember and turn, and before whom all the families of the nations worship? So the party of this Macarius, that is, of this Blessed One, does not fear your final curse, perversely borrowed from Solomon, that it perish from the earth. For what was said of the ungodly you try to turn against Christ's inheritance, and you contend with abominable impiety that it has happened. For when he spoke of the ungodly, he said, “Let their part perish from the earth.” But when you say that what is written, “I will give you the nations as your inheritance,” and, “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord,” that this promise has already perished from the earth, you want to twist against Christ's inheritance what was foretold of the lot of the ungodly; but while Christ's inheritance remains and grows, you who say these things are perishing. For you do not everywhere prophesy through God's sacrament, since here, through your madness, you wish evil. But the prediction of the prophets is stronger than the curse of false prophets.

Petilian said: “The apostle Paul also cries: ‘Do not bear the yoke with unbelievers; for what partnership has righteousness with iniquity, or what fellowship has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Belial, or what part has a believer with an unbeliever?’”

Augustine answered: I recognize the apostle's words, but I do not see at all how they help you. For which of us says there is partnership of righteousness with iniquity, even if a righteous man and an unrighteous one, like Judas and Peter, share the sacraments together? From one and the same holy thing Judas took judgment on himself, Peter salvation; just as you, if you were unlike him, received the sacrament with Optatus and were not a robber like him. Or is robbery not iniquity? Who is so mad as to say so? What partnership, then, had your righteousness with his iniquity when you approached one altar?

Petilian said: “And again he taught, so that schisms might not arise: ‘I say to you, because each of you says, I am of Paul, I of Apollos, I of Cephas, I of Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?’”

Augustine answered: Remember, you who read this: Petilian cites these words from the apostle. When would you have believed that he would speak so for us against himself?

Petilian said: “If Paul said these things to the untaught, to the righteous, I say them to you, the unrighteous: Is Christ divided, that you should tear us away from the church?”

Augustine answered: I fear that someone may think that in this work of mine the scribe made a mistake and wrote “Petilian said” where he should have written “Augustine answered.” But I see what you have done: you wanted, as it were, to forestall us from saying these things. But what have you done except make them be said twice? So if you so enjoy hearing what is against you said, hear it, I beg, from me, Petilian: Is Christ divided, that you should tear yourselves away from the church?

Petilian said: “Did Judas the traitor die for us by his noose? Or do you dye yourselves in the character of the one whose deeds you follow, when, having seized the treasures of the church, you sell us, Christ's heirs, to the powers of the world?”

Augustine answered: Not Judas but Christ died for us; to him the church spread through the whole world says, “I will answer a word to those who reproach me, for I have hoped in your words.” So when I hear the words of the Lord saying, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the whole earth,” and through the prophet, “Their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world,” no bodily mixture with the wicked disturbs me, if I know how to say, “Uphold your servant for good; let not the proud slander me.” So I care nothing for an empty slanderer, because I hold a reliable promiser. But if you complain about church property or places which you held and do not hold, the Jews too can call themselves righteous and charge us with iniquity, because Christians now possess the place where they reigned ungodly. What is unworthy, then, if, by a like will of the Lord, Catholics hold what heretics held? For to all who are like them, that is, to all the ungodly and unrighteous, that word of the Lord holds: “The kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation that does righteousness.” Or was it written in vain, “The righteous will eat the labours of the ungodly”? So you ought rather to wonder that you still hold anything than that you have lost something. But do not wonder at this either; for the whitewashed wall falls little by little. Yet look at the Maximianists: what places they held, and by whose action and assault they were driven out of them. And if suffering these things is righteousness and doing them is iniquity, dare to say, if you can, first, that you did them and they suffered them; next, that by the rule of this righteousness you are found inferior. For they were expelled from their ancient places through judges by Catholic emperors, while you are not expelled from the basilicas of unity even by the orders of those same emperors. Why, unless because you are of less merit not only than your other colleagues but even than these very men, whom you certainly condemned as sacrilegious by the mouth of your plenary council?

Petilian said: “For we, as it is written, put on in our baptism the betrayed Christ; you, by your contagion, put on Judas the betrayer.”

Augustine answered: I too could say, “You by your contagion put on Optatus, the betrayer, robber, oppressor, separator.” But God forbid that the desire to return abuse should provoke me into any falsehood; for you do not put on him, nor we that man. So if anyone coming to us answers that he was baptized in the name of Optatus, he will be baptized in the name of Christ; and as for all those coming from us whom you have baptized, if they had said they were baptized in the name of Judas the traitor, we do not blame what you did. But if they had been baptized in Christ's name, do you not see in what an error you think that divine sacraments vary with the variety of human vices, or are polluted by the filth of anyone's life?

Petilian said: “But if these are parties, the names of a shared party do not prejudice us. For there are two ways, one narrow by which we go, the other for the ungodly by which they will perish; and yet the sameness of the word is widely distinguished, so that the way of righteousness is not stained by sharing the name.”

Augustine answered: You were afraid of the multitude of the world compared with your multitude, and wanted to take yourself to the praise of the few walking by the narrow way. Would that you had taken yourself not to its praise but to the way itself! You would surely see that the same fewness is in the church of all nations, but that the righteous are called few in comparison with the many unrighteous, just as a few grains of a very rich harvest can be called few in comparison with the chaff, though by themselves, gathered into a heap, they fill the barn. For just as in the troubles of lost places, so also in fewness, if you think righteousness lies in these, the Maximianists themselves will outdo you.

Petilian said: “In the first psalm David separates the blessed and the ungodly, not making parties, of course, but separating holiness from all the ungodly: ‘Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners’ (let him who had strayed to perish return to the way of righteousness) ‘nor sat in the seat of pestilence’ (since he thus warns: O wretches, why do you sit?), ‘but his will is in the law of the Lord, and in the law of the Lord he will meditate day and night. And he will be like a tree planted by the streams of water, which will give its fruit in its season; and its leaf will not fall, and whatever he does will prosper. Not so the ungodly, not so; but like the dust which the wind drives from the face of the earth’ (it fills the eyes to blind them). ‘Therefore the ungodly will not rise in the judgment, nor sinners in the counsel of the righteous; for the Lord knows the ways of the righteous, and the path of the ungodly will perish.’”

Augustine answered: Who does not distinguish these two kinds of men in the Scriptures? But you slanderers charge the crimes of the chaff even against the grain, and though you are only chaff, you boast that you alone are the grain. But the truthful prophets say that both kinds are mixed throughout the whole world, that is, through the whole field of the Lord, before the winnowing that will take place on the day of judgment. Yet I advise you to read this first psalm in Greek: then you will not dare to charge the world with the party of Macarius as a crime, because you may perhaps understand which Macarius's party is in all the saints, who are blessed through all nations in the seed of Abraham. For where the Latin has “blessed is the man,” the Greek has makarios anēr. But that Macarius who displeases you, if he was evil, is neither in this lot nor harms this lot; if he was good, let him test his own work, so that he may have his boast in himself and not in another.

Petilian said: “The same psalmist sang the praises of our baptism: ‘The Lord shepherds me, and I shall lack nothing; in a place of pasture there he has set me. By the water of refreshment he has brought me up; he has restored my soul. He has led me along paths of righteousness for his name's sake. For even if I walk in the midst of the shadow of death’ (if, he means, the persecutor kills me) ‘I will fear no evil, for you are with me, Lord. Your rod and your staff, they have comforted me’ (by this David, armoured with the oil of anointing, overcame Goliath). ‘You have prepared a table before me against those who trouble me. You have anointed my head with oil, and your cup that inebriates is excellent indeed. And your mercy will follow me all the days of my life, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord for length of days.’”

Augustine answered: This psalm speaks of those who receive baptism well and use the holy thing holily. For these words do not apply also to Simon Magus, who nevertheless received the same holy baptism; and because he would not use it holily, he did not therefore defile it or teach that it must be repeated for such men. But since you mentioned Goliath, look at that psalm about Goliath himself and see that he was overcome in a new song, for there it says, “O God, I will sing a new song to you; on a ten-stringed psaltery I will play to you”; and see whether one who is not in communion with the world belongs to this song. For elsewhere it says, “Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.” So all the earth, in whose unity you are not, sings a new song, and these words too belong to all the earth: “The Lord shepherds me, and I shall lack nothing,” and the rest. These are not the words of the tares, although they are tolerated in one field until the harvest; they are not the words of the chaff, but of the grain, although they are nourished by the same rain and together, threshed on the same floor and together, until they are separated from each other by the last winnowing fork; and both of these certainly have one baptism in common, though they are not one. But even if your party were the church of God, you would surely admit that this psalm does not apply there to the raging bands of the Circumcellions. Or if they too are led along paths of righteousness, why do you deny that they are your companions when they are charged against you? Though often it is not the rod and staff of God that comfort the fewness of your cutting-off but their clubs, by which you think yourselves safe even against the Roman laws; and to run into them, what is it but to walk in the midst of the shadow of death? But he with whom the Lord is fears no evil. Certainly you will not dare to say that the words sung in this psalm belong to these madmen too; and yet you not only admit but proclaim that they have baptism. So none say these words but those who are refreshed by the holy water, like all God's righteous, not those who are overthrown by using it badly, like that magician baptized by Philip; and yet it is one and holy in both. None say these words but those who will belong to the right hand; yet sheep and goats feed on the same pasture under one shepherd until they are separated to receive what is due. None say these words but those who take life from the Lord's table, like Peter, not judgment, like Judas; and yet the table was one for both, but did not avail both to one end, because they themselves were not one. None say these words but those who are blessed by the holy oil also in the spirit, like David, not those consecrated in the body alone, like Saul; and yet, though both received one thing, it was not the sacrament that was unequal for them but the merit. None say these words but those who with changed mind long for the Lord's cup unto eternal life, not those who eat and drink judgment on themselves, as the apostle says; and yet for both, though they are not one, that cup is one, inebriating martyrs to seize heavenly things, not Circumcellions to deadly precipices. Remember, then, that the character of evil men does no harm to God's sacraments, so as to make them either not exist at all or be less holy, but harms the evil men themselves, so that they have them as a witness to their condemnation, not a help to their health. At least you ought to have considered the very last words of this psalm, and, because of those who apostatize after receiving baptism, understood that not all who receive holy baptism can say, “that I may dwell in the house of the Lord for length of days.” And yet, whether they persevere or fall, though they themselves are not one, baptism is one; and though they are not both holy, baptism is holy in both; because apostates too, if they return, are not baptized as though they had lost it, but are humbled because they did injury to what remained in them.

Petilian said: “And so that you may not say you are holy, I assert this first: one who has not been innocent does not have holiness.”

Augustine answered: Show us the tribunal where you sat, so that the world stood before you, and with what eyes you examined and judged, I do not say the consciences of all, but even their acts, so as to judge that it had lost its innocence. He who was caught up to the third heaven says, “But I do not even judge myself,” and you dare to pass sentence on the whole earth, through which Christ's inheritance is spread? Next, if what you said seems to you sufficiently final, “One who has not been innocent does not have holiness,” I ask: if Saul did not have the holiness of the sacrament, what did David venerate in him? But if he had innocence, why did he persecute an innocent man? For because of the sacred anointing David both honoured him while alive and avenged him when killed, and because he cut off even a small piece of his robe, his heart struck him and he trembled. See, Saul did not have innocence and yet had holiness: not of his own life, for no one can have that without innocence, but of God's sacrament, which is holy even in evil men.

Petilian said: “For if you, faithless men, know the law (I would say this without injury to the law itself), the devil knows it too. For in the case of righteous Job he answered the Lord God about the law as if he were righteous, as it is written: ‘The Lord said to the devil: Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a man without malice, a true worshipper of God, keeping himself from all evil, persevering in simplicity? But you asked to destroy all he has without cause. And the devil answered and said to the Lord: Skin for skin, and all that a man has he will give for his life.’ See, he who strives against the law speaks lawfully. And again he dared to tempt the Lord Christ with his words, as it is written: ‘The devil took Jesus to the holy city, set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him: Throw yourself down; for it is written that he has commanded his angels concerning you, that they may bear you up in their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone. Jesus said: Again it is written: You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’ You know the law, I say, as the devil does, who is defeated in his attempts and put to shame in his acts.”

Augustine answered: I could indeed ask you in what law the words are written that the devil spoke when he accused the holy man Job before God, if it were my purpose to show that you yourself do not know the law which you say the devil knows; but since that is not the question between us, I pass it over. You have tried to show the devil skilled in the law, as if we said that all who know the words of the law are righteous. So I do not see how what you chose to recall about the devil helps you, unless perhaps it was to bring to our minds how you imitate the devil himself. For as he brought out the words of the law against the giver of the law, so you too, with the words of the law, accuse men you do not know, so as to resist God's promises that are written in that very law. Next, I would like you to tell me: when those confessors of yours throw themselves down, to whom do they render martyrdom: to Christ, who rejected the devil when he suggested such things, or rather to the devil himself, who suggested such things for Christ to do? There are two especially cheap and common deaths of those who kill themselves: the noose and the precipice. You certainly said in the first parts of this letter, “The traitor perished by a noose; he left the noose for such men.” This does not concern us at all; for we do not venerate under the name of martyrs those who have tied their own necks. But how much more plausibly do we say against you: the devil, the traitor's master, wanted to persuade Christ to the precipice and was rejected! What, then, are those to be called whom he persuaded to it and was heard? What but enemies of Christ, friends of the devil, disciples of the seducer, fellow disciples of the traitor? For both learned voluntary deaths from one master: he the noose, they the precipice.

Petilian said: “But to destroy your claims one by one: if you call yourselves priests, the Lord God has said through the prophet: ‘The vengeance of the Lord is upon false priests.’”

Augustine answered: Seek rather what true thing you may say, not how to curse; and what you may teach, not what you may charge.

Petilian said: “If you wretches claim the chair for yourselves, as we said above, you certainly have the one which the prophet David, the psalmist, called the chair of pestilence. For it has justly been left to us, because the saints cannot sit in it.”

Augustine answered: Do you not see that these too are not any proofs but empty abuse? This is what I said a little before: you speak the words of the law, but you do not consider against whom you speak them, just as the devil spoke the words of the law but did not recognize to whom he spoke them. He wanted to cast down our Head, who was to ascend on high; you want to reduce the body of the same Head, which is spread through the whole earth, to a tiny part. You yourself certainly said a little before that we know the law and speak lawfully but are put to shame in our acts. You say these things without proving anything; but even if you proved them about some, you would not thereby prejudge the rest. Yet if all through the whole world were such as you most emptily accuse them of being, what has the chair of the Roman church done to you, in which Peter sat and in which Anastasius sits today, or the chair of the church of Jerusalem, in which James sat and in which John sits today, to which we are joined in Catholic unity and from which you have separated yourselves with abominable fury? Why do you call the apostolic chair a chair of pestilence? If it is because of men whom you think speak the law and do not do it, did the Lord Jesus Christ, because of the Pharisees, of whom he said, “For they say and do not do,” do any injury to the chair in which they sat? Did he not commend that chair of Moses and rebuke them while keeping the honour of the chair? For he says: “They sit on the chair of Moses. Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” If you considered this, you would not, because of men whom you defame, blaspheme the apostolic chair with which you are not in communion. But what is this but not knowing what to say, and yet being unable to do anything but curse?

Petilian said: “If you judge that you offer sacrifices, God himself speaks thus of you most wicked men: ‘The criminal,’ he says, ‘who sacrifices a calf to me is as if he killed a dog, and he who offers fine flour is as if he poured out swine's blood’ (know that this is your sacrifice, you who have already poured out human blood); and again: ‘Their sacrifices are like the bread of mourning; everyone who eats of it will be defiled.’”

Augustine answered: We say that the sacrifice becomes to each person such as he is who comes to offer it and such as he is who comes to receive it, and that those eat of the sacrifices of such men who come to them being such as those men are. So if an evil man offers to God and a good man receives from it, it is to each such as each has been; because it is also written, “To the pure all things are pure.” By this truthful and Catholic judgment you too were not polluted by Optatus's sacrifice, if his deeds displeased you. For surely his bread was the bread of mourning, under whose iniquities all Africa mourned; but the evil of schism, common to all of you, makes the bread of mourning common to all of you. For according to the sentence of your council, Felicianus of Musti poured out human blood; for you said when you condemned them, “Their feet are swift to shed blood.” See, then, what kind of sacrifice is offered by one whom you have as priest after condemning him as sacrilegious; and if you think this does you no harm, I ask you, what harm will the emptiness of your slanders do the world?

Petilian said: “If you make a prayer to the Lord or pour out supplication, it profits you nothing at all. For your bloody conscience empties your feeble prayers, because the Lord God hears a pure conscience rather than prayers, as the Lord Christ says: ‘Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.’ God's will is certainly good. For this reason we ask thus in the holy prayer, ‘Your will be done in heaven and on earth,’ so that, since his will is good, he may grant us what is good. So you do not do God's will, because you commit evils daily.”

Augustine answered: If we too said all these things against you, would not anyone who heard us, if he is sane himself, judge us mad litigants rather than Christian disputants? So we do not return curse for curse. “For the Lord's servant must not quarrel but be gentle toward all, teachable, correcting with modesty those who think otherwise.” So if we charge you with those who commit evils daily among you, we quarrel foolishly, accusing some because of others; but if we admonish you that, as you do not want those things charged against you, so you should not charge us with others' deeds, we correct you with modesty, in case you may at some time come to your senses.

Petilian said: “If perhaps you cast out demons, which I doubt, even that will not profit you, because the demons do not yield to your faith or merits but are driven out in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Augustine answered: Thanks be to God that you have at last confessed that the name of Christ, when invoked, can avail for the salvation of others even if it is invoked by sinners. From this, then, understand that when Christ's name is invoked, others' sins do not harm the salvation of others. But how we invoke the name of Christ, we do not need your judgment but the judgment of him who is invoked by us; for he alone can know with what heart he is invoked. From his words, however, we are sure that he is invoked to salvation by all the nations that are blessed in the seed of Abraham.

Petilian said: “Even if you do works of power and wonders, because of your wickedness the Lord does not know you even so, as the Lord himself says: ‘Many will say to me on that day: Lord, Lord, in your name we prophesied, and in your name we cast out demons, and in your name we did many mighty works. Then I will tell them: I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of iniquity.’”

Augustine answered: We recognize the Lord's words. Hence the apostle also says, “If I have faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” So this is what must be asked: who has love? You will find that none have it but those who love unity. As for casting out demons and the power of miracles, since many do not do such things and yet belong to the kingdom of God, while many do them and do not belong, neither ours nor yours ought to boast if any can do them; for the Lord did not want even the apostles, who truly could do these things to salvation and profit, to rejoice in such things, when he said to them, “Do not rejoice in this, that the demons are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” So the words you cited from the gospel I too could say to you, if I saw you working signs of power, and you to me, if you saw me doing such things. So let us not say to each other what can also be said from the other side; and, setting aside evasions, since we are asking where the church of Christ is, let us hear him who redeemed it with his blood saying, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the whole earth.” Whoever is not in communion with this church, which is spread through the whole earth, you see with whom he is not in communion, if you hear whose words these are. And what is more insane than to share in the Lord's sacraments and not to share in the Lord's words? These are surely the ones who will say, “In your name we ate and drank,” and will hear, “I do not know you”: who eat and drink his body and blood in the sacrament and do not recognize his members spread through the whole world in the gospel, and therefore are not counted among them in the judgment.

Petilian said: “Even if, as you think, you follow the Lord's law purely, let us argue lawfully from that most holy law. The apostle Paul says, ‘The law is good, if one uses it lawfully.’ What, then, does the law say? ‘You shall not kill.’ This Cain the fratricide did once; you have killed your brothers many times.”

Augustine answered: We do not want to be like you. For there is no lack of things that could be said, just as you say these things; and things that are known, whereas you do not know these; and things that can be shown, whereas you do not show these.

Petilian said: “It is said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ Each of you, even if chaste in the flesh, is an adulterer in the spirit, because he adulterates holiness.”

Augustine answered: These things can truly be said against some, both ours and yours; and if they displease both of us, they are neither ours nor yours. But what you say against some, and do not prove even against them, you want to be taken as if you had proved it, not against some who fall away from the seed of Abraham, but against all the nations that are blessed in the seed of Abraham.

Petilian said: “It is said, ‘You shall not bear false witness.’ When you falsely tell the kings of the world that we hold what is yours, are you not fabricating falsehoods?”

Augustine answered: If what you hold is not ours, neither was what you took back from the Maximianists yours. But if it was yours because they made a sacrilegious schism by not being in communion with the party of Donatus, consider what places you hold and whose inheritance you are not in communion with, and think what you can answer not to the kings of the world but to Christ the King. Of him it was said: “He shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth.” From what river, surely, but where he was baptized and where the dove descended on him, a great sign of love and unity? But you are not in communion with this unity, and you still hold places of unity, and you stir up odium against us about the kings of the world, while you yourselves, through the orders of proconsuls, expelled your schismatics from the places of the party of Donatus. These are not words flying through the void: the men are alive, the cities bear witness, proconsular and municipal records are read out. Let the slanderous voice that charges the whole earth with the kings of the world at last be silent, the voice through whose proconsuls one cut-off party could not spare another. So when we say that you hold what is ours, we are not shown to bear false witness unless you show that we are not in the church of Christ; which you indeed never stop saying but will never be able to show. Indeed, when you say this, you charge with the crime of false witness not us now but Christ himself. For we are in the church which was foretold by his testimony and where he gave testimony through his witnesses, saying, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the whole earth.” But we show you to be false witnesses not only because you resist this truth, but also in that very trial in which you contended with Maximian's schism. For if you were acting according to Christ's law, how much more fittingly do Christian emperors establish something according to it, if pagan proconsuls can judge according to it! But if you thought the laws of the earthly empire were also to be taken up as help, we do not blame you. Paul did this when he testified against those who were wronging him that he was a Roman citizen. But I ask by what earthly laws it was enacted that the Maximianists should be driven from their places. You will find none at all. But evidently you wished to expel them by the laws enacted against heretics, and among them against yourselves, and you prevailed against the weak as being stronger; so they, because they could do nothing, call themselves innocent, like the wolf under the lion. Yet you would certainly not use laws enacted against yourselves against others except through false witness. For if those laws are truthful, you too yield the places you hold; but if they are false, why did you exclude others by them? What of the fact that they are both truthful and you could not expel others by them except deceitfully? For for the judges to apply them, they had to want to expel heretics, and so they ought to have expelled you first; but you said you were Catholics, so that the laws through which you were crushing others might spare you. What you seem to yourselves to be among yourselves is your affair; yet by those laws you are not Catholics. Why, then, did you either deceive those laws, being truthful, by false witness, or use them, being false, to crush others?

Petilian said: “It is said, ‘You shall not covet your neighbour's property.’ You plunder what is ours, to hold it as yours.”

Augustine answered: Whatever unity possessed is ours and no one else's, since we stand in unity not according to men's slanders but according to the words of Christ, in whom all nations of the whole earth are blessed; and we do not separate ourselves from the fellowship of the wheat because of the wicked, whom we cannot separate from the Lord's grain before the winnowing of the judgment. And if you, once cut off, began to possess anything, then, since the Lord has taken it from you and given it to us, we are not therefore coveting what belongs to others; for by the command of him to whom all things belong it has become ours, and justly ours. For you used these things for cutting off, we for unity. Otherwise those too could charge the first people of God with coveting others' property who were driven out before them by divine power because they used that land badly; and the Jews themselves, from whom the kingdom was taken according to the Lord's words and given to a nation that does righteousness, can charge coveting of others' property, because the church of Christ possesses where the persecutors of Christ reigned. And after all, when it is said to you yourselves, “You covet others' property, because you threw the Maximianists out of the basilicas,” you find nothing to answer.

Petilian said: “By what law, then, do you show yourselves Christians, when you do things contrary to the law?”

Augustine answered: You want to quarrel, not to argue.

Petilian said: “The Lord Christ says: ‘Whoever does and so teaches will be called greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’ And thus he condemns you wretches: ‘Whoever relaxes one of these commandments will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.’”

Augustine answered: Where you perhaps quote the testimonies of the Scriptures otherwise than they stand, and it does not concern the matter between us, I do not care much; but where, unless they are quoted truly, they hinder what we are discussing, I do not think you ought to be angry if I remind you how it is written. Look, what you have just set down is not written so, but rather so: “Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and so teaches will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and so teaches will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” And he went on at once: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” For elsewhere he points out and rebukes the Pharisees, because they say and do not do. These, then, he meant here too when he said, “Whoever relaxes and so teaches,” that is, teaches in words what he relaxes in deeds; and he commanded that our righteousness should exceed theirs, so that we do and so teach. And yet not even because of those Pharisees, to whom you compare us not from wisdom but from malice, did the Lord command the chair of Moses to be deserted, in which he was certainly prefiguring his own. For, while saying that those who sat on the chair of Moses said and did not do, he still warns the people to do what they say and not to do what they do, so that the holiness of the chair may not be deserted and the unity of the flock may not be divided because of bad shepherds.

Petilian said: “And again: ‘Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but whoever sins against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him either in this age or in the age to come.’”

Augustine answered: This too is not written so; and see how far it has misled you. The apostle, writing to the Corinthians, says, “Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.” But this is one thing, and another what the Lord said in the gospel: “Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men; but whoever sins against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him either in this age or in the age to come.” You began a sentence from the apostle and finished it as though it were one sentence from the gospel; I believe you did this not by fraud but by error. For neither concerns the matter, and why you said these things, in whatever way you said them, I do not see at all. Unless perhaps, having said above that those who relax one of the commandments are condemned by the Lord, you considered how many you have who relax not one but many commandments, and, so that this would not be charged against you, you wanted to slip in in passing a distinction between sins: that relaxing some commandment, for which pardon can easily be obtained, is one thing, and sinning against the Holy Spirit, which will not be forgiven either in this age or in the age to come, another. So, fearing the contagion of sins, you did not want to keep silent on this; and again, fearing the depth of a question that exceeds your powers, you wanted to touch on it in a hurry, with such agitation that, as people hurrying in some alarm put on their clothes or shoes the wrong way, you did not choose to notice either what belongs to what or where and how it is written. But what that sin is which will not be forgiven either in this age or in the age to come you know so little that, though you believe we are in it, you nevertheless promise us its forgiveness through your baptism. How can that be, if it is such a sin as is not forgiven either in this age or in the age to come?

Petilian said: “By what deeds do you fulfil the divine commandments? The Lord Christ says, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ You, by the malice of your persecuting fury, breathe out riches.”

Augustine answered: Say these things rather to your Circumcellions.

Petilian said: “‘Blessed are the meek, for they will possess the earth.’ So you, not being meek, have lost earth and heaven alike.”

Augustine answered: Hear again and again the Lord saying, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the whole earth.” Why, then, have not those lost earth and heaven who, so as not to be in communion with the whole earth, despise the words of him who sits in heaven? As for your meekness, let not your words but the clubs of the Circumcellions be questioned. You will say, “What has that to do with us?” As if we said these things for any other reason than that you should answer so. For your schism concerns you precisely because you do not want another's sin to concern you; and yet you separated yourselves from us for no other reason than by charging us with another's crime.

Petilian said: “‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’ You, our executioners, make others mourn; you do not mourn.”

Augustine answered: Consider a little to how many, and how great a mourning, the “Praise to God” of your armed men has brought. Say again, “What has that to do with us?” And I will say again: And what you say, what has it to do with us, what with the world, what with those who praise the name of the Lord from the rising of the sun to its setting, what with all the earth that sings a new song, what with the seed of Abraham in which all nations are blessed? So the sacrilege of schism concerns you for this very reason, that the evil deeds of your people do not concern you; and from this you understand that the deeds of those because of whom you separated yourselves from the world do not concern the world, even if you proved them.

Petilian said: “‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.’ For you this is righteousness, to thirst for our blood.”

Augustine answered: What shall I say to you, you man, except that you are a slanderer? The unity of Christ does indeed hunger and thirst for you; would that it might swallow you up! You would not be heretics.

Petilian said: “‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy.’ When shall I call you merciful, when you inflict punishments on the righteous? Or shall I call you a most wicked communion, since you defile souls?”

Augustine answered: You neither prove yourselves righteous nor prove that we inflict punishments even on the unrighteous; and yet, just as deceitful flattery is often cruel, so just correction is always merciful. Hence the text you do not understand: “The righteous will correct me in mercy and rebuke me.” For after saying this of the harshness of merciful correction, he at once added, of the gentleness of ruinous flattery, “But the oil of the sinner will not anoint my head.” So consider to what you are called and from what you are called back. For how do you know with what mind he whom you think cruel acts toward you? But whatever his mind, each carries his own load, both among us and among you. But throw off the load of schism which you all carry, so that you may carry your good loads in unity, and correct mercifully, if you can, those who carry bad ones, or, if you cannot, tolerate them peaceably.

Petilian said: “‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’ When will you see God, you who bear blindness through the unclean malice of your heart?”

Augustine answered: Why do you say this? Do we perhaps charge all nations with unknown things that men say, and refuse to understand the manifest things that God foretold about all nations? That is great blindness of heart; and if you do not recognize it in yourselves, that is greater blindness of heart.

Petilian said: “‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.’ You feign peace by crime and seek unity by war.”

Augustine answered: We do not feign peace by crime; we preach peace from the gospel, and if you have peace with it, you will have it with us too. The Lord, rising and offering himself not only to be seen by the disciples' eyes but also to be handled by their hands, began thus: “Peace be with you,” he said. And how that peace was to be kept he disclosed in the following words. For there he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, “For thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” Have peace with these words, and you will not disagree with us. For if we seek unity by war, our war could not have been more splendidly praised; since it is written, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” and again it is written, “No one ever hated his own flesh,” and yet “the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh.” If no one hates his own flesh and yet lusts against his own flesh, see, unity is sought by war, so that the body, chastised, may be brought into subjection. And what the spirit does against the flesh, waging war not from hatred but from love, this the spiritual do against the carnal, so that what they do toward themselves they do also toward them, because they love their neighbours as themselves. But the war of the spiritual is that correction in love; their sword is the word of God. To such a war they are roused by the apostolic trumpet sounding with great force: “Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, exhort, rebuke, with all patience and teaching.” See, we act not with the sword but with the word; but you neither answer with truth nor stop accusing falsely; you do not correct your own faults, you charge others'. Christ gives true testimony about the world; you give false testimony against Christ against the world. If we believed you rather than Christ, we would be peacemakers; because we believe Christ rather than you, we feign peace by crime. And though you say and do these things, you dare besides to cite, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.”

Petilian said: “Since the apostle Paul says, ‘I, a prisoner in the Lord, beg you, brothers, to walk worthily of the calling with which you were called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.’”

Augustine answered: If you not only said these things but heard them, you would bear even known evils for the sake of peace, and not invent unknown ones for the sake of dissension; or, since afterwards you learned, for the unity of Donatus, to bear the most notorious and famous evils of Optatus. What madness is this? Known men are tolerated so that the cut-off party may not be cut again, and unknown men are defamed so that one may not remain in the whole itself.

Petilian said: “The prophet says to you: ‘Peace, peace; and where is peace?’”

Augustine answered: It is you who say this to us, not the prophet; so we answer you. If you ask where peace is, open your eyes and see of whom it was said, “He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth.” If you ask where peace is, open your eyes to that city which cannot be hidden, set on a mountain; open your eyes to the mountain itself too, and let Daniel show it to you, growing from a small stone and filling the whole earth. But when the prophet says to you, “Peace, peace; and where is peace?”, what will you point to? The party of Donatus, unknown to countless nations to whom Christ is known? That is not the city that cannot be hidden; and why, except because it is not set on that mountain? For he is our peace who made both one, not Donatus, who made two out of one.

Petilian said: “‘Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ You are not blessed, but you make blessed martyrs, with whose souls the heavens are filled and with the memory of whose bodies the earth has flowered. So you do not worship, but you make those whom we may worship.”

Augustine answered: Clearly, if it had not been said, “Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake,” but, “Blessed are those who throw themselves down,” your martyrs would fill heaven. Certainly we see many flowers of the earth from their bodies; but, as the saying goes, “The flower is ash.”

Petilian said: “Since, then, by falsifying the commandments you are not blessed, the Lord Christ condemns you with divine sentences: ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven before men; for you do not go in, and you do not let those who are entering go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he has been made, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done without omitting the others. Blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful to men, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. So you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.’”

Augustine answered: Tell me whether you have said anything which could not likewise be said in turn against you with an abusive and insulting mouth. But anyone who wishes will find from what I have said earlier that these things can be said against you not by empty abuse but by true testimonies. Still, since the occasion should not be passed over: the ancient people of God certainly had circumcision in place of baptism. So I ask: if those Pharisees, against whom so much is said, had made a proselyte who, if he imitated them, would, as was said, have been twice as much a son of Gehenna as they, then if he were corrected and wished to imitate Simeon, Zechariah, and Nathanael, would he be judged to need circumcising again by them? If it is ridiculous to say so, then, though in your empty-talking manner and mouth you compare us with such men, why do you baptize after us? And if you are such men, how much more truly and rightly do we not baptize after you, just as those I named ought not to have been circumcised after the very worst Pharisees! Next, since such men sat on the chair of Moses, to which the Lord kept its honour, why do you, because of those whom you compare with them, rightly or wrongly, blaspheme the apostolic chair?

Petilian said: “But these things do not frighten us Christians. For we have the command from the Lord Christ beforehand about the evil you would do. ‘I send you,’ he says, ‘as sheep in the midst of wolves.’ You have filled up the wolves' rage, you who lay or prepare snares for the churches no otherwise than wolves gaping at sheepfolds, always with destruction and attack, who breathe out panting wrath with jaws soaked in blood.”

Augustine answered: I would like to say that sentence against you, but I would not want to use those words; they are too inept, or rather insane. What was needed was that you should show by some sure proofs, not by the emptiest curses, that we are wolves and you sheep. For when I too say, “We are the sheep and you the wolves,” do you think it makes any difference that you say it in swollen words? But pay attention while I prove what I say. Surely the Lord, as you know whether you like it or not, says in the gospel, “My sheep hear my voice and follow me.” The Lord has many words on different matters. For example, if someone doubted whether the same Lord rose in the body, and his words were read out, “Handle and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have,” and if even after hearing these he refused to believe that his body was raised, he certainly would not be counted among the Lord's sheep, because when he heard his voice he did not follow. So now too, since the question between us is where the church is, when we read out, from the very passage of the gospel where after the resurrection he offered his body even to be handled by doubters, the following words in which he showed the future breadth of the church, saying, “For thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem,” and you refuse to be in communion with all the nations where these things have been fulfilled, how are you sheep of this shepherd, whose voice you hear and not only do not follow but even fight against? So that is how we show that you are not sheep; now hear how we show that you are wolves. Since it is evident from his own words where the church is, it is plain where Christ's sheepfold is. Whoever, then, separate sheep from this fold, pointed out and expressed by the Lord's most certain words, by charges, I will not say false, but, as is plain, uncertain crimes of men, and kill them when snatched and estranged from the life of unity and love: are not they themselves ravenous wolves? But, you say, they too praise and preach the Lord Christ. These, then, are the ones of whom he himself says, “clothed in sheepskins, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves; by their fruits you will know them.” The sheepskin is in the praises of Christ; the wolf's fruit is in the cursing teeth.

Petilian said: “O wretched traitors! It was fitting for Scripture to be fulfilled thus; but this I grieve over in you, that you have deserved to fulfil the parts of malice.”

Augustine answered: I could rather say, “O wretched traitors,” if I chose, or rather if justice advised me to charge all of you with the deeds of some of yours. But as to what concerns all of you, O wretched heretics, I would say the rest of your words. For it is written, “There must be heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you.” So it was necessary for Scripture to be fulfilled thus; but this I grieve over in you, that you have deserved to fulfil the parts of malice.

Petilian said: “But to us, against your deadly deeds, the Lord Christ commanded simple patience and innocence. For what does he say? ‘A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you’; and, ‘By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’”

Augustine answered: Unless you transferred these words, so far removed from your conduct, onto the surface of your speech, how would you cover yourselves with sheepskin?

Petilian said: “The apostle Paul too, when he suffered immense persecutions from all nations, endured heavier ones from false brothers, as he himself testifies about himself, often afflicted by dangers from the Gentiles, dangers from his own race, dangers from false brothers; and again he says, ‘Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.’ So when you false brothers attack us, we imitate the patience of our teacher Paul under the dangers you bring.”

Augustine answered: Certainly these are the false brothers of whom the same apostle complains in another place, when he praises Timothy's genuine sincerity: “I have no one like-minded,” he says, “who will be genuinely concerned for you; for all seek their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ.” He was certainly speaking of those who were with him at the time he wrote that letter; for not all Christians everywhere were seeking their own interests and not those of Jesus Christ. Of these, then, as I said, he groaned, whom he had with him at the time he wrote this. For whom else does he touch when he says elsewhere, “fighting without, fears within,” but those whom he feared the more intensely the more they were within? So if you wanted to imitate Paul, you would be within, bearing with false brothers, not outside, slandering the innocent.

Petilian said: “For what kind of faith is in you which does not have love, as Paul himself says: ‘If I speak with the tongues of men and have the knowledge of angels, but have not love, they are like sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I distribute all my substance to the poor, and hand over my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing’?”

Augustine answered: This is what I said a little before: you want to be covered with sheepskin, so that, if possible, the sheep may feel you biting before it senses you coming. Is not this the praise of love that usually convicts your slander with the clearest truth? Or will these weapons not be ours because you try to seize them first? These darts are truly alive: from wherever they are thrown, they recognize those they are to kill. If they are sent by us, they will stick in you; if they are sent by you, they are turned back on you. For with these apostolic words commending the pre-eminence of love we are accustomed to show you how it does not profit men, though they have the sacraments or faith, where love is not; so that when you come to Catholic unity you may understand what is conferred on you and how great a thing it is that you lacked (for Christian love cannot be kept except in the unity of the church), and may thus see that without it you are nothing, even if you hold baptism and faith and could even move mountains by it. If this is your view too, let us not detest and exsufflate in each other the sacraments of God, which we know, or faith itself, but let us hold love, without which we are nothing, with sacraments and with faith. And we hold love if we embrace unity; and we embrace unity if we do not invent it in a part by our own words, but recognize it in unity by the words of Christ.

Petilian said: “And again: ‘Love is magnanimous and kind; love does not envy, does not act wrongly, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, does not seek its own’ (but you seek what belongs to others) ‘is not provoked, does not think evil, does not rejoice over iniquity but rejoices with the truth; it bears all things, endures all things. Love never fails.’ That is to say in brief: love does not persecute, does not inflame emperors against other souls, does not plunder others' goods, does not even kill the men it has robbed.”

Augustine answered: How often must I say to you: these things, if you do not prove them, concern no one; if you prove them, they do not concern us, just as what your people commit daily does not concern you: the crimes of madmen, the debauchery of drunkards, the blindness of those who throw themselves down, the tyranny of robbers? Who does not see that what I cry out is true? But now, if there were love in you, it would rejoice with the truth. How elegantly, under the sheepskin, it is said, “Love bears all things, endures all things”! But when it comes to the test, the wolf's teeth cannot be covered. For since love, because of the saying, “bearing with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” would have compelled you, even if you knew of some evils within, not indeed to consent to them, but still, if you could not prevent them, to bear them, so that you would not now break the bond of peace with the fellowship of the good because of the wicked who are to be separated by the last winnowing fork; you, shaken outside by the wind of lightness, charge the wheat with the crime of the chaff, and claim that what you invent about the wicked prevails by contagion in the good as well. And though the Lord said, “The field is this world, and the harvest is the end of the age,” when he had said of the wheat and the tares, “Let both grow until the harvest,” you labour with your words to make it believed that the wheat has already failed throughout the field and has remained only in your tiny part, wanting Christ to be held a liar and yourself truthful. And you speak against your own conscience. For no one who looks at the gospel in any way truly dares to say in his heart that throughout so many nations, in which “Amen” is answered almost with one voice and “Alleluia” is sung, there are no Christians. And yet, so that the party of Donatus, which is not in communion with the world, may not seem to be in error, if an angel from heaven, who could look over the whole world, told you that outside your communion there were nowhere any innocent and good people, you would no doubt rejoice over the iniquity of the human race and boast that you had spoken the truth before you knew it. How, then, is there love in you, which does not rejoice over iniquity? But do not be deceived: throughout the field, that is, throughout the world, the Lord's wheat is growing until the end of the age. Christ said this, Christ is the truth. Let there be love in you, and let it rejoice with the truth. If even an angel from heaven preaches a gospel contrary to the gospel, let him be anathema.

Petilian said: “Finally, what is the reason for persecuting? I ask you, wretches, whether you think perhaps that you sin by some authority of the law.”

Augustine answered: One who sins does not sin by the authority of the law but against the authority of the law. But since you ask what is the reason for persecuting, I ask you in turn whose voice it is in the psalm that says, “The one who secretly slandered his neighbour, him I persecuted.” So inquire into the cause or the manner of persecution, and do not, with such ignorance, blame persecutors of evil in general.

Petilian said: “I, on the contrary, answer that Jesus Christ persecuted no one; and when some sects displeased the apostles, who suggested this to him (for he had come to create faith in such a way as not to compel men but rather to invite them), those apostles said: ‘Many lay on hands in your name and are not with us.’ Jesus said: ‘Let them be; if they are not against you, they are for you.’”

Augustine answered: Why do you not say that you will produce many things more freely of your own which are not found in the Scriptures? For if you want to produce testimonies from the holy Scriptures, will you produce what you have not found? But how many lies you tell is in your own power. For where is what you set down written, or when was it suggested to the Lord or answered by the Lord? No disciple ever said to the Son of God, “Many lay on hands in your name and are not with us.” Hence neither could he have answered, “Let them be; if they are not against you, they are for you.” But there is something similar which we truly read in the gospel, that it was suggested to the Lord about someone who cast out demons in his name and did not follow him with the disciples, where the Lord says, “Do not forbid him; whoever is not against you is for you.” But this has nothing at all to do with showing sects which the Lord seems to have spared. If a certain likeness of the saying misled you, it is not a lie but human error; but if you wanted to cast clouds of falsehood on those unskilled in the holy Scriptures, be pricked in heart, confounded, and corrected. Yet there is something we may make of this very man about whom the suggestion was made to the Lord. For as then, outside the communion of the disciples, the holiness of Christ's name nevertheless availed very much, so outside the communion of the church the holiness of the sacrament avails; for baptism is consecrated only in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. What utter madman would say that even outside the communion of the church the name of the Son avails, but that of the Father and of the Holy Spirit does not; or that it avails in healing a man but not in consecrating baptism? But plainly, outside the communion of the church and the most holy bond of unity and the most surpassing gift of love, neither the man by whom a demon is cast out nor the man who is baptized attains eternal life; just as neither do those who seem to be inside through communion in the sacraments and are understood to be outside through iniquity of life. As for Christ having persecuted, even bodily, those whom he drove out of the temple with a scourge, we have already said above.

Petilian said: “But the holy apostle Paul says this: ‘In any way whatever,’ he says, ‘let Christ be proclaimed.’”

Augustine answered: You speak against yourself; but because you speak for the truth, if you love it, what you say turns to your good. For I ask you of whom the apostle Paul said this. Let us recall it a little, if you please. “Some,” he says, “proclaim Christ out of envy and contention, but some out of goodwill; some out of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel, but others proclaim Christ out of stubbornness, not purely, thinking to stir up trouble for me in my chains. What then? Provided that in every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, in this I rejoice, yes, and I will rejoice.” We see that these men proclaimed a holy, pure, and true thing, yet not purely, but out of envy and contention, without love, without purity. Certainly a little before you seemed to speak the praises of love against us from the apostle's testimony, that where love is not, whatever there is profits nothing. Look, in these men there is no love, and yet there was the preaching of Christ, in which the apostle says he rejoices; for he does not rejoice in their evil but in the good of Christ's name. For in him was the love that does not rejoice over iniquity but rejoices with the truth. Envy, further, which was in them, is a devilish evil; by it the devil both fell and cast down. These men, then, so wicked, whom the apostle so rebukes, in whom was so great a good in which the apostle rejoices, where were they, inside or outside? Choose what you like. If inside, see, Paul knew them, and yet they did not pollute him. So those of whom you say some things or other, true or invented, would not pollute you in the unity of the world. Why, then, did you separate yourselves, why did you perish by the sacrilege of accursed schism? But if they were outside, see, even in those who are outside, and who certainly cannot attain eternal life because they do not have love and do not hold unity, there is still the holiness of Christ's name; and the apostle confirms their preaching with rejoicing because of the very holiness of the name, though he detests them. Rightly, then, we do no injury to that name when those who were outside come to us; we correct them and honour it. So see how abominably, in those whose deeds you rebuke as you see fit, you exsufflate even the sacrament of Christ's name, which is holy in them. And you think, as your words indicate, that these men whom the apostle mentioned were outside the church. So, while you fear suffering persecution from Catholics, about which you stir up odium against us by speaking, you have confirmed the name of Christ in heretics, to which you do injury by rebaptizing.

Petilian said: “If, then, so great a power of faith was not opposed to some, on what principle do you persecute, to compel men to be defiled?”

Augustine answered: We do not persecute you except as truth persecutes falsehood; and if anyone has persecuted you otherwise, it does not concern us, just as whatever your people likewise do does not concern you; nor do we compel you to be defiled, but we persuade you to be healed.

Petilian said: “If it had been lawful for anyone to be compelled by law even to good things, you wretches ought to have been compelled by us to the purest faith. But far be it, far be it from our conscience to force anyone to our faith.”

Augustine answered: No one indeed is to be compelled to the faith against his will; but faithlessness is usually chastised by the severity, or rather the mercy, of God through the scourges of tribulation. Because the best conduct is chosen by free will, is the worst conduct therefore not punished by the integrity of the law? Yet discipline that avenges bad living is out of order unless the teaching of good living, which comes first, is despised. So if any laws have been enacted against you, you are not compelled by them to do good, but prohibited from doing evil. For no one can do good unless he chooses it, unless he loves it, which lies in free will; but the fear of punishment, even if it does not yet have the delight of a good conscience, at least restrains evil desire within the bounds of thought. But who enacted laws against you, by which your audacity may be checked? Are they not those of whom the apostle says that they do not bear the sword in vain? “For they are God's ministers, avengers for wrath on the one who does evil.” The whole question, then, is whether you are not doing evil, you whom the world charges with the sacrilege of so great a schism; neglecting the discussion of this question, you talk of superfluous things, and though you live like robbers, you boast that you die like martyrs. And because you fear either the laws themselves or public odium, or are unequal to resisting, I will not say so many men, but so many Catholic nations, you even glory in your gentleness, that you compel no one to your party. In this way a kite too, frightened and unable to seize chicks, might call itself a dove. For where have you been able and not done it? From this you have shown how much more you would do if you could. When Julian, envying the peace of Christ, gave you back the basilicas of unity, who could recount the slaughters you committed, when even the demons exulted with you as their temples were opened? What Rogatus the Moor suffered from you in the war of Firmus, let Mauretania Caesariensis itself be asked. In the time of Gildo, since one colleague of yours was his most intimate friend, let the Maximianists see what they felt. For as for Felicianus himself, who is now with you, if one could challenge him to an oath, he would not dare to move his lips on whether Optatus did not compel him, against his will, to return to your communion, especially if the people of Musti, in whose presence those things were then done, were watching his face. But let those, as I said, see what they suffered from the very men with whom they had done such things to Rogatus. The Catholic Church itself, though strengthened by the rule of Catholic emperors, was attacked savagely and as an enemy by Optatus with armed bands on land and sea. That is what first compelled the law of ten pounds of gold to be invoked against you before the vicar Seranus, which none of you has yet paid; and you accuse us of cruelty! What could be gentler than that such great crimes of yours should be punished by the restraint of fines? But who could recount all the things you commit in your own places by your own domination, wherever anyone can, without any friendship of judges or other authorities? Which of us has not either learned of something of the kind in his congregations from his predecessors or experienced it himself? At Hippo, where I am, are there not people who remember that your Faustinus, in the time of his reign, ordered, since the Catholics there were few, that no one should bake bread for them, so that the baker of one of our deacons, a tenant of the deacon's own landlord, threw out his bread unbaked and refused him, though he had been condemned by no law of exile, fellowship not only in the Roman city but in his own home town, and not only in his home town but in his own house? And what of recently, which I still mourn? Did not your Crispinus of Calama, when he had bought a property, and that on a perpetual lease, not hesitate, on an estate of the Catholic emperors, by whose laws you are not even permitted to be in the cities, to drown by rebaptism, with one onslaught of terror, nearly eighty souls murmuring with pitiable groans? By what but such deeds did you compel even the laws you complain of to be passed, far below the desert of your crime, but still of some kind? Or should we not be driven from the countryside everywhere by the violent attacks of your Circumcellions, who serve under your leadership in raging bands, unless we held you as hostages in the cities, you who, out of shame if not fear, would not want to bear the public view and the reproach of respectable people? So do not say, “Far be it, far be it from our conscience to force anyone to our faith”; for you do it where you can; and where you do not, you cannot, out of fear of the laws or of odium, or because of the number of those who resist.

Petilian said: “For the Lord Christ says, ‘No one comes to me unless the Father draws him.’ Why do you not allow each person to follow his free choice, since the Lord God himself gave men free choice, while showing the way of righteousness so that no one might perish through ignorance? For he says, ‘I have set before you good and evil, I have set before you fire and water; choose what you will.’ By this choice, wretches, you have chosen for yourselves not water but rather fire. ‘But still,’ he says, ‘choose the good, that you may live.’ You who refuse to choose the good have condemned yourself to not wanting to live.”

Augustine answered: If I put to you the question how God the Father draws men to the Son whom he has left to free choice, you will perhaps find it hard to solve. For how does he draw, if he leaves each to choose what he wills? And yet both are true, but few can penetrate this with understanding. So just as it can be that the Father draws to the Son those whom he has left to free choice, so it can be that the warnings given by the coercion of laws do not take away free choice. For whatever hard and troublesome thing a man suffers, he is warned to consider why he suffers; so that if he perceives that he suffers for righteousness, he may choose that very good, to endure such things for righteousness; but if he sees that it is iniquity for which he suffers, considering that he labours and is tormented quite fruitlessly, he may change his will for the better and be rid at once both of the barren trouble and of the iniquity itself, which would certainly harm him far more seriously and ruinously. And you too, when kings enact something against you, believe that you are being warned to consider why you suffer these things. If for righteousness, then they are truly your persecutors, and you are blessed, who, having suffered persecution for righteousness, will possess the kingdom of heaven; but if for the iniquity of your schism, what are they but your correctors, and you, like others guilty of various crimes who pay the penalties of the laws, surely unhappy both in this age and in the age to come? So no one takes free choice away from you; but consider carefully what you should rather choose: whether to live corrected in peace, or, persevering in malice, to endure real punishments under the name of a false martyrdom. Yet I address you as though you suffered undeserved things for righteousness; as though you suffered anything worthy of your iniquity, when you do so many undeserved things and reign with such impunity, so raging that you terrify more with your “Praise to God” than with a war trumpet, so slanderous that you impute even the voluntary precipices of your people to our persecutions.

He also says, like a most kindly teacher: “You who refuse to choose the good have condemned yourself to not wanting to live.” So, then, if we believed your accusations, we would live well; because we believe God's promises, we condemn ourselves to not wanting to live! You remember well, I think, what the apostles said to the Jews when they were forbidden to preach Christ; so we too say this, that you may answer us whether God must be obeyed rather than men. “Traitors, incense-offerers, persecutors” are words of men against men. “Christ has remained only in the love of Donatus” are words of men who exalt the glory of a man under the name of Christ, so that the glory of Christ himself may be diminished. For it is written, “In a broad nation is the glory of a king, but in the diminishing of a people is the ruin of a prince.” These, then, are words of men. But those in the gospel, “that the Christ had to suffer and rise on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem,” are words of Christ commending the glory he received from the Father in the breadth of his kingdom. Having heard both, we choose rather this communion of the church and put Christ's words before men's words. I ask: who says that we have chosen evil, but one who says that Christ taught evil?

Petilian said: “Did God, then, order slaughter to be inflicted even on schismatics? If he had commanded it at all, you ought to have been killed by some Scythians or barbarians, but not by Christians.”

Augustine answered: Let your Circumcellions be quiet, and I do not want you to frighten us with barbarians. But whether we are the schismatics or you, let neither I nor you be asked, but Christ, that he may point out his church. So read the gospel, and he answers you: “In Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the whole earth.” Whoever, then, is not found in the church, let him no longer be questioned, but either be corrected and converted, or, being rebuked, not complain.

Petilian said: “For the Lord God never rejoiced in human blood, since he willed that Cain, the killer of his brother, should remain alive, with his life as his executioner.”

Augustine answered: If God would not have death inflicted on the killer of his brother but left him life as his executioner, see whether this may be the reason why, since the king's heart is in God's hand, and so he himself has enacted many laws to admonish and correct you, yet no royal law has ordered you to be killed: perhaps so that whoever of you persist in the stubborn breeze of sacrilegious fury may be tormented with the punishment of Cain the fratricide, life as executioner. For we read that many were killed mercifully by Moses the servant of God. For in his praying the Lord for their abominable sacrilege in such a way as to say, “Lord, if you forgive them their sin, forgive; but if not, blot me out of your book,” his ineffable love and mercy are plain enough. Did he, then, suddenly become cruel when, coming down from the mountain, he ordered so many thousands to be killed? So consider whether it is not by God's greater anger that, through so many laws enacted against you, you have been ordered killed by no emperor. Or do you think you are not to be compared with that fratricide? Hear the Lord saying through the prophet: “From the rising of the sun to its setting my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name and a pure offering; great is my name among the nations, says the Lord Almighty.” You show by your slanders that you envy this brother's sacrifice, on which God looks with favour; and whenever you hear that the name of the Lord is praised from the rising of the sun to its setting, which is the living sacrifice of which it was said, “Offer to God a sacrifice of praise,” your face falls like that murderer's. But since you cannot kill the whole world, you are held guilty by the hatred itself, as John says: “Whoever hates his brother is a murderer.” And would that an innocent brother would run into the weapons of your Circumcellions to be slaughtered rather than into your tongue to be rebaptized!

Petilian said: “We warn you, then, if you will listen willingly; and if you do not receive it willingly, we warn you all the same: the Lord Christ established for Christians a pattern not of killing but of dying. For if he loved those who resist in that way, he would not have been willing to be killed for us.”

Augustine answered: Would that your martyrs followed his pattern! They would not throw themselves down, which he did not do when the devil suggested it. But when you persecute our forebears, even the dead, with false witness, where did you receive this pattern? When you try to stain us with the crimes of unknown men, while you do not want the most notorious evil deeds of your own to harm you, where did you receive this pattern? But we are too proud if we are angry on our own account, when we see you bearing false witness against the Lord himself, since he both promised and displayed his church through all nations, and you contradict it. This pattern you did not receive even from the Jewish persecutors themselves; for they persecuted the flesh of one walking on earth, you the gospel of one sitting in heaven. That gospel bore the flames of raging kings more mildly than it suffers your tongues; for when they burned it, unity remained; when you speak, it could not remain. Those who wanted the Lord's words burned and abolished did not believe they could be despised once read. They would not have exercised their flames on the gospel if you had promised them your tongues against the gospel. In that persecution the gospel of Christ was sought by some in rage, betrayed by others in fear, burned by others who tore it out, hidden by others in love, attacked by none in contradiction. Now that the persecution by the Gentiles is over, you have kept for yourselves the more criminal parts of persecution: those who persecuted Christ's name did not believe in Christ; those who are honoured because of Christ's name contradict Christ.

Petilian said: “Here you have the fullest proof that a Christian may not engage in the destruction of others. The beginning of this discipline was established for Peter, as it is written: ‘Peter struck the ear of the servant of the chief of the Jews and cut it off. And Jesus said to him: Peter, put your sword back in its sheath; for whoever uses the sword will die by the sword.’”

Augustine answered: Why, then, do you not restrain the weapons of the Circumcellions with such a word? Or do you think you would be speaking outside the gospel if you said, “Whoever uses a club will die by the club”? Forgive us, then, since our forebears could not prevent even those who, you complain, threw Marculus down. For it is not written in the gospel, “Whoever throws someone down will die by a fall.” And would that, as those things are either false or past, so these men's clubs would cease! Though perhaps you are angry that we strip your legions of their armour, if not by laws, at least by words, since we say they rage with clubs alone. That was indeed their old warfare; but now they have made great progress. For amid drunken feasts and with the free licence of accompanying, roaming, joking, drinking, and spending nights with women who have no husbands, they have learned not only to turn clubs but also to brandish iron and whirl slings. But why should I not say to them (God knows with what intention I say it and with what they receive it): “Madmen, Peter's sword, though still drawn by a fleshly impulse of mind, was nevertheless drawn for the body of Christ against the body of a persecutor; but your weapons are divided against Christ, whose body, of which he is the head, that is, his church, is through all nations. He himself said this and ascended into heaven, where the fury of the Jews could not follow him; and your fury attacks his members in the body which he commended as he ascended.” For these members, whoever in the Catholic Church are still of little faith and of the mind Peter had then, when he drew the sword for Christ's name, rage against you and resist you. But there is a great difference between your persecution and theirs. You are like the servant of the Jewish high priest, because, serving your leaders, you arm yourselves against the Catholic Church, that is, against Christ's body; but they are such as Peter was then, who fight even bodily for Christ's body, that is, for the church. But if they are told to be quiet, as Peter was told then, how much more must we tell you to lay aside heretical fury and belong to those members for which they fight so! But, wounded by such men, you even hate us, and, as if you had lost your right ears, you do not hear Christ sitting at the Father's right hand. But to whom shall I speak, or when shall I speak to them, when I cannot find an hour for those who belch wine even in the morning, whether already drunk or still drunk? Indeed, not only they threaten, but on their behalf their bishops too, ready to deny that what they have done concerns them. May the Lord give us the song of ascents in which we may say, “With those who hated peace I was peaceable; when I spoke to them, they fought against me without cause.” For this is said by the body of Christ, which throughout the whole earth is attacked by heretics, some here, some there, and by all of them, each in his own place.

Petilian said: “So, I say, he established that death is to be undergone for the faith rather than inflicted on anyone for the sake of communion. For Christianity advances by deaths. For no one would live most faithful if death were feared by the faithful. For the Lord Christ says: ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’”

Augustine answered: I would like to know who on your side first threw himself down. That grain was very fertile indeed, from which so great a harvest of thrown-down corpses sprang up. Surely, since you remember the Lord's words, that he said he was the grain that would die and bear much fruit, why do you envy that very fruit, which has come forth so abundantly through the whole world, and charge it with the crimes of the tares or the chaff, either what you have heard or what you have invented?

Petilian said: “But you scatter thorns and tares, not seeds, with which it is fitting that you be burned up at the last judgment. We are not cursing; but every thorny conscience is held so by God's sentence.”

Augustine answered: At least the mention of tares should have brought the wheat to your mind as well, since both were ordered to grow through the field until the harvest. But you fix the eye of malice sharply on the tares and contend, against Christ's sentence, that they alone have grown throughout the world, except in Africa.

Petilian said: “Where is what the Lord Christ says: ‘If you receive a slap, offer the other cheek also’? Where is the fact that he suffered spitting in his face, he who opened the eyes of the blind with his most holy spittle? Where is what the apostle Paul says: ‘If anyone strikes you on the face’? Where is what he says again: ‘in beatings beyond measure, in deaths often, in prisons more abundantly’? He recalls what he suffered, not what he did. It should have been enough for Christianity that these things were done by the Jews; why do you wretches commit them?”

Augustine answered: Do you really, when slapped, offer the other cheek? Your raging bands, roaming everywhere through all Africa with terrible shamelessness, have not earned you that reputation. Would that men could make an agreement with you, that at least, according to the old law, you would demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and not raise clubs in return for words heard!

Petilian said: “But what have you to do with the kings of the world, whom Christianity has never found anything but envious? To show this briefly: a king persecuted the Maccabean brothers; a king too, though he himself was sacrilegious, unknowingly consigned three boys to the religious flames; a king sought the life of the Saviour as a child; a king threw most righteous Daniel to the bites of wild beasts, as he thought; and the Lord Christ himself was killed by a king's most wicked judge. Hence the apostle cries: ‘We speak wisdom among the perfect, a wisdom not of this age nor of the rulers of this world, which is being brought to nothing; but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, which was hidden, which God established before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew; for if they had known it, they would surely not have crucified the Lord of majesty.’ But let this be said of the ancient pagan kings. You, however, do not allow the emperors of this age to be Christians, though they desire to be Christians; with the paint and fog of your lie you lead them, who believe with good intention, right into your iniquity, so that with their weapons, prepared against the enemies of the state, they attack Christians and think, by your persuasion, that they are doing God a service if they kill us whom you hate; as the Lord Christ says: ‘The time will come,’ he says, ‘when whoever kills you will think he is doing God a service.’ So it makes no difference to us, with you teaching evil, whether the kings of the world desire to be pagans, which God forbid, or Christians, since you do not cease arming them against Christ's household. Do you not know, or rather have you not read, that the persuader's crime is greater than that of the one who kills a man? Jezebel had roused her husband the king to the death of a righteous or poor man; yet husband and wife both perished with equal punishment. For you push kings on no otherwise than as subtle feminine persuasion has often pushed kings into guilt. For Herod's wife, through her daughter, obtained and won that John's head be brought on a dish to the table. The Jews so compelled Pontius Pilate that he fastened the Lord Christ to the cross, whose avenging blood they wished to remain always upon themselves and their children. So you too, sinning, overwhelm yourselves with our blood. For even if the judge strikes, is it not rather your slanders that have struck us? For the prophet David says in the person of the Lord Christ: ‘Why have the nations raged, and the peoples devised vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ. Let us break their bonds and cast their yoke from us. He who dwells in heaven will laugh at them, and the Lord will mock them. Then he will speak to them in his anger and trouble them in his fury. But I have been set as king by him on Zion, his holy mountain, proclaiming his decree. The Lord said to me: You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession. You will rule them with a rod of iron and break them like a potter's vessel.’ And he warned these same kings with these commands, so that they might not desire, as it were in ignorance or unknowing, to persecute Christians, lest they perish. Would that we could teach them these commands, since they do not know them; or at least that you would show them to them without doubt, if you wanted them to live; or at least, as a third choice, that your malice had allowed them to read them for themselves! The first Davidic psalm would entirely persuade them to remain Christians and reign. You have badly deceived them while they trust themselves to you; for you invent evil things for them and hide good things. Let them read this at last, even late, which they ought to have read long ago. For what does it say? ‘And now, kings, understand; be instructed, you who judge the earth. Serve the Lord in fear and rejoice in him with trembling. Lay hold of discipline, lest the Lord be angry and you perish from the just way, when his anger is quickly kindled against you. Blessed are all who trust in him.’ You press the emperors, I say, with your persuasions, as the Jews pressed Pilate, whom we mentioned, though he cried out, washing his hands publicly, ‘I am free of the blood of this righteous man.’ Yet how can he be clean of the crime who did it? But to say nothing of old things, notice in your own examples how many emperors and judges of yours perished in persecuting us. To leave aside Nero, who first persecuted the Christians, Domitian too, much like Nero, Trajan, Geta, Decius, Valerian, Diocletian; Maximian also perished. When they ordered incense, and the Lord's books were burned, first Marcellinus, who was bishop of the Romans, and also Mensurius of Carthage and Caecilian, remained as embers or ashes from those very sacrilegious flames. For the guilt of the incense entangled you who agreed with Mensurius. Macarius perished, Ursatius perished, and all your counts likewise perished by God's vengeance. For Ursatius, laid low in a battle with barbarians, was torn apart by the cruel claws of birds and the greedy teeth of dogs. Is not he too a murderer at your urging, who, like King Ahab, whom we said was struck at a woman's instigation, killed a righteous poor man? So you too do not cease to slaughter the righteous and poor (poor, I mean, in worldly wealth; for God's grace in us is not poor). For even if you do not do it with your hand, you slaughter a man with your tongue as executioner. For it is written, ‘Death and life are in the hands of the tongue.’ So all who have been killed, you, the persuader, have killed; for the executioner's hand does not grow hot except by your tongue, and that hard heat of the breast is kindled for another's blood by your words, the blood that avenges the words of those who poured it out.”

Augustine answered: To this passage, so copiously heaped up and set out by you, where you speak invidiously against us about the kings of the world, if I were to answer as is due and fitting, I fear you would accuse me too of having wanted to stir up the kings' anger against you. Although, since in your usual way you carry the force of this invective against all Catholics universally, you certainly do not pass me over. Still, I will try to show, if I can, that you have rather done this by saying such things than I by answering them. And first see how you contradict yourself. You certainly began this passage thus: “But what have you to do with the kings of the world, whom Christianity has never found anything but envious?” With these words you surely forbid us to approach the kings of the world. And a little later you say: “And he warned these same kings with these commands, so that they might not desire, as it were in ignorance or unknowing, to persecute Christians, lest they perish. Would that we could teach them these commands, since they do not know them; or at least that you would show them to them without doubt, if you wanted them to live!” How, then, do you want us to be teachers of kings? As for our people, if they have some friendship with Christian kings and use it well, they do not sin at all; but if any are puffed up by it, they sin much more lightly than you. For what had you, who so accuse us, to do with a pagan king, and, what is more serious, an apostate and enemy of the Christian name, Julian, whom you begged to have the basilicas returned to you as if yours, and in whose praise you set down that with him justice alone had a place? In these words (for I believe you understand Latin) both Julian's idolatry and his apostasy were called justice. The petition your forebears submitted is extant, the decree they obtained, the records in which they presented it. Wake up and pay attention: to the enemy of Christ, the apostate, the adversary of Christians, the servant of demons, that man, that very man, your own Pontius, made supplication in such words. Go now and say to us, “What have you to do with the kings of the world?”, so that, deaf, you may read to deaf peoples what you refuse to hear with them: “You see the speck in your brother's eye; you do not see the beam in your own eye.”

“What,” you say, “have you to do with the kings of the world, whom Christianity has never found anything but envious?” Having said this, you tried to list the kings whom the righteous found to be enemies, and did not consider that more could be listed whom they had as friends. Father Abraham was treated most kindly by a king who had been divinely warned not to touch his wife, and received a gift. His son Isaac likewise found a king most friendly. Jacob, received honourably by a king in Egypt, even blessed him. What shall I say of his son Joseph, who, after the trouble of prison, in which his chastity was tested as gold by fire, was raised by the king to great honours and even swore by Pharaoh's health, not puffed up with pride but not ungrateful for goodwill? A king's daughter adopted Moses. David, driven by the iniquity of the king of Israel, took refuge with a foreign king. Elijah ran before the chariot of a very wicked king, not at his command but of his own deference. Elisha thought he should even offer to his hostess, if she wished, anything she might want done for her by the king through his intercession. But let me come to the very times when God's people were held captive, where, to put it mildly, a remarkable forgetfulness crept over you. For, wishing to prove that Christianity has never found kings anything but envious, you mentioned the three boys and Daniel, and what they suffered from persecuting kings; and you could not be reminded by the facts, not neighbouring facts but the very same, of what that king himself became after the miracle of the harmless flames, both in praising and proclaiming God and in honouring the boys themselves; of how the king regarded Daniel and with what gifts he adorned him, who did not refuse them, since, paying due honour to the royal power, as is clear enough from his words, he did not withhold the gift of God with which he was endowed in revealing and interpreting the king's dream. Hence, when the king was compelled against his will, by those who envied the holy man and slandered him with sacrilegious madness, to throw him into the lions' den, though he did it sorrowfully, he was confident that Daniel would be safe through the help of his Lord. And so, when Daniel, the lions' rage restrained by God, had lived unharmed, after the anxious and friendly voice of the king himself had reached him first, he too answered from the den with a blessing: “O king, live forever.” Why, when your speech was dealing with these very matters, when you yourself were recalling the examples of these servants of God in whom these things were done, did you either not see these friendships of kings with saints, or not want to see them, or (which I do not know how you will excuse) keep silent about them, though you saw and knew them? But if the zeal for building up falsehood, as befits the defender of a very bad cause, did not hinder you and turn you, unwilling or unknowing, away from the light of truth, you would certainly recall without any difficulty that some kings were good and some bad, some friends of the saints and others enemies. And we wonder that your Circumcellions throw themselves down like this? Who was running after you, I beg you? What Macarius, what soldier was pursuing you? Certainly none of us drove you over the cliff of this falsehood. Why, then, did you go so headlong with your eyes shut that, having said, “What have you to do with the kings of the world,” you did not add, “whom Christianity has often found envious,” but did not hesitate to say, “whom Christianity has never found anything but envious”? Did you really neither think yourself nor suppose that those who would read your writings would think of so many examples of kings crying out against you: “He does not know what he is saying”?

Or, because those I mentioned belonged to ancient times, do you think they do not tell against you at all, since you did not say, “whom righteousness has never found anything but envious,” but, “whom Christianity has never found anything but envious,” perhaps meaning that they have envied the righteous since the time they began to be called Christians? Then what is the point of the examples from ancient times, by which you wished still more imprudently to teach what you said imprudently? For did not the Maccabees, the three boys, and Daniel do or suffer those things before Christ was born on earth? Next, why did you supplicate Julian, whom I mentioned a little before, who truly envied Christianity? Why did you ask the basilicas from him? Why did you say that with him justice alone had a place? If one who envies Christianity hears these things, what are those from whom he hears them? But Constantine, who did not envy the Christian name at all but plainly gloried in it, mindful of the hope he bore in Christ, judging most justly for its unity, did not deserve to be accepted by you even when you had appealed to him. Both lived in Christian times, but both were not Christians. If both envied Christianity, why did you appeal so to one of them and supplicate the other so? For at your forebears' request Constantine had granted a judgment of bishops both at Rome and at Arles; at the first you accused before him, from the second you appealed to him. But if, as is true, one of them had believed in Christ and the other had apostatized from Christ, why is the Christian who sought unity despised, and the apostate who favoured division praised? Constantine ordered the basilicas taken from you, Julian restored: do you want to know which of these suits Christian peace? The one was done by him who had believed in Christ, the other by him who had abandoned Christ. O how you would like to say, “It was wrong that Julian was supplicated so; but what has that to do with us?” If you said that, the Catholic Church would win even by these words of yours, to whose saints spread through the whole world whatever you say about whomever you like, as you like, concerns much less. But you cannot say it was wrong that Julian was supplicated so. Your own authority blocks your throat and presses your tongue: Pontius did it, Pontius supplicated, Pontius called the apostate most just, Pontius proclaimed that with the apostate justice alone had a place. That Pontius supplicated him in these words Julian himself stated by name, without ambiguity, in his rescript. Your presentations are extant; not uncertain report but public records testify to these things. Or perhaps, because the apostate granted something to your petition against the unity of Christ, you think it true that with him justice alone had a place, while the Christian emperors, because they decree against your will what they judge to serve Christ's unity, are called envious of Christianity? So let all heretics lose their foolishness and come to their senses, so as not to be heretics.

“And where,” you will say, “was what the Lord says fulfilled: ‘The time will come when whoever kills you will think he is doing God a service’?” For this could not be said of the pagans, who persecuted Christians not for God but for idols. Do you not see that if this were said of those emperors who rejoice in the Christian name, they would certainly have ordered above all that you be killed? Which they never ordered at all; but your people, by resisting the laws in hostile fashion, pay the penalties due, and while they think their voluntary deaths odious for us, they do not think them ruinous for themselves. But if they think this was said by the Lord of kings who honour Christ's name, let them inquire what the Catholic Church suffered in the East when the Arian Valens was emperor. There I would have a way of understanding the fulfilment of the Lord's words, “The time will come when whoever kills you will think he is doing God a service,” so that heretics should not take it to the glory of their reputation if Catholic emperors had commanded anything against their error. Yet we recall that that time was fulfilled after the Lord's ascension; holy Scripture, known to all, is witness of this. The Jews thought they were doing God a service when they killed the apostles. Among those who thought they were offering God a service was also our Saul, not yet ours, so that he lists this among his past glories, to be forgotten: “A Hebrew,” he says, “of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, persecuting the church.” See one who thought he was doing God a service when he did what he himself soon suffered. For forty Jews had sworn to kill him, when he had it made known to the tribune, so that, surrounded by armed soldiers, he escaped their ambush. But there was not yet anyone to say to him, “What have you to do, not with kings, but with tribunes and royal arms?” There was no one to say to him, “Do you dare to seek protection through soldiers, when your Lord was led by them to his passion?” Those ravings did not yet exist; but against these future ravings those examples were already being prepared.

You even dared to put it forward menacingly and say: “But to say nothing of old things, notice in your own examples how many emperors and judges of yours perished in persecuting us.” When I read this in your letter I waited most intently to see what you would say and whom you would list, when lo, as if leaving them aside, you began to recall Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Geta, Decius, Valerian, Diocletian, Maximian. I admit they are many; but you have quite forgotten against whom you are speaking. Were not all these pagans, who persecuted the Christian name everywhere for the sake of their idols? Wake up, then; for these were not of our communion. They persecuted unity itself as a whole, the unity from which either we went out, as you think, or you went out, as Christ teaches. But you had proposed to show that our emperors and judges perished in persecuting you. Or do you not require us to count these either, since you mentioned them while leaving them aside, saying, “To leave aside Nero,” and under this leaving aside ran through the others? Then what need was there to mention men who have nothing to do with the matter? But what is that to me? I now leave these aside with you; now at least let those come forward whom you promised, “how many.” Unless perhaps they are not found because you said they perished.

For you go on and now name bishops whom you usually accuse of handing over the books. About them we too usually answer: either you do not prove it, and it concerns no one; or you prove it, and it does not concern us. For they carried their own load, good or bad; and we believe it good, but whatever it was, it was theirs; just as your wicked ones do not carry yours nor you theirs; but the common, very bad load of all of you is schism. We have said this often. So produce not the names of bishops but of our emperors and judges who perished in persecuting you. For this is what you had proposed, this is what you had promised, for this you had made us most attentive. Listen, you say: “Macarius perished, Ursatius perished, and all your counts likewise perished by God's vengeance.” You mentioned only two, neither of whom was an emperor. Whom would this please, I ask you? Are you not displeased with yourself? You promise to mention how many of our emperors and judges perished in persecuting you, and, keeping silent about emperors, you name two judges or counts. For what you add, “and all your counts likewise perished by God's vengeance,” is beside the point; in this way you could have finished the passage long ago by naming no one at all. Why, then, did you not mention our emperors, that is, those of our communion? Were you afraid of being accused of treason? Where is your Circumcellion courage? Next, what do you do about those many whom you named above, who could more rightly say to you, “Why did you want us?” For they did nothing to help your case, and yet they were named. Next, what sort of man are you, that you are afraid to name those whom you claim perished? At least you might have named more judges or counts, whom you seem not to have feared. But you stopped at Macarius and Ursatius. Are those two your “how many”? Or do you know what we learned as boys? For if you ask me whether two is a singular or a plural number, what should I answer but plural? But I have something to say even to this. I exclude Macarius; for you did not say how he perished. Or perhaps whoever persecutes you, unless he is immortal on this earth, will be thought to have died because of you when he dies? What if Constantine, who first enacted much against your error, had not lived in so long a reign and so long a prosperity, and what if Julian, who gave you the basilicas, had not been snatched so quickly from life, when would you keep silent with such chatter, when you will not keep silent even now? Yet we do not say that Julian died quickly because he gave you the basilicas. For we could be equally copious in these things, but we do not want to be equally empty. So, as I had begun to say, I separate Macarius from those two. For when you had put forward two, him and Ursatius, you repeated the name of Ursatius to show us what death he deserved, and said: “For Ursatius, laid low in a battle with barbarians, was torn apart by the cruel claws of birds and the greedy teeth of dogs.” From this it is clear enough that, since you usually stir up greater odium about Macarius, so that you call us Macarians, not Ursatians, you would most of all have spoken about him, if you could have said anything of the kind about his death. So of these two, where you used the plural number, with Macarius set apart, Ursatius remains, a proper name in the singular number. Where, then, is that so threatening and terrible promise of so many?

Now how ridiculous it is, I think all who know how to speak at all understand: that, having said, “Macarius perished, Ursatius perished, and all your counts likewise perished by God's vengeance,” as if we were demanding that you prove it (for in truth neither hearer nor reader would demand anything else), you at once attached a great proof by which to prove that all our counts likewise perished by God's vengeance: “For Ursatius,” you say, “laid low in a battle with barbarians, was torn apart by the cruel claws of birds and the greedy teeth of dogs.” In this way someone else, likewise not knowing what he says, could say that all your bishops wasted away in prison by God's vengeance, and when asked how he proves it, at once add: “For Optatus, accused of being Gildo's henchman, perished by that kind of death.” We are forced to hear, discuss, and refute such trifles; we fear only for the weak, lest through slower understanding they run quickly into your snares. As for that Ursatius, if perhaps he lived well and truly died so, he will be consoled by the promise of God, who says, “I will require the blood of your souls from the hands of all beasts.”

As for your slander that we stir up the kings of the world to anger against you, not teaching them the divine Scripture but rather suggesting our own malice, I do not think they are so deaf to the very words of the holy books that you should not rather fear that they know them. But whether you like it or not, they come into the church, and even if we are silent they turn their ears to the readers, and, to say nothing of other things, they very often listen most attentively to this very psalm which you mentioned. For you said that we do not teach them, and do not allow them, though willing, to know what is written: “And now, kings, understand; be instructed, you who judge the earth. Serve the Lord in fear and rejoice in him with trembling. Lay hold of discipline, lest the Lord be angry,” and the rest. Believe that these words are sung and that they hear them; but certainly they also hear what comes earlier in the same psalm, which, unless I am mistaken, you chose not to pass over so as not to be understood to have feared it. So they also hear this: “The Lord said to me: You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession.” When they hear it, they surely wonder that there are some who contradict this inheritance of Christ and try to reduce it to a tiny part of the earth; and wondering, they perhaps ask, because of what they hear next, “Serve the Lord in fear,” in what way they can serve him insofar as they are kings. For all men ought to serve God: in one way by the common condition by which they are men, in another by different gifts, since one man does one thing in human affairs and another another. For no private person could order idols to be removed from the earth, which was foretold so long before. So kings, apart from their membership in the human race, have, by the very fact that they are kings, the means of serving the Lord in a way that those who are not kings cannot.

So when they consider these things, they also hear what you yourself mentioned about the three boys, and they hear it at a wonderful solemnity. For that very scripture is sung in church above all at the time when the festival itself makes even those more fervent who are more sluggish the rest of the year. What mind, then, do you think Christian emperors have when they hear that the three boys were sent into the furnace of burning fire because they would not consent to the king's iniquity of worshipping an image, except to think that the godly freedom of the saints could be overcome neither by royal power nor by the monstrousness of punishment, and to rejoice that they are not of the number of such kings, who punished the despisers of idols as sacrilegious? And further, when they hear in what follows that the same king, terrified by so great a miracle, in which not only the boys but even the flames served God, himself began to serve God in fear and rejoice with trembling and to lay hold of discipline, do they not understand that these things were written and are read with such solemnity in order to set examples both before the servants of God, that they may not yield to kings for sacrilege, and before kings themselves, that they may believe God for religion? So these men, wishing, by the admonition of that very psalm which you too inserted in your writings, to understand and be instructed and serve the Lord in fear and rejoice with trembling and lay hold of discipline, listen intently to what that king said afterward. For he said that he would issue a decree to all the peoples he ruled, that whoever spoke blasphemy against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego should perish and their houses be scattered. And if they learn that he decreed this so that God, the tamer of fire and deliverer of the three boys, might not be blasphemed, they surely consider what they ought to decree in their own kingdom, so that the same God, the forgiver of sins and now the deliverer of the whole world, may not be exsufflated in his faithful.

So see, when Christian kings enact something against you for Catholic unity, whether you do not perhaps accuse them with your lips as ignorant of the divine Scriptures, while grieving in your heart that they are learned enough. For who could bear this sacrilegious and odious deceit of yours, in the single case of Daniel, to accuse kings because he was sent into the lions' den, and not to praise kings because he was honoured on high, when even at the time he was sent the king himself believed he would be saved rather than die, and, anxious for him, did not eat? Then you dare to say to Christians, “What have you to do with the kings of the world?” because Daniel suffered persecution from a king, and not to look at Daniel himself faithfully interpreting dreams to kings, calling the king lord, receiving gifts and honours; and likewise, in the case of the three boys, to stir up flames of odium about kings because, refusing to worship the statue, they were sent into the flames, but to keep silent and hide the fact that they were so proclaimed and so honoured by the king. See, the king was a persecutor when he threw Daniel to the lions; what of when, rejoicing and congratulating at receiving him safe, he sent his enemies to be torn and devoured by the same lions: was he a persecutor or not? I want you to answer. If he was, why did Daniel himself not resist him, especially since with so great an intimacy he could most easily have done so? And you tell us to call kings back from persecuting men! But if he was not a persecutor because he most justly avenged a crime committed against a holy man, how should kings avenge the exsufflation of Christ's sacraments, if the limbs of a prophet, because they were put in danger, deserved to be avenged so? Likewise, I grant, and it is plain, that the king was a persecutor when he sent the three boys into the flame for refusing to worship the image; but I ask whether he was a persecutor when he issued the decree that those who blasphemed the one true God should perish and their houses be laid waste. For if he was a persecutor, why do you answer “Amen” to a persecutor's words? But if he was not, why do you call those persecutors who deter you from the fury of blasphemy? For if they compel you to pray to an idol, they are like the ungodly king, and you like the three boys; but if they forbid you to fight against Christ, you are ungodly if you do it. What they are, if they forbid it with terrors, I do not say; you find something else to say, if you will not call them godly emperors.

If I had brought up these examples of Daniel and the three boys, you might perhaps resist and cry out that they should not have been taken from those times into ours. Thanks be to God that you yourself put them forward, indeed for what you wanted; but you see they have rather served what you did not want. Or is this not deceit on your part but human error? Would that it were so! Then correct it. Do not fear; you will not be the less for it; indeed it takes a greater mind to put out the flames of animosity by confessing than to avoid the fogs of falsehood by understanding.

Petilian said: “Where is the law of God, where is your Christianity, if you commit and order slaughters and deaths?”

Augustine answered: To this see what the fellow heirs of Christ throughout the whole world say: we neither commit nor order slaughters and deaths; and you rage much more wickedly than those who do these things, since you commit them in men's minds against eternal life.

Petilian said: “If you want us as friends, why do you drag us unwilling? But if you pretend we are enemies, why do you kill enemies?”

Augustine answered: We neither drag the unwilling nor kill enemies; but whatever we do with you, even though we do it against your will, we do it from love, so that you may correct yourselves willingly and, corrected, live. For no one avoids vices unwillingly; and yet a boy is beaten against his will so that he may learn this willingly, and often by someone very dear to him. And kings would say this to you if they struck you; for their power was ordained by God for this. But even when they do not strike, you cry out.

Petilian said: “What reason is there, or what inconsistency of vanity, that while you call us heretics by a false name, you greatly desire our communion?”

Augustine answered: If we greatly desired the communion of heretics, we would not want you corrected from heretical error; but since what we are doing with you is that you may not be heretics, how do we greatly desire the communion of heretics? For dissension and division make you heretics, but peace and unity make Catholics. So when you come here from there, you cease to be what we hate and begin to be what we love.

Petilian said: “Choose at last one of the two things to say. If you have innocence, why do you pursue us with the sword? Or if you say we are guilty, why do you seek us, being innocent?”

Augustine answered: O most acute dilemma, or rather most inept garrulity! Is not one of two answers usually proposed to be chosen where both cannot be chosen? For if you proposed that I choose one of two things to say, whether we are innocent or guilty, or again of two others, whether you are guilty or not, I could choose only one to say. But now you propose these two, whether we are innocent or you are guilty, and you want me to choose one of these two to answer. But I do not want to say one, because I say both: that we are innocent and you guilty. We say we are innocent of your false and slanderous accusations, all of us in the Catholic Church who can say with a safe conscience that we did not hand over the holy books, nor consent to the worship of idols, nor kill anyone, nor whatever other evil you usually charge; and that those who perhaps did these things (which you have not proved even of them) shut the kingdom of heaven not against us but against themselves, because each of us carries his own load: there you have one. And we say that you are all guilty and criminal, not some by the crimes of others which are committed by some among you and blamed by others, but by the crime of schism, from which most monstrous sacrilege none of you can call himself free as long as he is not in communion with the unity of all nations, unless he is compelled to say that Christ lied about the church that is spread through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem: there you have the other. See, I have given you the two, of which you wanted us to say one. You surely ought to have noticed that both could be said by us, and at least, if you wanted this, have asked us to say one, when you saw that we could say both.

“But if you have innocence,” you say, “why do you pursue us with the sword?” Look a little at your own bands, which are armed not, in the old fashion of their fathers, with clubs alone, but have added axes and lances and swords, and recognize whose voice should rather be, “Why do you pursue us with the sword?” “Or if you say we are guilty,” you say, “why do you seek us, being innocent?” Here I answer briefly: you, the guilty, are sought by the innocent so that you may cease to be guilty and begin to be innocent. See, I have chosen both of ours and answered both of yours. Now you choose one of two: are you innocent or guilty? You cannot say both; but say both, if you like. For surely you cannot be innocent in the same case in which you are guilty. So if you are innocent, do not wonder that you are sought for peace by your brothers; but if guilty, do not wonder that you are sought for punishment by kings. But since of these two you claim one for yourselves and hear the other from us (for you claim innocence for yourselves, and hear from us that you live impiously), hear again what I say of both. If you are innocent, why do you contradict Christ's testimony? But if guilty, why do you not take refuge in his mercy? For his testimony concerns the unity of the world, and his mercy is in brotherly love.

Petilian said: “Finally, as we have often said, what is this presumption of yours, to presume upon kings, when David says, ‘It is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in man; it is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in princes’?”

Augustine answered: We do not hope in man, but as far as we can we admonish men to hope in the Lord; nor do we hope in princes, but as far as we can we admonish princes to hope in the Lord; and if we ask something from princes for the benefit of the church, we still do not hope in them. For neither did the apostle hope in that tribune as in a prince, from whom he obtained that armed escorts be given him, nor in the armed men as in men, surrounded by whose number he escaped the ambush of the desperate. Nor do we blame you yourselves for asking the emperor that the basilicas be returned to you, as if you had hoped in the prince Julian; but we blame you for having despaired of Christ's testimony, from whose unity you separated those very basilicas. For you received them at the order of Christ's enemy, so that in them you might despise Christ's orders, since what Julian decreed seems to you valid and true when he says: “This too is added to the sum, at the supplication of Rogatian, Pontius, Cassian, and the other bishops, and also clergy, that, what was wrongly done against them without a rescript being annulled, all things be restored to their former state”; while what Christ decreed seems invalid and false when he says, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the whole earth.” We beg you: be corrected, return to this most evident unity of the whole world, so that, not by the words of the apostate Julian but by the words of Christ the Saviour, all things may be restored to their former state. Have pity on your souls. We are no longer comparing Constantine and Julian, to show how unequal they are. We do not say: if you did not hope in man and in a prince when you said to a man, a pagan and apostate emperor, that with him justice alone had a place (prayers and a rescript, as is written there and as the records of the presentation testify, which the party of Donatus used everywhere), much less should we be accused by you of hoping in man and in a prince if we asked anything of Constantine or the other Christian emperors without any sacrilegious flattery, or if they of their own accord, without our asking, mindful of the account they will render to the Lord, under whose words they tremble when they hear what you yourself recalled, “And now, kings, understand,” and the rest, and many other things, make decrees for the unity of the Catholic Church. But I say nothing of Constantine. We set before you Christ and Julian; I say too little: God and man, the Son of God and the son of Gehenna, the Saviour of our souls and the killer of his own soul. Why in possessing basilicas do you hold to Julian's rescript, and in embracing the peace of the church not hold to Christ's gospel? We too cry out: let all that was wrongly done be restored to its former state. Christ's gospel is older than Julian's rescript; the unity of Christ is older than the party of Donatus; the church's prayers to the Lord for Christ's unity are older than those of Rogatian and Pontius and Cassian to Julian for the party of Donatus. Or is it wrongly done when kings forbid division, and not wrongly done when bishops divide unity? Is it wrongly done when kings serve Christ's testimony in defending the church, and not wrongly done when bishops contradict Christ's testimony in denying the church? So we beg that, not against the gospel but according to the gospel, even the words of that Julian whom you so supplicated be heard, and that all that was wrongly done be restored to its former state.

Petilian said: “You, you wretches, I call upon, who, terrified by fear of persecutions, while you seek your riches and not your souls, do not so much love the faithless faith of the traitors as, against the malice of those very men whose patronage you have obtained for yourselves, behave no otherwise than shipwrecked men who in the waves go under the waves that are about to crash on them, and in great danger of life run toward what is feared; or as tyrannical fury, so as to fear no one, wishes to be feared even at its own peril: so, so you flee to the citadel of malice, to watch the losses or punishments of the innocent without fear for yourselves. If this is avoiding danger, it is fleeing beneath a collapse; and it is a damnable faith to keep faith with a robber. Finally, it is the trade of a mad profit to lose your souls so as not to lose your riches. For the Lord Christ says: ‘If you gain the whole world and lose your soul, what will you give in exchange for your soul?’”

Augustine answered: This exhortation would be useful, I admit, if anyone used it in a good cause. You did quite well to deter men from putting riches before their souls. But you who have heard this, hear us too a little; for we too say this, but notice how. If kings threaten to take away your riches because you are not Jews according to the flesh, or because you do not worship idols or demons, or because you do not go over to any heresy but remain in Catholic unity, choose rather that your riches perish so that you yourselves do not perish; and prefer nothing else, not even temporal life itself, to the eternal salvation that is in Christ. But if kings threaten you with losses or condemnation because you are heretics, they frighten you not cruelly but mercifully, and you do not fear, not bravely but stubbornly. So hear Peter saying, “What glory is it if you suffer punishment for sinning?”, so that you have neither earthly comforts here nor eternal life in the age to come, but here the straits of the unhappy and there the Gehenna of heretics. So you see, brother, with whom I am now dealing, that you ought first to show whether you hold the truth, and then exhort men to be ready to do without everything that frightens them in time, for the sake of holding it. Since you do not show this, because you cannot, not for lack of talent but because the cause is bad, why do you hurry by your exhortations to make men beggars, ignorant, needy, wandering, ragged, contentious, starving, and heretics, losing temporal goods in this age and finding eternal evils at the judgment of Christ? A careful son, who for fear of his father's rod draws back from the serpent's lair, is neither beaten nor perishes; but one who despises the pains of discipline in favour of his own ruinous will is both beaten and perishes. Do you not yet understand, eloquent man, that one who has lacked all earthly things for the peace of Christ has God, while one who has lost even a few coins for the party of Donatus has no heart?

Petilian said: “We, the poor in spirit, do not fear for riches but dread riches. We, having nothing and possessing all things, believe the soul to be our wealth, and with our punishments and blood we buy the eternal riches of heaven; since the Lord says, ‘Whoever loses his substance will receive it a hundredfold.’”

Augustine answered: Here too it is relevant to point out how it is written; for where nothing hinders my purpose, if you deceive or are deceived about the Scriptures, I do not care. It is not written, “Whoever loses his substance,” but, “Whoever loses his soul for my sake.” And of substance it is not written, “whoever loses,” but, “whoever leaves,” and not only the substance of money but many other things too. You, meanwhile, have not lost your substance. Whether you have left it, since you so boast of poverty, I do not know. If perhaps my colleague Fortunatus knows this, since you are in the same city, he has never told me, because I never asked. But even if you have done this, you yourself, in this very letter of yours, cited against yourself the apostolic testimony: “If I distribute all I have to the poor, and hand over my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.” For if you had love, you would not charge the world, ignorant and unknown to you, with the crimes of Africans, not even proved; if you had love, you would not invent unity in your slanders, but recognize it, expressed most plainly in the Lord's words, to the whole earth. But if you have not done this, why do you boast as if you had? Do you really so dread riches that, having nothing, you possess all things? Say this to your colleague Crispinus, who has just bought an estate near our Hippo, where he might plunge men into the deep. I know this all too well; you perhaps do not know it, and so you cry out securely, “We dread riches.” I wonder, then, that this voice of yours leaped over him to reach us; for between Constantina, where you are, and Hippo, where I am, lies Calama, where he is, nearer to us indeed, but still in between. I wonder, then, how he did not catch this voice first and throw it back so that it would not pass to us, and recite against you the praises of riches much more copiously. For he not only does not dread riches but loves them. And certainly, for the future, before you publish, recite such things to him; if he does not reform, we will answer. And you, if it is true that you are poor, have my brother Fortunatus there; you will be able to please that colleague of mine more easily from there than this one of yours.

Petilian said: “By the fear of God by which we live, we do not fear the punishments and deaths which you cause by the sword; we flee only this, in short, that you slaughter souls by a most wicked communion; as the Lord himself says: ‘Do not fear those who kill the body, for they cannot kill the soul; but fear rather him who has power to send body and soul into the Gehenna of fire.’”

Augustine answered: What you say, you yourselves do, not with a visible sword but with that of which it was said, “Sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword”; for with this sword, accusing and slandering a world you do not know, you slaughter the souls of the unlearned. But if you accuse a most wicked communion, then, by your mouth, not mine, go up, go down, go out, come in, turn about, twist and turn: you are such as Optatus. But if you return to your heart and find that you are not such as he, not because he did not share the sacraments with you but because he displeased you, you will acquit the world of others' crimes and find yourselves entangled in the crime of schism.

Petilian said: “You, then, who would rather be washed than born by a most false baptism, not only do not lay down your offences but load your souls with the crimes of the guilty; for as the water of the guilty is emptied of the Holy Spirit, so it is plainly filled with the crimes of the traitors. So whoever you are, wretch, who are baptized by such a man: if you wished to be free of lying, you are drenched with falsehood; if you would not shut out the offences of the flesh, with the conscience of the guilty added you will receive guilt as well; if you would not quench the flame of avarice, you are drenched with fraud, drenched with crime, drenched with fury too. Finally, if you believe that faith belongs to the receiver and the giver, you are drenched with a brother's blood by the one who kills a man. So it comes about that you who came innocent to baptism return from baptism a parricide.”

Augustine answered: I would like to talk with those who applauded when these words were read or heard; for such people have not ears in their heart but their heart in their ears. Still, let them read them again and again, and think, and perceive in them not what they sound but what they mean. First, to shake out this last point: “So it comes about,” you say, “that you who came innocent to baptism return from baptism a parricide.” Answer first: who comes innocent to baptism, except him who came to be baptized not to have his iniquity washed away but to give us the authority of humility? For what will be forgiven an innocent man? Or are you so eloquent that you can show us some sinful innocence? Do you not hear Scripture saying, “No one is clean of sin in your sight, not even an infant whose life on earth is one day old”? For why do people run even with infants for the forgiveness of sins? Do you not hear another: “I was conceived in iniquity”? Next, if one who came without parricide returns a parricide because a parricide baptizes him, then all who returned baptized by Optatus became Optatuses. Go now and charge us with stirring up the anger of kings against you. Are you not afraid that as many of Gildo's henchmen may be sought among you as there were people who could be baptized by Optatus? Do you see at last how this sentence of yours has burst like a bladder, not only with an empty noise but on your own heads?

Now the other, earlier points which we have now proposed to refute are such as to say that every baptized person returns just such as the one by whom he is baptized. But God forbid that those whom you baptize should return as raving as you are in saying this! And how fine it sounded to you when you said, “You are drenched with fraud, drenched with crime, drenched with fury too”! You, if you were not, not drenched, but filled with fury, would not pour out these things. Is it really so, to say nothing of other things, that whoever come not greedy to be baptized by your greedy colleagues or presbyters return greedy, and whoever run sober to those whirlpools of wine to be baptized come back drunk? Thinking and urging these things, you dare even to cite, as if against us, what you set down a little earlier: “It is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in man; it is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in princes.” What else, I ask, do you teach but to hope not in the Lord but in man, when you say that the baptized becomes such as the baptizer was? And because you claim for yourselves this principate of baptizing, are men to believe you, and those who were going to hope in the Lord to hope in princes? Rather, let them not listen to you, but to those testimonies which you set down against yourselves, and something more terrible besides: that not only is it better to hope in the Lord than in man, but also, “Cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man.”

Petilian said: “At least imitate the prophets, who feared that their holy souls would be deceived by a false baptism. For Jeremiah first said that among ungodly men water is deceitful: ‘Deceitful water,’ he says, ‘has no faith.’”

Augustine answered: Anyone ignorant of the Scriptures who hears this, and does not believe you either so mistaken that you do not know what you are saying, or so deceitful that whoever you deceived does not know what he is saying, thinks that the prophet Jeremiah, when he wanted to be baptized, took care not to be baptized by ungodly men, and said these words for that reason. For what is the point of what you said before setting down this testimony: “At least imitate the prophets, who feared that their holy souls would be deceived by a false baptism”? As if in Jeremiah's time anyone was washed with the sacrament of baptism; except that the Pharisees dipped themselves almost every moment in those washings which the Lord rebuked, and their couches and cups and dishes, as we read in the gospel. How, then, could Jeremiah have said this as one longing for baptism and avoiding being baptized by the ungodly? He said it when complaining of the unbelieving people, by whose very bad conduct he was troubled, not mixing himself in their deeds; yet he did not separate himself bodily from that people, nor seek other sacraments than those which that people received according to the order of the law, suited to that time. So he called this people, living badly, the wound by which the heart of the righteous man was grievously smitten, whether he said this of himself or prefigured in himself what he saw would come. For he says: “Lord, remember me and visit me, and make me innocent before those who pursue me, not in long-suffering; know how I have received reproach for your sake from those who despise your words. Make an end of them, and your word will be to me the delight and joy of my heart, for your name is called upon me, Lord Almighty. I did not sit in the council of those who make merry, but I feared before your hand; I sat alone, for I was filled with bitterness. Why do those who grieve me prevail over me? My wound is severe; how shall I be healed? It has become to me like deceitful water that has no faith.” In all this one sees what the prophet wanted to be understood; but it is seen by those who do not want to twist what they read to their own twisted cause. For Jeremiah said that his wound had become to him deceitful water that has no faith, and he wanted his wound to be understood as those who grieved him by living badly. Hence the apostle too says, “fighting without, fears within,” and again, “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I do not burn?” And because he despaired that they could be corrected, he said, “How shall I be healed?”, as one who would always have pain as long as those among whom he was forced to live were such. That a people is usually signified by the name of water is shown in the Apocalypse, where we learn that many waters are many peoples, not by our conjecture but by the interpretation given there. So do not, by a perverse understanding or rather error, blaspheme the sacrament of baptism, even if it is in the most abandoned man; for neither in lying Simon was the baptism he had received deceitful water, nor do your many liars give deceitful water when they baptize in the name of the Trinity. For they do not begin to be liars when, exposed and convicted, they confess their crimes; rather they were liars then, when, being adulterers and criminals, they pretended to be chaste and innocent.

Petilian said: “David also said: ‘The oil of the sinner will not anoint my head.’ Whom, then, does he call a sinner? Me, who suffer your crimes, or you, who persecute the innocent?”

Augustine answered: In the person of the body of Christ, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth, spread through the whole world because of the gospel which is preached, as the apostle says, “in all creation under heaven”; in the person of the world, of which the same David, whose words you do not understand, says, “He has established the world, which will not be moved,” which you contend has not been moved but wholly perished through others' sins: in its person, then, I answer: I do not persecute the innocent. But David said “the oil of the sinner”; he did not say “of the traitor,” nor “of the incense-offerer,” nor “of the persecutor,” but “of the sinner.” What, then, will you do on your understanding? See first whether you are not yourself a sinner. Do not tell me, “I am not a traitor, I am not an incense-offerer, I am not a persecutor.” Neither am I, if it pleases the Lord, any of these, nor is the world, which will not be moved. But say, if you dare, “I am not a sinner.” For he says, “the oil of the sinner.” Whatever even of light sin is found in you, how do you show that you are not covered by the saying, “the oil of the sinner”? For I ask whether you pray with the Lord's Prayer. If you do not pray with the prayer by which the Lord taught the disciples to pray, where did you learn another, suited to your greater merits, surpassing the merits of the apostles? But if you pray as that Master deigned to teach, how do you say, “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors”? For we do not ask this about the sins forgiven us in baptism. So these words of the prayer either do not allow you to be one who prays to God, or they reveal you a sinner. Let those whom you baptized now go and kiss your head, whose heads perished by your oil! But see what you are, or what you think of yourself. Was Optatus, then, whom pagans, Jews, Christians, ours, yours, throughout all Africa proclaim a thief, robber, betrayer, oppressor, separator, and the henchman (not friend, not client, but henchman) of the man whom one of you called his companion god, not even any kind of sinner? What, then, will those do whose heads were anointed by a man guilty of a capital crime? Do they not also kiss your heads, those of whose heads you judge so badly by your understanding? At least expose them and warn them to be healed. Or is it rather your head that needs healing, raving like this? “What, then,” you will say, “did David mean?” Why ask me? Ask him; he will answer you in the previous verse: “The righteous will correct me in mercy and rebuke me; but the oil of the sinner will not anoint my head.” What is plainer, what more evident? “I would rather,” he says, “be healed by merciful rebuke than be deceived and perverted by smooth flattery, as if my head were anointed.” The same thought is elsewhere in Scripture in other words: “Better are the wounds of a friend than the voluntary kisses of an enemy.”

Petilian said: “And he praises the ointment of concord among brothers thus: ‘See how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity. Like ointment on the head, which runs down on the beard, the beard of Aaron, which runs down to the collar of his garment; like the dew of Hermon, which comes down upon the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord commanded blessing and life forevermore.’ So, he says, unity is anointed, as priests were anointed.”

Augustine answered: You speak the truth. For that priesthood had its anointing as a figure of the body of Christ, which is saved by the bond of unity. For Christ himself is named from chrism, that is, from anointing. The Hebrews call him Messiah, a word that agrees with the Punic language, as do very many other Hebrew words, almost all. What, then, in that priesthood is the head, what the beard, what the collar of the garment? As far as the Lord grants me to understand, the head is the Saviour of the body himself, of whom the apostle says, “And he is the head of the body, the church.” By the beard strength is not unfittingly understood. So upon those who are strong in his church and cling to his mouth, so as to preach the truth without fear, the holy ointment runs down from Christ himself as from the head, that is, spiritual sanctification. The collar of the garment is to be understood as that which is at the top of the garment, through which the head of the wearer enters. By this are signified the perfect faithful in the church; for in the collar is completion. And surely you remember that it was said to a certain rich man, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” He indeed went away sad, neglecting perfection, choosing defection. But were there therefore lacking those on whom the ointment of unity ran down from the head as onto the collar of the garment, made perfect by such giving up of earthly things? For apart from the apostles and the leaders and teachers who were with them, whom we understand as the more eminent and stronger in the beard, read in the Acts of the Apostles and see who laid the prices of their sold goods at the apostles' feet; and no one called anything his own, but they had all things in common, and distribution was made to each as each had need, and they had one soul and one heart toward God. You know that it is written so. So recognize the brothers dwelling in unity, good and pleasant; recognize the beard of Aaron; recognize the collar of the spiritual garment. Ask Scripture itself where these things began to be done; you will find, in Jerusalem. From this collar of the garment the whole unity is woven through all nations. By this the head entered the garment, so that Christ might be clothed with the variety of the world; because in this collar of the garment appeared the very variety of tongues. Why, then, do you resist the very head from which that ointment of unity runs down, that is, the spiritual fragrance of love; why, I say, do you resist the very head that testifies and says, “Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem”? And why do you want to interpret this ointment as the sacrament of chrism, which indeed, in the class of visible seals, is most holy, like baptism itself, but can be also in the worst men, who spend their life in the works of the flesh and will not possess the kingdom of heaven, and therefore belong neither to Aaron's beard nor to the collar of his garment nor to any weaving of the priestly vestment? For where will you put what the apostle lists as the manifest works of the flesh: “which are,” he says, “sexual immorality, uncleanness, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, dissensions, heresies, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like; of which I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not possess the kingdom of God”? I set aside sexual immorality, which is committed secretly; interpret uncleanness as you will, I set that aside too; let us put sorcery there as well, since no one openly makes and gives poisons; I set aside heresies too, since you wish it; whether I should set aside idolatry I do not know, since the apostle places there the avarice that rages publicly. With these set aside, then, are there among you no debauched, no greedy, none who stubbornly carry on enmities, none contentious, jealous, angry, eager for dissensions, envious, drunk, given to carousing? Are none such anointed among you and die known and manifest in these vices? If you say none, since by your zeal for strife you lie openly, see that you are not yourself one of them. But if you are removed from such men not by bodily separation but by unlikeness of life, and with groaning you see such crowds around your altars, what shall we say, since they have been anointed with holy oil and, as the apostle confirms with clear truth, will not possess the kingdom of God? Must sacrilegious injury be done to Aaron's beard and the collar of his garment, so that we think they should be placed there? God forbid. So distinguish the visible holy sacrament, which can be both in the good and in the bad, for the one to reward, for the other to judgment, from the invisible anointing of love, which is proper to the good. Distinguish these, distinguish them; may God distinguish you from the party of Donatus and call you back into the Catholic Church, from which they snatched you as a catechumen and bound you with the chain of a deadly honour. Now, however the dew of Hermon on the mountains of Zion is taken by you, you are not on the mountains of Zion, because you are not in the city set on a mountain, which has this sure sign, that it cannot be hidden. So it is known to all nations; but the party of Donatus is unknown to most nations; so it is not that city.

Petilian said: “Woe to you, then, who by violating what is holy cut unity apart, as the prophet says: ‘If the people sin, the priest will pray for them; but if the priest sins, who will pray for him?’”

Augustine answered: A little while ago, when we were discussing the oil of the sinner, I seemed to be rubbing your forehead so that you would say, if you dared, whether you yourself were not a sinner. Look, you have said it. O crime, O monster! For since you claim to be a priest, what else have you said through this prophetic testimony than that you are wholly without sin? For if you have sin, who will pray for you, on your understanding? For so you sell yourselves to the wretched peoples, citing from the prophet, “If the people sin, the priest will pray for them; but if the priest sins, who will pray for him?”, so that they may believe you without sin and entrust their sins to be cleansed by your prayers. Great men you are, lofty, heavenly, divine, no longer men but angels, who pray for the peoples and do not want the peoples to pray for you! Are you more righteous than Paul, more perfect than so great an apostle, who commended himself to the prayers of those he taught? “Persist in prayer,” he says, “watching in it with thanksgiving, praying at the same time for us too, that God may open to us a door for the word, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in chains, that I may make it manifest as I ought to speak.” See, prayer is made for an apostle, which you do not want made for a bishop. Do you see how devilish this pride is? Prayer is made for an apostle, that he may make the mystery of Christ manifest as he ought to speak. So if you had godly congregations, you should have urged them to pray for you, that you might not speak as you ought not. Are you more righteous than John the evangelist, who says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us”? Are you, finally, more righteous than Daniel, whom you yourself mentioned in this very letter so as to say, “A king threw most righteous Daniel to the bites of wild beasts, as he thought”? Which the king had not thought, since with a most friendly mind, as the context of the reading proves, he said to Daniel himself, “Your God, whom you serve continually, will himself rescue you.” But we have said much about this already. Now to the point: Daniel was indeed most righteous, not by your testimony (though that would be enough for me in the case I am pleading with you) but by the testimony of the Spirit of God speaking also through Ezekiel, where he named three of most eminent righteousness, Noah, Daniel, and Job, who he said alone could be delivered from a certain most severe wrath of God that was hanging over the rest. So a most righteous man, one of the three memorable ones, prays and says, “When I was praying and confessing my sins and the sins of my people before the Lord my God.” And you say you are without sin, because, forsooth, you are a priest; and if the people sin, you pray for them, but if you sin, who will pray for you? Truly, because by the impiety of such arrogance you show yourself unworthy that that Priest should intercede for you whom the prophet wanted to be understood by these words which you do not understand. For now, so that no one may ask why this was said, I will explain as far as the Lord grants. God was preparing men's minds through the prophet to long for such a priest that no one could pray for him. He was prefigured in the times of the first people and the first temple, where all things were figures of us. Therefore the high priest alone entered the holy of holies to pray for the people, who did not go into those inner holy places with the priest; as that Priest entered the secret places of heaven, that truer holy of holies, while we are still here, for whom he intercedes. Therefore the prophet said, “If the people sin, the priest will pray for them; but if the priest sins, who will pray for him?”, that is: long for such a priest as cannot sin, so that he does not need to be prayed for. And therefore prayer is made by the peoples for the apostles, but for that Priest, the Master and Lord of the apostles, no prayer is made. Hear John confessing and teaching this: “Brothers,” he says, “I write these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; he is the propitiation for our sins.” He said “we have,” he said “our sins.” Learn humility, so that you may not fall, or rather so that you may at some time rise; for you would not have said these things unless you had fallen.

Petilian said: “And so that one who is a layman may not claim to be free from fault, he is bound by this prohibition: ‘Do not share in others' sins.’”

Augustine answered: You err, as the saying goes, by the whole sky, through pride, while you refuse through humility to be in communion with the world. For this was not said to a layman, and you do not know how it was said. When the apostle was writing to Timothy, he gave this warning to that same Timothy to whom he says in another place, “Do not neglect the grace that is in you, which was given you through the laying on of the hands of the presbytery”; and many other proofs show that he was not a layman. And when he says, “Do not share in others' sins,” he wanted it understood of consent and approval; hence he at once adds how this is done: “Keep yourself pure,” he says. For neither did Paul himself share in others' sins because he tolerated in bodily unity the false brothers over whom he groans; nor did the apostles, Judas's predecessors, share in Judas's theft and crime because they shared the most holy supper with him when he was already the seller of the Lord and pointed out by the Lord.

Petilian said: “By this same sentence the apostle himself classes together the partners of a bad conscience: ‘Both those who do these things,’ he says, ‘and those who consent to those who do such things are worthy of death.’”

Augustine answered: However you have said it, I do not care; these things are true, and this is what the Catholic Church teaches: there is a great difference between those who consent, whom these things please, and those who tolerate, whom they displease. The former become chaff, as they follow the barrenness of the chaff; the latter, since they are wheat, wait for Christ the winnower to separate them.

Petilian said: “Come, then, to the church, you peoples, and flee the traitors, if you do not want to perish with them. For that you may easily recognize that they, though guilty themselves, judge very well of our faith: I baptize those they have infected, while they, God forbid, receive those baptized by me. They would certainly not do this unless they had recognized some fault in our baptism. See, then, how holy is what we give, which the sacrilegious enemy fears to destroy.”

Augustine answered: Against this error we have said much already, both in this work and elsewhere. But since you think there is so great a support for your vanity in this sentence that you thought you should end your letter with it, so that it might remain fresher, as it were, in the minds of readers, I answer briefly. We approve in heretics the baptism not of heretics but of Christ, just as in the sexually immoral, the unclean, the debauched, idolaters, sorcerers, those who hold on to enmities, the contentious, the jealous, the angry, those eager for dissensions, the envious, drunkards, carousers, and the like, we approve the baptism not of them but of Christ. For all these, among whom heretics are also placed, as the apostle says, will not possess the kingdom of God and so will belong to the left side with the devil. Nor are they to be thought to be in the body of Christ, which is the church, because they share bodily in his sacraments. For those sacraments are holy even in such men and will avail for greater judgment for those who handle and receive them unworthily; but the men themselves are not in that structure of the church which grows in the members of Christ, through joining and contact, into the growth of God. For that church is on the rock, as the Lord says, “On this rock I will build my church”; but they build on sand, as the same Lord says, “Whoever hears my words and does not do them, I will liken him to a foolish man who builds his house on sand.” But so that you may not think that the church which is on the rock is in one part of the earth and not spread to the ends of the earth, hear its voice from the psalm, groaning amid the evils of its pilgrimage. For it says: “From the ends of the earth I have cried to you, when my heart was in anguish. You have set me high on a rock; you have led me, for you have become my hope, a tower of strength before the enemy.” See how it cries from the ends of the earth; so it is not in Africa alone or among Africans alone, who send a bishop from Africa to Rome for a few Montenses, and to Spain for the house of one woman. See how it is set high on a rock; so not all who build on sand, that is, who hear Christ's words and do not do them, are to be counted in it; yet both among us and among you they have and hand on the sacrament of baptism. See how its hope is God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not Peter, not Paul, much less Donatus or Petilian; so what we fear to destroy is not yours but Christ's, which even in the sacrilegious is holy in itself. For we cannot receive those who come from you unless we destroy what is yours; for we destroy the faithlessness of the deserter, we do not destroy the mark of the commander. So consider yourself and destroy what you have said. “I,” you say, “baptize those they have infected, while they, God forbid, receive those baptized by me.” For you do not baptize the infected, but, so as to infect them with the fraud of your error, you rebaptize. But we do not receive those baptized by you; we destroy your error, from which they are yours, and accept Christ's baptism, from which they are baptized. So your putting “God forbid” in the middle was apt. For you said, “They, God forbid, receive those baptized by me.” For while you wanted it understood that they receive, God forbid, fearing that we might receive your people, I take you to have said without knowing it, “mine, God forbid.” For in truth, God forbid that they should be yours, who now pass over to the Catholic Church; and they do not pass over so as to be our baptized, but so as to be our companions, while they are Christ's baptized together with us.

I have read your letter, Petilian, when I was able to read it, in which you have shown clearly enough that you could say nothing adequate against the Catholic Church for the party of Donatus, and yet were not allowed to keep silent. What surges you suffered, with what a storm of heart you were tossed, when you had read what I answered, as briefly and clearly as I could, to the part of your letter that had then come into my hands! For you saw the truth which we hold and defend strengthened with such firmness and lit with such light that you could not find what to say against it by which it might be refuted and convicted. You noticed too that the expectation of many who had read it had turned to you, eager to know what you would say, what you would do, how you would escape, by what way you would break out of the great straits in which the word of God had surrounded you. Here you, who ought to have despised the opinion of empty men and gone on to a true and sound judgment, did what Scripture foretold of such men: you loved malice more than kindness, iniquity more than speaking equity. So if I too wanted to repay you curse for curse, what would we be but two cursers, so that of those who read us some would cast us off in disgust out of sound seriousness, and others would drink us in sweetly with malicious pleasure? When I answer anyone, in speech or in writing, even when provoked by insulting charges, as far as the Lord grants me, I curb and crush the stings of vain indignation and, considering the hearer or reader, I do not try to become superior to the man by railing, but more wholesome to him by refuting his error.

For if those who consider what you have written have any heart at all, what did it profit you for the case being argued between us about Catholic communion or the party of Donatus, that you left the business, a public business as it were, and, out of a kind of private grudge, attacked the life of one man with abusive reproaches, as if that man were the case under inquiry? Did you think so badly, I will not say of Christians, but of the human race itself, that you did not believe your writings could come into the hands of some prudent men who would set our persons aside and inquire rather into the question at issue between us, and attend not to who or what kind of men we are, but to what we say for truth or against error? Their judgment you should have respected, their censure you should have guarded against, so that they would not think you had found nothing to say unless you set before yourself someone to curse in any way you could. But evidently, counting on the levity and vanity of some who like to hear the quarrels of eloquent brawlers, so that while they attend to how eloquently you rail they do not notice how truly you are refuted, you also aimed, I think, at this: that I too, busied with my own defence, might abandon the case I had taken up, and so, with men turned to the words not of disputants but of litigants, the truth which you dread to see dawn and become known might be obscured. What, then, shall I do against such a plan but rather neglect my own defence and hold to the matter, from which no accuser of mine shall shake my purpose? I will extol the house of my God, whose beauty I have loved, with the proclamation of a serving voice. As for myself, I will humble and abase myself; for I have chosen to be cast down in the house of my God rather than to dwell in the tents of heretics. So I will turn my speech from you, Petilian, for a little while, to those whom you tried to turn from me by your curses; as if I were working for men to be turned to me, and not rather to God with me.

Hear, then, all of you who have read the curses which Petilian, more angry than considerate, vomited against me. First I will address you in the apostle's words, which are certainly true, whatever I myself may be: “Let a man so regard us, as ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Here it is required of stewards that one be found faithful. But to me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human day; I do not even judge myself.” As for what follows, though I dare not apply it to myself so as to say, “For I am conscious of nothing against myself,” yet I say confidently in the sight of God: of none of the things with which Petilian has charged the time of my life since I was baptized in Christ am I conscious. “Yet I am not justified by this; he who judges me is the Lord. So do not judge anything before the time, until the Lord comes, who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the counsels of hearts; and then each will have praise from God. These things, brothers, I have applied to myself, so that no one may be puffed up for one against another beyond what is written. So let no one glory in man; all things are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.” I say again: let no one glory in man; I repeat it more often: let no one glory in man. If you notice anything praiseworthy in us, refer it to the praise of him from whom is every best gift and every perfect gift; for it is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change nor shadow of a moment. “For what have we that we did not receive? And if we received it, let us not glory as if we had not received it.” And in all the good things you know in us, be imitators of us, if indeed we are of Christ; but if you suspect or believe or see any evil things in us, hold fast to that word of the Lord by which you may, secure, not desert his church because of men's evils: do what we say, but what you think or know to be our evil deeds, do not do. For this is not the time for clearing myself to you, since, neglecting my own case, I have undertaken to commend to you a wholesome matter: that no one glory in man; for “cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man.” If this command of the Lord and the apostle is held and kept, then even if I fail and am crushed in my own case, as the enemy wishes me to be thought, the cause I serve will be victorious. For if you hold most firmly to what I urge and work for, that everyone who puts his hope in man is cursed, so that no one may glory in man, you will in no way desert the Lord's threshing floor because of the chaff, which either now flies off struck by the wind of pride or will be separated by the last winnowing; nor will you flee the great house because of vessels made for dishonour; nor will you go out through broken nets because of the bad fish which are to be separated on the shore; nor will you leave the good pastures of unity because of the goats which the shepherd will put apart on the left; nor will you separate yourselves by abominable division, because of the tares mixed in, from the fellowship of the wheat, whose head is that grain which died and was multiplied, and which grows together through the world until the harvest. For the field is the world, not Africa; the harvest is the end of the age, not the time of Donatus.

You surely recognize these gospel likenesses as given for no other purpose than that no one should glory in man and that no one, puffed up for one against another, should be divided off, saying, “I am of Paul,” when surely Paul was not crucified for you nor were you baptized in the name of Paul, much less in the name of Caecilian or of any of us; so that you may learn, as long as the chaff is threshed with the grain, as long as bad fish swim with good within the Lord's nets, before the time of winnowing, rather to tolerate the mixture of the bad for the sake of the good than to violate the love of the good because of the bad. For this mixture is not eternal but temporal, not spiritual but bodily. In it the angels will not err when they gather the wicked from the midst of the righteous and cast them into the furnace of burning fire. For the Lord knows those who are his, and if one cannot for the time withdraw bodily from the unrighteous, still let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from unrighteousness itself. For it is permitted meanwhile to be separated and to depart from the wicked in life, conduct, heart, and will, and this separation must always be kept. But bodily separation must be awaited, confidently, patiently, bravely, until the end of the age; for which waiting it was said, “Wait for the Lord, act manfully; let your heart be strengthened, and wait for the Lord.” For the greatest palm of tolerance is, among false brothers brought in secretly, seeking their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, not to disturb by any turbulent and rash dissension the love of those who seek not their own but the things of Jesus Christ, nor proudly, by abominable strife, to break the unity of the Lord's dragnet, which gathers fish of every kind, while it is being drawn to the shore, that is, to the end of the age, when each thinks himself something while he is nothing, and so deceives himself, and wants his own judgment, or that of his people, to suffice for separating Christian peoples; men who say they know quite openly certain wicked men unworthy of communion in the sacraments of the Christian religion, and yet cannot persuade the whole church, which is spread through all nations as was foretold, of whatever they say they know about them. And while they flee the communion of these men, as of men they know, they desert the unity of that church; whereas they ought rather, if there were in them the love that bears all things, so as not to divide themselves from the good, whom in all nations they could not teach about others' evils, to tolerate themselves in one nation what they knew. Hence, even without examining the case, in which they are convicted by the weightiest documents of having slandered the innocent, it is more probably believed that they invented false charges of handing over the books, since they did not hesitate to commit the far more wicked crime of abominable division; because, even if all they threw about concerning the handing over were true, they ought in no way to have left the fellowship of the Christians whom divine Scripture commends to the ends of the earth on account of what they knew and the others did not know.

I would not say this so that church discipline might be neglected, so that anyone might be allowed to do what he likes without any correction and a kind of medicinal punishment, terrible gentleness, and severity of love. For where then will be the apostle's word: “Correct the unruly, comfort the faint-hearted, support the weak, be patient toward all; see that no one repays evil for evil to anyone”? Since he added, “See that no one repays evil for evil to anyone,” he showed clearly enough that correcting the unruly is not repaying evil for evil, though the penalty of correction is repaid for the fault of unruliness. So the penalty of correction is not an evil, since the fault is the evil; for the steel is not that of an enemy wounding but of a physician cutting. These things are done in the church, and that spirit of inner gentleness burns with zeal for God, lest the chaste virgin betrothed to one husband, Christ, be corrupted in some of her members from the chastity that is in Christ, as Eve was seduced by the serpent's cunning. Yet far be it from the servants of the householder to forget their Lord's command and so blaze with the fire of holy indignation against the multitude of tares that, wanting to gather them before the time, they root up the wheat along with them. Of this sin these men would be held guilty even if they showed that they had brought true charges against the traitors whom they accused; since they separated themselves with ungodly presumption not only from the unrighteous, whose fellowship they claimed to shun, but also from the good faithful established in all nations, to whom they could not prove what they said they knew; and they drew with them into the same ruin many among whom they had some authority and who could less well understand that the unity of the church spread through the whole world is by no means to be deserted for others' sins. So, even if they themselves knew they were bringing true charges against some, in that way the weak brother perished in their knowledge, for whom Christ died, while, offended by others' evils, he killed in himself the good of peace which he had with good brothers, some of whom had not heard such things, some of whom had feared to believe rashly things not examined and not proved, and some of whom had left them, whatever they were, with peaceable humility to the ecclesiastical judges overseas, to whom the whole case was taken.

So you, holy offspring of the one Catholic mother, subject to the Lord, guard with all the vigilance you can against the example of such a crime and error. However much someone shines with the light of learning and reputation and boasts himself a precious stone, whoever wants to draw you after himself, remember that that strong woman, one and lovable to her one husband, whom holy Scripture describes at the end of Proverbs, is more precious than precious stones. Let no one say, “I will follow that man, because he made me a Christian,” or, “I will follow that man, because he baptized me.” “Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth”; and “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” No one, even if he preaches the name of Christ and bears and ministers the sacrament of Christ, is to be followed against the unity of Christ. “Let each test his own work, and then he will have glory in himself alone and not in another; for each will carry his own load,” the load, namely, of rendering account, because each of us will render account for himself. “So let us no longer judge one another.” But as regards the loads of mutual love, “bear one another's burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ. For whoever thinks himself something when he is nothing deceives himself.” So let us bear with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, outside which whoever gathers does not gather with Christ; and whoever does not gather with Christ scatters.

Therefore, whether concerning Christ or his church or any other matter that pertains to your faith and life, I will not say that we are in no way to be compared with him who said, “even if we,” but, as he went on to add, altogether: “if an angel from heaven proclaims to you anything other than what you have received in the legitimate and gospel Scriptures, let him be anathema.” Pressing these things with you and with all whom we desire to gain for Christ, and among other things preaching the holy church, which we read promised in God's writings and see rendered, as it was promised, in all nations, we have earned, instead of thanks, the flames of hatred from those whom we desire to draw to its peaceful bosom; as if we had bound them in that part for which they can find nothing to say, or had instructed the prophets and apostles so long beforehand to put in their books no testimonies by which the party of Donatus might be shown to be the church of Christ. And we, dearest friends, when we hear false charges from those whom we offend by preaching the words of truth and refuting the empty talk of error, have, as you know, the most abundant consolation. For if, in the things of which they accuse me, the testimony of my conscience does not stand against me in the sight of God, upon which no mortal eye is fixed, not only ought I not to be saddened, but I ought even to rejoice and exult, because my reward is great in heaven. For one must look not at how bitter what I hear is, but at how false it is, and how true he is for whose name I hear it, to whom it is said, “Your name is ointment poured out.” And rightly is he fragrant in all nations, whose fragrance these men who curse us try to shut up in one small part of Africa. Why, then, should we take it ill that we are defamed by those who so detract from Christ's glory, to whose party and contention what was foretold so long before is hostile, concerning his ascension into heaven and the pouring out of his name like ointment: “Be exalted above the heavens, O God, and your glory above all the earth”?

Bringing forward these and such divine testimonies against human empty talk, we bear bitter reproaches from the enemies of Christ's glory. Let them say what they like, so long as he exhorts us, saying: “Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed will you be when they persecute you and curse you and say every evil against you falsely for my sake.” What he said above, “for righteousness' sake,” he repeated when he said afterward, “for my sake,” because he has become for us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “whoever glories, let him glory in the Lord.” Since he says, “Rejoice and exult, for your reward is great in heaven,” if I hold with a good conscience what was said, “for righteousness' sake” and “for my sake,” whoever willingly detracts from my reputation unwillingly adds to my reward. For he not only taught me by his word but also confirmed it by his example. Follow the faith of the holy Scriptures: you will find that Christ rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father. Follow the accusations of his enemies: you will think he was stolen from the tomb by his disciples. What else, then, should we hope for, defending his house against his enemies as far as he grants? If they called the householder Beelzebub, how much more his household! If, then, we endure, we shall also reign with him. But if the anger of the accuser not only strikes the ear but the truth of the charge also bites the conscience, what does it profit me if the whole world exalts me with continual praises? So neither does the praiser's proclamation heal a bad conscience, nor does the railer's reproach wound a good one. Nor even so is your hope, which is in the Lord, deceived, even if perhaps we are secretly such as the enemy wants us to be thought, because you have not placed it in us, nor have you ever heard this from us. So you are secure, whatever we may be, you who have learned to say, “Hoping in the Lord, I shall not be moved,” and, “In God I will hope; I will not fear what man can do to me”; and to those who try to lure you to the earthly heights of proud men you know how to answer: “In the Lord I trust; how do you say to my soul, Flee to the mountain like a sparrow?”

Not only you whom the very truth of Christ pleases in us, however much and wherever it is preached through us, and who, because you willingly hear it through the ministry of our tongue, however small, think well and kindly of us too, are secure whatever we may be, because your hope is in him whom we preach to you by his mercy upon you; but also all of you who received the sacrament of holy baptism by our ministry, rejoice in the same security, because you were baptized not in us but in Christ. So you put on not us but Christ; and I did not ask you whether you were turning to me but to the living God, nor whether you believed in me but in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. If you answered with a truthful mind, what saved you was not the removal of the dirt of the flesh but the questioning of a good conscience; not a fellow servant but the Lord, not the herald but the judge. For it is not true, as Petilian said inconsiderately, that the conscience of the giver, or, as he added, the conscience of one who gives in holiness, is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver. For when what is God's is given, even an unholy conscience gives something holy. That conscience, whether holy or not, certainly cannot be inspected by the receiver; but plainly what is given can be, and once it is known to belong to him who is always holy, through whatever minister it is received, it is received with the greatest security. For unless the words from the chair of Moses were holy, the Truth would not say, “Do what they say.” But if those who gave the holy words were themselves holy, he would not say, “Do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” For a grape is in no way gathered from thorns, because it never springs from the roots of thorns; but when the branch of a vine has entangled itself in a thorny hedge, the fruit that hangs there is not therefore shunned; the thorn is avoided, the grape is picked.

So, as I have often said and strongly insist, whatever we may be, you are secure who have God as Father and his church as mother. For though goats are pastured together with sheep, they will not stand on the right; though chaff is threshed together with wheat, it will not enter the barn; though bad fish swim together with good within the Lord's nets, they will not be put into the vessels. Let no one glory even in a good man; let no one flee God's good things even in a bad man.

Let these things suffice for you, dearest brothers, Catholic Christians, for the present business. If you hold them with Catholic love, since you are one flock, secure under one shepherd, I do not care much that any enemy rails at me, your fellow member of the flock, or indeed your dog, provided he compels me to bark for your defence rather than for my own. Yet if my defence were needed for the case, I would use a very brief and easy one: namely, the whole time of my life before I received Christ's baptism, as regards my desires and errors, I disapprove and detest along with everyone, so that in defending that time I may not seem to seek my own glory rather than that of him who by his grace freed me even from myself. Hence when I hear that life of mine blamed, with whatever intention the one who does it does it, I am not so ungrateful as to grieve; for as much as he accuses my vice, so much do I praise my physician. Why, then, should I labour to defend those past and abolished evils of mine, about which Petilian said many false things but left unsaid more true ones? As for the time of my life after baptism, to those of you who know me I speak superfluously of the things that can be known to men; and those who do not know me ought not to be so unjust to me as to believe Petilian about me rather than you. For if a praising friend is not to be believed, neither is a detracting enemy. There remain the hidden things of a man, where conscience alone is witness, and it cannot be a witness before men. In these Petilian says I am a Manichee, speaking of another's conscience; I say I am not, speaking of my own. Choose whom you believe. However, since not even this short and easy defence of mine is needed, where the question concerns not the merit of one man of whatever kind, but the truth of the holy church, I must say more to you too, all of you in the party of Donatus who have read the curses that Petilian wrote against me; which I would not hear from him if I despised your perdition, if I had not the heart of Christian love.

What wonder, then, if, when I draw inward the grains shaken out of the Lord's threshing floor together with earth and chaff, I suffer the injury of rebounding dust, or, when I diligently seek my Lord's lost sheep, I am torn by the briars of thorny tongues? I beg you, set aside party zeal for a little while and judge between me and Petilian with some fairness. I want you to know the church's case, he wants you to know mine. For what other reason, except that he does not dare tell you not to believe my witnesses, whom I constantly bring forward in the church's case (for they are the prophets and apostles and the Lord of the prophets and apostles himself, Christ), whereas whatever he wishes to say about me you readily believe, a man against a man, your own man against a stranger? And if I bring forward any witnesses of my life, what great thing is it for him to say they are not to be believed and quickly persuade you of it, especially since whoever says a word for me will at once be counted an enemy of the party of Donatus and therefore of yours? So Petilian reigns; when he hurls any abuse at me, you all acclaim and applaud him. He has found himself a case he can win, but with you as judges; he needs neither witness nor proof, for whom the only proof of what he says is that he abundantly curses the man you hate most. For since, when the testimonies of divine Scripture for the Catholic Church are read so thick and clear, he remains mute, to your grief, he has chosen a subject where he may speak with your applause, though defeated. But if he says such things against me a thousand times over, or even more wicked ones, it is enough for me, for the matter I am now pursuing, that whatever I may be in it, the church for which I speak is unconquered.

For I am a man of Christ's threshing floor: chaff if bad, grain if good. Petilian's tongue is not the winnowing fork of this threshing floor; and so whatever evil he may say, even truly, against its chaff in no way prejudices its grain; and whatever curses and slanders he throws against the grain itself, their faith is exercised on earth and their reward increased in heaven. For to God's holy servants, who serve as soldiers of God in holiness, not against Petilian and such flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and rulers of such darkness (as all adversaries of the truth are, to whom would that we might say, “You were once darkness, but now light in the Lord”): to God's servants serving in this warfare, then, whatever slanderous abuse is spoken by enemies, which may create a bad reputation among the malicious and the rashly credulous, are weapons of the left hand; with these too the devil is defeated. For when we are tested by good reputation, whether we exalt ourselves in pride, and are tested by bad reputation, whether we love those very enemies by whom it is invented against us, we conquer the devil by the weapons of righteousness on the right hand and on the left. When the apostle had mentioned these, saying, “by the weapons of righteousness on the right and on the left,” he at once, as if explaining what he said, added, “through glory and dishonour, through ill repute and good repute,” and so on, counting glory and good repute among the weapons of the right hand, and dishonour and ill repute among those of the left.

If, then, I am a servant of God and a soldier not rejected, however eloquent a railer Petilian proves against me, ought I to take it ill that a most skilful smith of left-hand weapons has been procured for me? I must fight with these most skilfully, with the help of my Lord, and strike with them the one against whom I fight invisibly, who with most perverse and ancient cunning craftily aims and works so that I may hate Petilian because of these things and so be unable to fulfil Christ's command, “Love your enemies.” May his mercy turn this from me, who loved me and gave himself for me, so that hanging on the cross he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” and taught me to say of Petilian and such enemies of mine, “Lord, forgive them, for they do not know what they are saying.”

So if I obtain from you, as I have aimed, that, with all party zeal removed from your minds, you are fair judges between me and Petilian, I will show you that he has not answered my writings, so that you may understand that, compelled by lack of truth, he abandoned the case and threw what curses he could at the man who argued it in such a way that he could not answer. Yet what I am going to say is so plainly clear that, even if your minds are estranged from me by party zeal and hatred of me, provided only you read both, you will surely confess among yourselves in your hearts that I have spoken the truth.

For in answering the first part of his writings, which had then come into my hands, I passed over the abusive and sacrilegious wordiness in which he says, “They charge us with a double baptism, those who under the name of baptism have polluted their souls with a guilty washing; than whom, filthy as they are, all dirt is cleaner, who through a perverse cleanness have come to be defiled by their own water,” and I took up for examination and refutation what follows, where he says, “For it is the conscience of the giver that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver”; and I asked from what source the one who receives baptism is to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it.

Read now the very copious curses which he poured out against me, puffed up and angry, and see whether he answered my question: from what source is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the receiver does not know it? I beg you, search attentively, shake out every page, count every line, turn over every word, pick apart every syllable, and tell me, if you find it, where he answered: when the giver's conscience is polluted, from what source is the conscience of the one who is to receive it, not knowing this, to be cleansed?

For what did it matter that he added a word which he said I had taken away, and contended that he had written thus: “For it is the conscience of one who gives in holiness that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver”? For, so that you may know that I did not take it away, the addition does nothing to hinder my inquiry and nothing to relieve his failure. On those very words I ask again, and inquire whether he has answered: if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source is the receiver's conscience cleansed when the giver's conscience is stained and the one about to receive does not know it? Demand that this be answered, and do not allow the man to abandon the case and wander off in abuse. If the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to (see that I did not say “the conscience of the giver,” but added “of one who gives in holiness”), if, I say, the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source, then, is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it?

Let him go now and, with panting lungs and swollen throat, accuse me as a dialectician; or rather, not me, but let him summon dialectic itself before the popular court as a defendant, as if it were the craft of lying, and open wide against it the mouth of a forensic advocate with as crashing a din as he likes. Let him say what he wants before the unlearned, at which the learned may be disgusted and the unlearned deceived. Let him brand me, for my rhetoric, with the name of Tertullus the orator, by whom Paul was accused; let him give himself, for his advocacy, in which he boasts of his former power, the name of Paraclete, and rave that for this reason he was once, not now, a namesake of the Holy Spirit. Let him exaggerate with great relish the impurities of the Manichees and try to twist them against me by barking. Let him read out the proceedings against condemned men, some unknown to me and some known, and, because a former friend of mine named me there in my absence rather for his own defence, let him turn it, by some new law of his own, into the slander of a crime prejudged. Let him read the titles of my letters, inscribed by himself or his people as they pleased, and exult as if he had caught me confessing in them. Let him defame the blessed bread, given simply and cheerfully, with the ridiculous name of poisonous filth and madness, and think so badly of your hearts as to presume that he can be believed that love-charms were given to a woman with her husband not only aware but even approving. Let him want to count against me what the man who was to ordain me to the episcopate wrote about me in anger when I was still a presbyter, and not want to count for me that he asked and obtained pardon from a holy council for having so sinned against us; so ignorant or forgetful of Christian gentleness and of the gospel command that he even accuses what was mercifully forgiven to a brother humbly asking pardon for himself.

Let him go on also in wordy but plainly empty speech into matters he is wholly ignorant of, or rather in which he abuses the ignorance of very many; and from the confession of a certain woman, who had been a dedicated virgin in the Catholic Church and said she was a catechumen of the Manichees, let him say and write what he likes about their baptism, not knowing, or pretending not to know, that among them catechumens are not so called because baptism is due to them at some time, but that those are so called who are also called hearers, because they cannot keep the precepts, as better and greater, which are kept by those whom they think should be distinguished and honoured with the name of the elect. Let him contend with amazing rashness, either mistaken or deceiving, that I was even a presbyter of the Manichees; let him set out the words of the fourth book of my Confessions, which are perfectly clear in themselves to readers and from much that is said before and after, in whatever sense he likes, and argue from them; and finally, let him exult as victor at having put back two words of his which I, as a thief of his words, had taken away.

In all these things, certainly, as you will be able to learn or recognize by reading, he exercised the force of his tongue with whatever range of boasting he pleased; yet nowhere did he say from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed when he does not know the giver's to be stained. But I, amid his noise or after his great and, as he thinks, very terrible noise, repeat this very thing slowly, as they say, and well, so that he may at least answer it; I demand: if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source is the one to be cleansed who does not know the giver's conscience to be stained? And in his whole letter I find nothing said to this.

Perhaps one of you will now say to me: “All these things he said against you he meant to serve to disfigure you, and through you those with whom you are in communion, so that neither they themselves nor those whom you are trying to bring over to your communion would think you of any further weight. For the rest, one must consider from the point where he set out the words of your letter whether he answered nothing to them.” Let us do so, then: let us consider his writings from that very point. Excepting the preface, in which I wished to prepare the reader's mind and to pass over a few first words of his, insulting rather than relevant, I said: “For it is the conscience of the giver that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver. What if the giver's conscience is hidden, and perhaps stained? How will it be able to cleanse the receiver's conscience, if, as he says, the conscience of the giver is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver? For if he says that whatever evil lies hidden in the giver's conscience does not concern the receiver, that ignorance will perhaps avail so far as this, that the receiver, not knowing, cannot be stained by the conscience of his baptizer. Let it be granted, then, that another's stained conscience, when it is unknown, does not stain; but can it also cleanse? From what source, then, is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it, especially since he adds and says: For he who has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt?”

All these words of my letter Petilian set out to refute. Let us see, then, whether he refuted them, whether he answered at all. For I add the words which he slanderously says I took away, and I repeat the same thing so, or even more briefly (for by adding these two words he has greatly helped the brevity of this proposition): if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt, from what source is the receiver's conscience cleansed when he does not know the giver's to be stained, and when he unknowingly receives faith from a faithless man? I ask from what source he is cleansed. Let him tell us; let him not go off onto something else, not spread fogs before the unlearned; at least, after many winding detours have been put in and gone through, let him at last some time tell us from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed when the stained conscience of the faithless baptizer is hidden, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt. For he unknowingly receives from a faithless man who has not the conscience of one who gives in holiness, but a stained and hidden one. From what source, then, is he cleansed, from what source does he receive faith? For if he is not cleansed then, nor receives faith then, when the faithless and stained baptizer is hidden, why, when the baptizer is afterwards exposed and condemned, is he not baptized again, so as to be cleansed and receive faith? But if, while that faithless and stained man is hidden, he is cleansed and receives faith, from what source is he cleansed, from what source does he receive, where there is no conscience of one who gives in holiness to cleanse that of the receiver? Let him say this, let him answer this: from what source is he cleansed, from what source does he receive, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and it is not there when the baptizer, stained and faithless, lay hidden? Nothing at all has been answered to this.

But see, hard pressed in the case, he again makes a cloudy and windy attack on me, so as to obscure the clear sky of truth, and becomes copious out of utter poverty, not by saying true things but by vomiting empty curses. Hold fast, most attentively and firmly, to what he ought to answer, that is, from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed when the giver's stained conscience is hidden, so that his blast may not perhaps knock it out of your hands and you yourselves be swept away by the murky storm of his turbulent speech, so as not to know at all from where you have departed or where you should return; and see the man wander where he can, while he cannot stand by the business he has undertaken. See how much he says while having nothing to say. He says that I slip like something slippery but am held; that I neither build up nor confirm what I object; that I devise uncertain things for certain ones; that I do not let readers believe what is true, but make them suspect doubtful things more deeply. He says I have the damnable mind of the Academic Carneades; he even tries to suggest what the Academics think of the falsity or deceptiveness of human sense; and in this too, quite ignorant of what he is saying, he asserts that they say snow is black when it is white, and silver black, that a tower seems round or cylindrical when it is long, that an oar is broken in the water when it is whole. And all this because, when he had said, “The conscience of the giver, or of one who gives in holiness, is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver,” I said against it, “What if the giver's conscience is hidden, and perhaps stained?” Is this the black snow, the black silver, the round tower for a long one, the oar broken in the water for a whole one? For I said a thing that can be thought and cannot be, that the giver's conscience is hidden and perhaps stained?

And he goes on and cries: “What is ‘what if,’ what is ‘perhaps,’ but the uncertain and inconstant hesitation of one in doubt, of which that author of yours says: What if I now go back to those who say: What if the sky now falls?” Is what I said, “What if the giver's conscience is hidden, and perhaps stained?”, as if I had said, “What if the sky now falls?” “What if” was said, of course, because it can happen that it is hidden, and it can happen that it is not. For when what he thinks or what he has committed is not known, the giver's conscience is certainly hidden from the receiver; but when his sin is made manifest, it is not hidden. “And perhaps stained” was said, because it can happen that it is hidden and clean, and again it can happen that it is hidden and stained. That is why “what if,” that is why “perhaps.” Is this like “What if the sky now falls”? O how often have men been convicted and have confessed that they had stained and adulterous consciences when ignorant people were baptized by them, after they were degraded once their crime was made manifest; and yet the sky did not fall! What are Pilus and Furius doing here, who defended injustice against justice? What is the atheist Protagoras doing here, who denied that God exists, so that the prophet seems to have foretold of him, “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God”? What are these men doing here, why were they named, except to intervene for a man who has nothing to say, so that, while at least something is said about them, though to no purpose, the case may seem to be being pleaded, and what has not been answered may be believed to have been answered?

Finally, if these two or three words, “what if” and “perhaps,” are so intolerable that on their account the Academics, long asleep, are roused, and Carneades and Pilus and Furius and Protagoras and black snow and the falling sky and other such mad and absurd things, let them be removed from the midst. For in truth what we want to say can be said without them. See, it is enough what was put a little later and set out by him from my letter: “From what source, then, is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it?” Surely here there is no “what if” and “perhaps.” So let it be answered. Pay attention, in case he answers it in what follows: “But I,” he says, “bind you, quibbler, to the faith of believing, so that you may wander no further. Why do you turn life aside by arguments of folly to errors? Why do you disturb the reason of faith about irrational things? With this one word I hold and convict you.” Petilian said this, not I. These are from Petilian's letter; but I have now added to it those two words which he accuses me of taking away, and nonetheless have shown that the sentence of my inquiry, which he does not answer, stands fixed much more briefly and clearly. These certainly are the two: “in holiness” and “knowingly,” so that it is not “the conscience of the giver” but “the conscience of one who gives in holiness,” and not “he who has received faith from the faithless” but “he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless.” These words I had not taken away; I had not found them in the copy that was given me. It may be that it was faulty; for this too is not incredible, unless Academic odium is to be stirred up against me even over this, and my saying that the copy was faulty is asserted to be like saying snow is black. For why should I repay him a rash suspicion and say that he added afterwards what he pretended I took away, when the copy, which does not get angry, can bear this mark of faultiness without any slanderous rashness of mine?

And the first of these, “in holiness,” does not hinder at all my inquiry, by which he is hard pressed, whether I say, “if the conscience of the giver is looked to,” or, “if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source, then, is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, if the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it?” As for the other added word, “knowingly,” so that it is said not “for he who has received faith from the faithless” but “he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt,” I admit that, as though it were missing, I said some things whose loss I readily accept, since they rather delayed my ease than helped my ability. For how much more readily, how much more fully and briefly I ask thus: if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt, from what source is he cleansed from whom the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness is hidden, and from what source does he receive true faith who is unknowingly baptized by a faithless man? Let it be said from what source, and there the whole question of baptism will be clear, there all that is sought will shine out; but if it is said, not if the time is used up in cursing.

So whatever he slanders about these two words as taken away, or boasts about as added, you see that it does not hinder my question at all; and he, finding no answer to it, yet not to be silent, rushes again and again at my person, departing, I would say, from the case, if he had ever approached it. For as if the question were about me and not about the truth of the church or of baptism, he says that I argued with those two words removed so that it might not harm my conscience that I did not know the sacrilegious conscience of my defiler, as he calls him. If that were so, that word “knowingly,” as set down, would rather help me when added and harm me when removed. For if I had wanted to defend myself on the ground that I was thought not to have known my baptizer's conscience, I would take Petilian as speaking for me when he says, not in just any way, “he who has received faith from the faithless,” but, “he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt”; so that I might boast from this that I received not guilt but faith, because I would say: “I did not receive knowingly from a faithless man; as a man, I did not know the conscience of the man who gave.” So see, and count if you can, how many superfluous things he says against that one “I did not know,” which he represents me as having said, though I did not say it at all; because neither was the question about me, so that I should say it, nor did any crime appear in the one who baptized me, so that I should be compelled to say for my defence that I did not know his conscience.

And yet this man, so as not to answer what I said, sets before himself what I did not say and distracts men from attending to his debt, so that what must be answered may not be demanded. He often interposes: “‘I did not know,’ you say,” and answers, “But even if you did not know,” and as it were convicts me, so that I may not be allowed to say, “I did not know.” He mentions Mensurius, Caecilian, Macarius, Taurinus, and Romanus, and asserts that they did things against the church of God which I could not be ignorant of, since I am an African and already almost an old man in age; whereas, as I hear, Mensurius died in the unity of communion before the party of Donatus split off, and as for Caecilian's case, I have read that they themselves brought it to Constantine, and that he was acquitted by the bishops whom that emperor gave as judges, once and again, and, when they appealed to him, by the emperor himself a third time. And whatever Macarius, Taurinus, and Romanus did, by judicial or executive power, against their obstinate fury for the sake of unity, it is established that they did it according to the laws which those same men, by taking Caecilian's case to the emperor's judgment, compelled to be enacted and enforced against themselves.

Among many things quite irrelevant he also says that I was struck by a sentence of the proconsul Messianus, so that I fled from Africa; and because of this falsehood, which, if he did not invent it himself, he certainly believed maliciously from malicious inventors, how many other false things in consequence he was not afraid, with amazing rashness, not only to say but even to write! Whereas I came to Milan before the consulship of Bauto, and on the Kalends of January recited a panegyric for that consul before so great an assembly and gathering of people, as my profession of rhetoric then required; and I returned to Africa from that sojourn after the death of the tyrant Maximus; whereas the proconsul Messianus heard the Manichees after the consulship of Bauto, as the date of the proceedings inserted by the same Petilian shows. If it were necessary to prove these things to those who doubt or believe the contrary, I could bring forward many men eminent in the world as most reliable witnesses of the whole of that period of my life.

But why do we inquire into these things, why do we both suffer and cause superfluous delays? Are we going to find from this from what source the conscience of a receiver is to be cleansed who does not know the giver's to be stained, and from what source he receives faith who is unknowingly baptized by a faithless man? When Petilian had set this out from my letter as if to answer it, he said whatever else he wanted rather than what the case required. How often he said, “If you did not know,” as if I had said what I never said, that I did not know my baptizer's conscience; and he seemed to do nothing else with his cursing mouth than to appear to convict me of not being ignorant of the evils of those among whom I was baptized and to whose communion I was joined, understanding well enough, surely, that ignorance would not make me guilty! See, then: if I were ignorant, as he so often repeated, I would beyond doubt be innocent of all those evils. From what source, then, would I be cleansed, who, not knowing the conscience of one who did not give in holiness, could not in the least be hindered by his crimes; from what source would I receive faith, unknowingly baptized by a faithless man? For not in vain did he so often repeat, “If you did not know,” except so as not to let me be thought innocent; beyond doubt showing that no one's innocence is violated if he unknowingly receives faith from a faithless man and does not know the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness. So let him say from what source such people are cleansed, from what source they receive faith, not guilt. But do not let him deceive you: let him say it, not say nothing by saying much, or rather say much by saying nothing. Next, what comes to mind and must not be passed over: if I am guilty because I was not ignorant, to speak in his terms, and I was not ignorant because I am an African and already almost an old man, at least let the children of the other churches throughout the world not be guilty, who neither by nation nor by age could know these things you charge, true or false; who nevertheless, if they fall into your hands, are rebaptized without any regard.

But we are not now inquiring into these things. Let him rather answer what, so as not to be compelled to answer it, he departs from so copiously: from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed who does not know the giver's to be stained, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver; and from what source he receives faith who is unknowingly baptized by a faithless man, if whoever knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt. So, leaving aside his curses, which he threw at me without any sound consideration, let us still attend, in case he says what we demand in what follows. It is pleasant to see how garrulously he set out my words, as if he would most easily tear them down and overturn them: “But let us return,” he says, “to that argument of your phantasm, by which you seemed to paint for yourself in words some baptizer or other. For it befitted you to imagine likenesses of truth, who do not see the truth.” Petilian spoke these words of his before setting out my words, then added: “‘See,’ you say, ‘a faithless man stands ready to baptize, and the one to be baptized does not know his faithlessness.’” He did not state my whole proposition and question, and at once he himself began to question me, saying: “Who is this man, or where did he spring from, whom you put forward? Why do you seem to yourself to see the one you feign, so as not to see the one you ought to see, examine most carefully, and approve? But since I understand that you are ignorant of the order of the sacrament, I tell you this briefly: you ought both to have examined the baptizer and to have been examined by him.” What were we waiting for? That he should say from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed who does not know the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness, and from what source he receives faith, not guilt, who has unknowingly received baptism from a faithless man. See, we have heard that the baptizer must be examined most carefully by one who wants to receive faith, not guilt, so that he may find the conscience of one who gives in holiness to cleanse that of the receiver. For one who did not examine, and received unknowingly from a faithless man, by the very fact that he did not examine and did not know the giver's stained conscience, had no source from which to receive faith, but only guilt. What, then, did it help that he added, as a great thing, “knowingly,” which he slanderously said I took away? When he would not have it said, “He who has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt,” he seemed to leave some hope to the one who did not know. But now, when asked from what source one receives faith who is unknowingly baptized by a faithless man, he answers that he ought to have examined the baptizer; so beyond doubt he does not allow the wretch even to be ignorant, finding no source from which he can receive faith unless he has placed his hope in the man who baptizes.

This is what we abhor in you; this is what the divine sentence condemns, crying most truly and plainly, “Cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man.” This is what holy humility and apostolic love most openly forbid, as Paul cries, “Let no one glory in man.” This is why the attack of empty slanders and the sharpest curses grows thick against us, as if, with the man overthrown, no hope remained for those to whom we minister God's word and sacrament according to the stewardship entrusted to us. We answer them: “How long will you pile on against a man?” The venerable Catholic fellowship answers them: “Will not my soul be subject to God? For from him is my salvation; for he is my God, my upholder; I shall not move away.” For what other cause did these men have for moving out of God's house than that they pretended they could not bear the vessels made for dishonour, without which that house will not be until the day of judgment; whereas it is rather apparent from the proceedings and records of that time that they themselves were such and slanderously charged others. Concerning these vessels made for dishonour, so that he may not be disturbed by them and move out of the great house, which is one for the great householder, the servant of God and the good believer, or one about to receive faith in baptism, says what I recalled a little before: “Will not my soul be subject to God?” To God, surely, not to man; “for from him is my salvation,” not from man. But this man, so as not to give the man to God to be washed and cleansed even when the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness is hidden and someone unknowingly receives faith from a faithless man, says, “I tell you this briefly: you ought both to have examined the baptizer and to have been examined by him.”

I beg you, pay attention here: I ask from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed when he does not know the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver; and from what source he receives faith who is unknowingly baptized by a faithless man, if whoever knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt; and he answers me that both the baptizer and the one to be baptized must be examined. And to prove this, about which there is no question, he brings the example of John: that those examined him who asked him whom he claimed to be, and that he also examined those to whom he said, “Brood of vipers, who showed you to flee from the wrath to come?” What has this to do with the matter, with the case? God had borne witness to John's surpassing holiness, with a most glorious prophecy going before, both when he was conceived and when he was born. They, already believing him holy, were asking which of the holy ones he claimed to be, or whether he himself was the Holy One of holy ones, which is Christ Jesus. For such grace was held to be in him that whatever he said of himself would at once be believed. But if by this example it is claimed that any baptizer now must be examined, whatever each says of himself will have to be believed. And who is the hypocrite, whom, as it is written, the Holy Spirit certainly flees, who would not want the best to be believed of himself and work for it with whatever words he could? So when he has been asked who he is and has answered that he is God's faithful steward and has a conscience polluted by the stain of no crime, will that be the whole examination; or must his conduct and life also be looked into more carefully? Certainly so. But it is not written that those who questioned John in the desert of the Jordan as to who he was did this.

So this example has nothing at all to do with the matter in hand. Rather, that apostolic sentence urges this care sufficiently, where he says, “Let them first be tested, and then let them minister, having no crime.” Since this is done carefully and customarily on both sides by almost everyone, how is it that so many have been found reprobate after the time of their stewardship, except that human diligence is often deceived, and some who were good at first change for the worse? Since these things happen so often that they let no one ignore or forget them, what does Petilian mean by insultingly teaching us briefly that the baptizer must be examined by the one being baptized, when we ask from what source the receiver's conscience is to be cleansed when the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness is hidden, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver? “Since I understand,” he says, “that you are ignorant of the order of the sacrament, I tell you this briefly: you ought both to have examined the baptizer and to have been examined by him.” O what an answer! Around him in so many places stands so great a multitude of people baptized by men who, though they first seemed righteous and chaste, were afterwards convicted and cast down when their crimes were laid bare; and he thinks he escapes the force of this question, in which we ask from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed when he does not know the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, because he says briefly that the baptizer must be examined. Nothing is more unhappy than not to agree with the truth, by which one is so shut in that he cannot find a way out. We ask from whom one receives faith who is unknowingly baptized by a faithless man. The answer is: he ought to have examined his baptizer. So, because he does not examine him and receives faith from a faithless man even unknowingly, does he receive not faith but guilt? Why, then, are those not baptized again who are shown to have been baptized by men exposed and convicted, while these still lay hidden?

“And where,” he says, “is the word I added, ‘knowingly,’ so that I did not say, ‘he who has received faith from the faithless,’ but, ‘he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt’?” Then he who received unknowingly from a faithless man received faith, not guilt; and so I ask from what source he received it. Pressed hard there, he answers: “He ought to have examined.” Granted, he ought to have. He did not, or could not. What do you judge of him: was he cleansed or not? If he was cleansed, I ask from what source; for the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness, of which he was ignorant, could not cleanse him. But if he was not cleansed, order him to be cleansed. You do not order it; so he was cleansed. Say from what source. You at least say what he did not say. For I put forward the same words to which he could not answer: “Look, a faithless man stands ready to baptize, and the one to be baptized does not know his faithlessness. What do you think he will receive, faith or guilt?” What has been put forward so far is enough. Answer, or look carefully at what he answered: you will find his abuse refuted. For he blames me, as if mocking, because I put forward likenesses of truth, not seeing the truth; and, repeating my words and halving my sentence, he says: “‘Look,’ you say, ‘a faithless man stands ready to baptize, and the one to be baptized does not know his faithlessness.’” Then he adds: “Who is this, or where did he spring from?” As if there were one or two, and not everything everywhere full of such men! Why does he ask me who this is, or where he sprang from, and not rather look around and see that there are few churches, in cities or in the countryside, that do not have men detected in crimes and cast out of the clergy? When they lay hidden and wanted to seem good though they were bad, and to be thought chaste though they were adulterers, they were certainly hypocrites; certainly, as it is written, the Holy Spirit fled from them. From the crowd of these, then, while still hiding, sprang that faithless man whom I put forward. Why does he ask me where he sprang from, shutting his eyes to so great a crowd, from which, if only those were considered who could be convicted and cast down, the noise of them is enough for the blind?

What of the fact that he himself put in his letter that Quodvultdeus, convicted among you of two adulteries and cast out, was received by our people? What then? Let me say it without prejudice to him, who has either proved or persuaded that his cause was good: when such men among you, not yet detected, baptize, what is received from them, faith or guilt? Not faith, certainly, because they do not have the conscience of one who gives in holiness to cleanse that of the receiver; but not guilt either, because of that added word: “For he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt”; and the people who were baptized by them certainly did not know what kind of men they were. So, not receiving faith from them, because they did not have the conscience of one who gives in holiness, and not receiving guilt either, because they were baptized not knowing but ignorant of their crimes, they remained without faith and without guilt. They are not, then, in the number of such scandalous men; but neither can they be in the number of the faithful, because, as they could not receive guilt from them, so they could not receive faith either. Yet we see them counted by you among the faithful, and none of you judging that they should be baptized, but holding valid that they have been baptized. So they received faith, and yet not from those who did not have the conscience of one who gives in holiness to cleanse that of the receiver. From what source, then, did they receive it? This is what I am busy with, this I ask urgently, this I most vehemently demand to be answered.

Look now at Petilian, how, so as not to answer this, or so as not to appear caught unable to answer it, he wanders emptily through insults against us, accusing and proving nothing; and wherever he perhaps tries to resist pugnaciously, as it were, for his cause, he is most easily beaten everywhere; and yet to this one thing that we ask he answers nothing at all: if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it? For by citing these words from my letter he put me forward as asking, and showed himself answering nothing. For when he had said what I have already recalled, in which I showed that he did not answer what I asked, and when, hard pressed, he had been compelled to say that the baptizer must be examined by the one to be baptized and the one to be baptized by the baptizer, and had tried to build this up from the example of John, in case he found very careless or very unlearned hearers, he brought in other testimonies of Scripture irrelevant to the matter: that the eunuch said to Philip, “Here is water; what prevents me from being baptized?” (“because he knew,” he says, “that the lost are prevented”), and that Philip did not forbid his being baptized because he had tested him while reading as to how he believed in Christ, as if he had forbidden Simon Magus; and that the prophets feared to be deceived by false baptism, and that therefore Isaiah said, “deceitful water that has no faith,” as if showing that among faithless men water is deceitful; whereas not Isaiah but Jeremiah said this of deceitful men, figuratively calling the people water, which is most plainly shown in the Apocalypse; and that David said, “Let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head,” whereas he said this of the flattery of a fawner deceiving with false praise, so that the head of the one praised swells into pride. This meaning is opened by the words set before it in the same psalm, for he says, “The righteous will correct me in mercy and rebuke me; but let not the oil of the sinner fatten my head.” What is clearer, what more evident than this sentence? He would rather be rebuked mercifully by the harsh correction of the righteous so as to be healed, than be anointed by the soft blandishments of a flatterer so as to be puffed up.

Petilian also recalls that the apostle Paul warned that not every spirit should be believed, but that the spirits should be tested whether they are from God; as if this diligence were applied in order that the wheat might now be separated from the chaff before the time, and not rather so that the wheat may not be deceived by the chaff; or as if, when even a lying spirit says something true, it must be denied because a detestable spirit said it. Whoever thinks so is so mad that he might contend that Peter ought not to have said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” because the demons had already said something of the kind. Since, then, the baptism of Christ, whether ministered by the unrighteous or the righteous, is nothing other than the baptism of Christ, a careful man and a good believer must avoid the man's iniquity, not condemn God's sacraments.

In all these things Petilian certainly does not answer, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source the one who receives baptism is to be cleansed when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it. A colleague of his from Thubursicubure, one Cyprian, was caught in a brothel with a most shameful woman, brought before Primian of Carthage, and condemned. When this man baptized, before he was detected and cast out, he certainly did not have the conscience of one who gives in holiness to cleanse that of the receiver. From what source, then, were those cleansed who today, though he is condemned, are certainly not washed again? There was no need for me to name the man, except so that Petilian might not say again, “Who is this, or where did he spring from?” Why did your people not examine this baptizer, as John was examined, on Petilian's view? Or did they examine him, as far as men could examine a man, and for a long time not find him out, hiding in cunning pretence? Was this man's water not deceitful, or is not a fornicator's oil the oil of a sinner? Or, as the Catholic Church says and is true, was that water and that oil not his by whom it was ministered, but his whose name was invoked there? Why did those who were baptized by this hypocrite in hiding not test his spirit, since it was not from God? For the holy Spirit of discipline was fleeing the hypocrite. Or was he fleeing him and yet not deserting his own sacraments, though ministered through him? Finally, since you do not deny that those were cleansed whom, though he is condemned, you do not trouble to cleanse, see whether in all the fogs he has so variously spread Petilian answers anywhere from what source these were cleansed, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, which a hidden unclean man could not have.

So, answering nothing to what is so insistently asked of him, he next gains himself room to talk: “Since both the prophets and the apostle,” he says, “feared these things cautiously, with what face do you say that the baptism of a sinner is holy to those who believe well?” As if I or any Catholic said that baptism is a sinner's which is given or received with a sinner ministering, and not his in whose name the believer is baptized. From there he now runs off to Judas the traitor and says whatever he can against him, bringing in the prophetic testimonies sent before about him so long before, as if he would drench the church of Christ spread through the whole world, whose case is at issue in this question, with the impiety of Judas the traitor; not considering that he ought to have been warned even by this that it is as little to be doubted that the church of Christ is that which is spread among all nations, since this was truly prophesied so long before, as it is to be doubted that Christ had to be betrayed by one of his disciples, since this too was likewise prophesied.

But plainly, after this, when Petilian came to that objection of ours, that they received the baptism of the Maximianists whom they had condemned (though in stating this question he preferred to use his own words rather than mine; for we do not say that the baptism of sinners ought to profit us, since we say it is not of sinners, nor of any men at all, because we know it to be Christ's; but he put it thus: “But you stubbornly assert,” he says, “that the baptism of sinners ought to profit you, because we too, as you said, preserve the baptism of the guilty whom we justly condemned”), when, I say, he came to this question, even his feigned fight failed him completely. Where to go, how to get out, by what approach, searched out or built, he might either slip away secretly or break out by force, he did not find. “Although,” he says, “I will show in a second book how great the difference is between us and ours and yours whom you call innocent, still, meanwhile, first rescue yourselves from the crimes of your colleagues which you know, and then ask for an account of those whom we cast out.” Who would answer like this? Who among men would answer like this, but one who opposes the truth and finds nothing to answer against it? If we too say the same words, “Meanwhile, first rescue yourselves from the crimes of your colleagues which you know, and then charge us with any crime of those you think wicked among us,” have we both won or both lost? Rather, he wins for his church and in his church who taught us in his Scripture that no one should glory in man and that whoever glories should glory in the Lord. For see, we who say with the voice of truth that the believer is justified not by the man by whom he is baptized but by him of whom it is written, “To one who believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness,” since we do not glory in man but strive, by his gift, when we glory, to glory in the Lord: how secure we are, whatever error or crime he may be able to prove about some men of our communion! For among us all the wicked, whether they lie wholly hidden, or are known to some but tolerated because of the good to whom they are unknown and before whom they cannot be convicted, for the sake of the bond of unity and peace, so that the wheat may not be rooted up with the tares, carry the load of their own malice in such a way that no one shares it with them except those whom their iniquity pleases. For we do not fear that those they baptize cannot be justified, since they believe in him who justifies the ungodly, so that their faith may be reckoned as righteousness.

So among us neither the man whom he said was cast out by us for the crime of the Sodomites, with another put in his place, and then restored again to our college (not knowing what he is saying), nor the man whom he mentions as having been a penitent among you, however their cases can or cannot be defended, prejudge anything against the church of God, which is spread through all nations and grows in the world until the harvest. In it, if those you accuse are truly wicked, they are no longer in it but in its chaff; but if they are good, when you defame them with unjust accusations, they themselves are tested like gold while you burn like chaff. Yet the church is not stained by others' sins; spread through the whole world, according to most faithful prophecies, it awaits the end of the age as its shore, where, drawn in, it will be rid of the bad fish, with whom, within the same nets of the Lord, as long as it ought not impatiently to be separated from them, the inconvenience of nature could be borne innocently. Nor is church discipline therefore neglected by Christ's steadfast, diligent, and prudent stewards, where crimes are so manifest that they cannot be defended on any plausible ground. There are innumerable examples in those who were bishops or clergy of some other such rank and now, degraded, have either gone off to other lands out of shame, or passed over to you yourselves or to other heresies, or are known in their own regions. Their number, scattered through the lands, is so great that, if Petilian had curbed his reckless cursing a little and considered it, he would never have fallen into so openly false and empty a sentence as to think he could say to us: “None of you is innocent, where no guilty man is condemned.”

For to leave out others living in various lands (for this kind of man is hardly lacking anywhere), so that it may appear that wicked leaders and ministers are usually condemned in the Catholic Church too, he could have looked close by at Honorius of Milevis. And as for Splendonius, whom, condemned as a deacon in the Catholic Church, he rebaptized and made a presbyter, whose condemnation in Gaul was sent to us by the brothers and publicly posted to be read in Constantina itself by our colleague Fortunatus, and whom afterwards the same Petilian cast out after experiencing his horrible plots: why could not this Splendonius remind him how the wicked are degraded in the Catholic Church too? I wonder over what precipice of rashness his heart was, when he dictated these words and dared to say, “None of you is innocent, where no guilty man is condemned.” Therefore the wicked in the Catholic Church, mixed in bodily but separated spiritually, both when they are unknown by the human condition and when they are condemned in consideration of discipline, carry their own loads; and so those are secure, if they do not share their sins by imitation and consent, who are baptized by them with Christ's baptism; because even if they were baptized by the very best, they would be justified only by him who justifies the ungodly. For to those who believe in him who justifies the ungodly, faith is reckoned as righteousness.

But you, when the Maximianists are put to you, condemned by the sentence of a council of three hundred and ten, attacked by that same council presented in so many proconsular and municipal proceedings, driven from the basilicas they held by orders of judges and the aid of cities, and received back by you and honoured, together with those whom they had baptized outside your communion, without any question of baptism, you find nothing to answer. For you are defeated by a sentence, not true but your own, by which you contend that in the same communion of sacraments some perish by the crimes of others, and that each is such as the man by whom he was baptized: if guilty, guilty; if innocent, innocent. If these things are true, then, to leave out countless others, the crimes of the Maximianists, whose wickedness your people, in so numerous a council, exaggerated to the likeness of those whom the earth swallowed alive, have certainly destroyed you. But if the crimes of the Maximianists have not destroyed you, what you think is false, and much less could some unproved crimes of Africans destroy the world. And so, as the apostle writes, each carries his own load, and the baptism of Christ is no one's but Christ's; and in vain does Petilian promise that he will speak in a second book about what we press concerning the Maximianists, thinking too badly of men's hearts, as if they did not understand that he has nothing to say.

For if the baptism which Praetextatus and Felicianus ministered in the communion of Maximian was theirs, why was it accepted by you as Christ's in those they baptized? But if it is truly Christ's, as it is, and could not profit those who had it with the crime of schism, what can you say you conferred on those whom you received with that same baptism, except that, the crime of wicked division having been blotted out through the bond of peace, they were not forced to receive the sacrament of the holy washing as if they did not have it, but what they had, which was harmful before, began now to be useful to them? Or if this was not conferred on them in your communion, because nothing of the kind could be conferred on schismatics among schismatics, still this is conferred on you in the Catholic communion: not that you receive baptism as if you lacked it, but that the baptism you received may profit you. For all the sacraments of Christ are held not to salvation but to judgment without the love of Christ's unity. But since it is not a true but your own opinion that Christ's baptism perished from the world through the baptism of some traitors or other, you rightly find nothing to answer about the baptism of the Maximianists that you accepted.

See, then, and remember most vigilantly, how Petilian has not answered even those very things which he puts to himself in such a way as to seem to say something. But that other matter he dropped long ago altogether and would not tell us, because certainly he could not, nor will he ever tell us, to the end of his volume, what he cited from the first parts of my letter as if to refute it. For even with those two words added, which he boasted of as his strongest defences, as if I had taken them away, he lies no less defenceless, finding nothing to answer when asked: if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source is the conscience of one to be cleansed who does not know the polluted conscience of one not giving in holiness; and if he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt, from what source will he receive faith, not guilt, who is unknowingly baptized by a faithless man? To this, it is clear, he has answered nothing all this while that he has been speaking.

Next he went on, with cursing mouth, to revile monasteries and monks, blaming me too because this kind of life was instituted by me; a kind of life whose nature he does not know at all, or rather, though it is very well known throughout the world, pretends not to know. Then, asserting that I said Christ is the baptizer, he also added some words from my letter, as if I had said this from my own view, when I said it from yours and his; and he inveighed with the most copious ferocity as if against me for saying it, when the view he criticizes is not mine but his and yours, as I will show clearly a little later, as far as I can. Then he tried to teach us, in many superfluous words, that Christ does not baptize, but that baptism is in his name together with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; and about the Trinity itself he said what he wished or what he could, that Christ is the middle of the Trinity. From there he heaped on us whatever insults he liked from the names of the magicians Simon and Bar-Jesus; then, cautiously suspending the case of Optatus of Thamugadi, so as not to be drenched in its odium, he said that neither he nor his people could judge him, and in this very thing he accused us of having pressed Optatus by my suggestions.

Finally he ended his letter by exhorting and warning his people not to be deceived by us, and lamenting over ours, that we had made them worse than they had been. When these things have been carefully considered and examined, it appears clearly enough from that very letter he wrote that Petilian did not answer at all what I first put in my letter: if, as he says, the conscience of the giver, or rather (to add what he thinks a great support), if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when, if the giver's conscience is polluted, the one about to receive does not know it? So it is not surprising that a man resisting for falsehood, pressed by the straits of the truth coming against him, panted out mad abuse rather than chose to walk with that truth which cannot be conquered.

Now, I beg you, attend a little, so that I may show you clearly what he feared, so as not to answer this, and bring to light what he tried to obscure. He could certainly have answered most easily when we asked from what source the one who receives baptism is to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it: “By the Lord God”; and said with complete confidence, “Certainly God cleanses the receiver's conscience when he does not know the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness.” But the man, who had already been forced by the aim of your sect to place the cleansing of the receiver in the giver's conscience, since he had said, “For it is the conscience of the giver,” or “of one who gives in holiness, that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver,” feared that a man would seem to be better baptized by a hidden bad man than by a manifestly good man; for then he would be cleansed not by the conscience of a man giving in holiness, but by the most excellent holiness of God himself. Fearing this, then, lest so great an absurdity, or rather madness, should follow him that he would not know where to flee, he would not say from what source the receiver's conscience is to be cleansed when he does not know the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness; and, confusing everything with litigious noise, he preferred to hide what was asked of him rather than give the questioner an answer by which he would at once be choked; never thinking that our letters could be read by men of good sense, or his by those who had also read mine, to which he pretended to answer.

For what I have just said is set out most plainly in that very letter of mine against which he said nothing in writing; and see, I beg, what he did there, and, though you favour him and hate us, bear it with an even mind, if you can. For since in his former letter, to whose first parts, which alone had then come into our hands, I had first answered, he had placed the hope of the man to be baptized in the man who baptizes, so as to say, “For everything consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have something as its head, it is nothing”; since, then, Petilian had said this, meaning nothing else to be understood as the origin and root and head of the man to be baptized than the man by whom he was baptized, I added and said: “So we ask, when that faithless baptizer is hidden, if the one he baptizes then receives faith and not guilt, if his baptizer is not then his origin and root and head, who is it from whom he receives faith? Where is the origin from which he springs, where the root from which he grows, where the head from which he begins? Or perhaps, when the one baptized does not know that the baptizer is faithless, is it then Christ who gives faith, then Christ who is the origin, root, and head?” This, then, I say and cry out now too, as I cried out there: “O human rashness and pride! Why do you not rather allow that Christ always gives faith, making a Christian by giving it? Why do you not allow that Christ is always the origin of the Christian, that the Christian fixes his root in Christ, that Christ is the Christian's head? For even when spiritual grace is imparted to believers through a holy and faithful minister, it is not the minister himself who justifies, but that one alone of whom it is said that he justifies the ungodly. Nor was the apostle Paul the head and origin of those he had planted, or Apollos the root of those he had watered, rather than he who had given them the growth; for he himself says, ‘I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth; so neither the one who plants is anything, nor the one who waters, but God who gives the growth.’ Nor was he their root, but rather he who said, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches.’ And how could he be their head, when he says that we who are many are one body in Christ, and in many places proclaims most plainly that Christ himself is the head of the whole body? Therefore, whether someone receives the sacrament of baptism from a faithful or a faithless minister, let all his hope be in Christ, so that he may not be cursed as one who puts his hope in man.”

These things I set down, I think both clearly and truly, in my former letter when I answered Petilian. These I have now recalled too, urging and commending that our hope be not at all in man, and that we believe Christ God to be the cleanser and justifier of men who believe in him who justifies the ungodly, so that their faith may be reckoned as righteousness, whether the man who ministers baptism is holy, or ungodly and a hypocrite whom the Holy Spirit flees. Then I added how great an absurdity would follow if it were otherwise, and said what I say now too: “Otherwise, if each is reborn in spiritual grace such as the one by whom he is baptized, and if, when the man who baptizes is plainly good, he himself gives faith and is himself the origin, root, and head of the one being born, but when the faithless baptizer is hidden, each then receives faith from Christ, then draws his origin from Christ, then is rooted in Christ, then glories in Christ as head, then all who are baptized ought to wish to have faithless baptizers and not to know it. For however good the baptizers they have, Christ is beyond comparison better, and he will be the baptized person's head only if the baptizer is secretly faithless. But if it is utter madness to believe this (for Christ always justifies the ungodly by making a Christian out of the ungodly; faith is always received from Christ; Christ is always the origin of the regenerate and the head of the church), what weight do those words have, whose inner sense empty readers do not attend to, but only how they sound?” This I said then; this is written in that letter of mine.

Then a little later, since he had said, “Since these things are so, brothers, what perversity can it be that one guilty of his own crimes should make another innocent, when the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘A good tree bears good fruit, a bad tree bears bad fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns?’ and again, ‘Every good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and every evil man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth evil things’?”, by which words Petilian showed quite plainly that the man who baptizes is to be taken as the tree and the one baptized as the fruit, I had answered this: “If the good tree is the good baptizer, so that his good fruit is the one he has baptized, then whoever has been baptized by a bad man, even one not manifestly bad, cannot be good, since he sprang from a bad tree; for a good tree is one thing, a tree hidden but still bad is another.” What else did I mean to be understood by these words but what I had set down a little earlier: that the tree and its fruit should be taken not as the one who baptizes and the one baptized, but the man as the tree and his work and life as his fruit, which a good man always has good and a bad man bad; so that the absurdity may not follow that a man is bad who has been baptized even by a hidden bad man, as the fruit of a tree, hidden but still bad? To this he answered nothing at all.

But so that neither he nor any of you might say that, when the one who baptizes is secretly bad, the one he baptizes is then not his fruit but Christ's fruit, I at once added what mad error follows even this view, and repeated, though in other words, what I had said a little before: “If, when the bad tree is hidden, whoever has been baptized by it is born not of it but of Christ, then those baptized by hidden bad men are justified in a holier way than those baptized by manifestly good men.” Petilian, then, hemmed in by these very severe straits, was silent about the earlier words on which these depended, and he cited these absurdities, which follow from his error, in his answer as if I had said them from my own view, when they were said precisely so that he might notice how much evil follows his view and be forced to change it. So, practising this fraud on hearers or readers, and wholly despairing that what we wrote could be read, he began to inveigh against me heavily and petulantly, as if I had thought that all who are baptized should wish to have faithless baptizers and not know them, because, however good the baptizers they have, Christ is beyond comparison better, who will be the baptized person's head only if the baptizer is secretly faithless; and likewise as if I had thought that those baptized by hidden bad men are justified in a holier way than those baptized by manifestly good men; whereas this astonishing madness was mentioned by me because it necessarily follows for those who think, with Petilian, that the baptized man is to his baptizer as fruit is to the tree from which it springs, good from good, bad from bad. When we tell them to answer whose fruit they think the baptized man is when he is baptized by a hidden bad man, since they do not dare to rebaptize him, they are forced to answer that he is then not the fruit of that hidden bad man but the fruit of Christ; and so there follows for them what they do not want and what it is madness to think: that if a man is the fruit of his baptizer when he is baptized by a manifestly good man, but when he is baptized by a hidden bad man is then not his fruit but Christ's, then those baptized by hidden bad men are justified in a holier way than those baptized by manifestly good men.

When Petilian attributes this to me, as though I had thought it, and inveighs against me heavily and vehemently enough, he himself surely shows by that very heavy invective of his how wicked it is to think such things; and so whatever he wanted to seem to say against me because of this view is found to be said against himself, who is convicted of thinking such things. For there he shows how great a force of truth has overcome him, where he finds no other way out than to pretend that I thought what he himself thinks. Just as if those whom the apostle rebukes, because they said there is no resurrection of the dead, should want to accuse the same apostle because he said, “Neither has Christ risen,” and that the preaching of the apostles is empty, the faith of believers empty too, and that those are found false witnesses against God who said that he raised Christ: this is what Petilian wanted to do to me, despairing that what I wrote, to which he could not answer, could be read; and he greatly desired to be thought to have answered. But just as, if anyone had done that to the apostle, then, with the whole passage read out from his letter and the earlier words restored, on which anyone who reads understands that these depend, all that slanderous criticism would rebound on the critics' foreheads, so, with the earlier words of my letter restored, while Petilian accuses me, they are turned back with greater force into his face, from which he tried to remove them.

For the apostle, refuting those who denied the resurrection of the dead, corrects them by the absurdity that follows unwillingly for those who think so, so that, shrinking from what is wicked to say, they may correct what they dared to believe. So he says: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, neither has Christ risen; and if Christ has not risen, our preaching is empty, your faith also is vain; we are found also false witnesses of God, because we bore witness against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise”; so that, while they fear to say that Christ has not risen and the other evil and wicked things that follow, they may correct what they foolishly and faithlessly said, that there is no resurrection of the dead. If, then, you take away what is set at the head of this reasoning, “If there is no resurrection of the dead,” the rest is wrongly said and must be attributed to the apostle; but if you restore what it depends on and put at the beginning, “If there is no resurrection of the dead,” then rightly follow, “Neither has Christ risen,” and, “our preaching is empty, your faith also is empty,” and the rest that is connected; and all these things were said well and prudently by the apostle, since whatever evil they contain must be imputed to those who denied the resurrection of the dead. So too in my letter, take away what is set down: “If each is reborn in spiritual grace such as the one by whom he is baptized, and if, when the man who baptizes is plainly good, he himself gives faith and is himself the origin, root, and head of the one being born, but when the faithless baptizer is hidden, each then receives faith from Christ, then draws his origin from Christ, then is rooted in Christ, then glories in Christ as head”: take these away, on which what follows depends, and it is very badly said and must be attributed to me: “All who are baptized ought to wish to have faithless baptizers and not to know it. For however good the baptizers they have, Christ is beyond comparison better, who will be the baptized person's head only if the baptizer is secretly faithless.” But let those things be restored which you say: then what depends on them and follows, tied to them, is found not to be thought by me, and whatever evil it has is turned back on your view. Likewise take away what is set down: “If the good tree is the good baptizer, so that his good fruit is the one he has baptized,” and, “if, when the bad tree is hidden, whoever has been baptized by it is born not of it but of Christ”: take these away, which you are forced to confess both from your sect and from Petilian's letter, and that mad conclusion that follows will be mine and imputable to me: “Those baptized by hidden bad men are justified in a holier way than those baptized by manifestly good men.” But restore the things on which this depends, and you will at once see both that I put it rightly to correct you, and that all that rightly displeases you in this sentence has fallen back on your own face.

So, just as those who denied the resurrection of the dead could in no way defend themselves from the great evils which the apostle linked together to refute them, saying, “Neither has Christ risen,” and the other things likewise wicked, unless they changed their view and confessed that there is a resurrection of the dead; so you too, if you do not want imputed to you what we say to convict and correct you, that those baptized by hidden bad men are justified in a holier way than those baptized by manifestly good men, change your view and do not place the hope of those who are baptized in man. For if you do place it, see what I say (so that no one may again suppress this and say that I thought what I mention to refute and correct you); see what I say, on what what I am about to say depends: if you place the hope of those to be baptized in the man by whom they are baptized; if you make the baptizing man, as Petilian wrote, the origin and root and head of the one baptized; if you take the good tree as the good man baptizing and his good fruit as the one baptized by him; then you prompt us to ask you from what origin he springs, from what root he sprouts, to what head he is attached, from what tree he is born, whom a hidden bad man baptizes. To this inquiry belongs also that question to which I have very often pointed out that Petilian did not answer: from what source is the one cleansed who receives baptism, when he does not know the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness? For he wants this conscience of the giver, or of one who gives in holiness, to be the origin, root, head, seed, tree from which the sanctification of the baptized arises, spreads, begins, sprouts, is born.

So when we ask from what source the person was cleansed whom you do not rebaptize in your communion, even when it is shown that he was baptized by someone who, because of hidden wickedness, no longer had the conscience of one who gives in holiness, what will you answer but, “By Christ,” or, “By God” (though Christ too is God over all, blessed forever), or, “By the Holy Spirit,” since he too is God, because this Trinity is one God? Hence when Peter had said to a man, “You dared to lie to the Holy Spirit,” he went on at once to add what the Holy Spirit is, and said, “You have not lied to men but to God.” Finally, even if you say that he is cleansed and purified by an angel when he does not know the polluted conscience of one not giving in holiness, see that it was said of holy men that, when they rise to eternal life, they will then be equal to the angels of God. So whoever is cleansed even by an angel is cleansed better than if he were cleansed by any man's conscience. Why, then, do you not want it said to you: if a man cleanses when he is manifestly good, but when he is a hidden bad man, since he has not the conscience of one who gives in holiness, then no longer he but God or an angel cleanses, then those baptized by hidden bad men are justified in a holier way than those baptized by manifestly good men? If this sentence displeases you, as truly it ought to displease everyone, remove the things from which it springs, correct the things to which it is tied; for if those do not come first, this does not follow.

So do not say, “The conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver,” so that it may not be said to you, “When the giver's polluted conscience is hidden, who cleanses the receiver's conscience?” and, when you answer, “Either God or an angel,” since you have nothing else to answer, there may follow what confounds you: “Those baptized by hidden bad men, so as to be cleansed by God or an angel, are justified in a holier way than those baptized by manifestly good men, who are not comparable with God or angels.” But say what the truth and the Catholic Church say: that not only when the minister of baptism is bad, but also when he is holy and good, hope is not to be placed in man, but in him who justifies the ungodly, in whom those who believe have their faith reckoned as righteousness. For when we say, “Christ baptizes,” we do not mean by a visible ministry, as Petilian thinks or wants it thought that we say, but by hidden grace, hidden power in the Holy Spirit, as John the Baptist said of him, “This is he who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.” Nor, as Petilian says, has he now ceased to baptize; he still does it, not by the ministry of the body but by the invisible work of his majesty. For when we say, “He himself baptizes,” we do not say, “He himself holds and dips the bodies of believers in the water,” but, “He himself invisibly cleanses,” and this the whole church without exception. For one must believe the apostle Paul, who said of him, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water in the word.” See that Christ sanctifies; see that Christ, even in that very washing of water in the word, where ministers are seen to work bodily, himself washes, himself cleanses. So let no one claim for himself what is God's. Thus the hope of men is sure when it is fixed in him who cannot deceive, since “cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man” and “blessed is he whose hope is the Lord God.” For the faithful steward will receive eternal life as reward; but the unfaithful steward, when he distributes the Lord's provisions to his fellow servants, God forbid that by his unfaithfulness he should make the provisions useless. For “do what they say,” he says, “but do not do what they do.” This was commanded about bad stewards precisely so that God's good things might be received through them, and their bad life avoided by being unlike it.

But if it is clear that Petilian did not answer these first words of my letter, and that where he tried to answer he rather showed that he could not answer, what shall I say of those parts of my writings which he did not even try to answer, which he did not touch at all? Yet if anyone who has both my writings and his cares to review them, I think he will understand with what firmness they are strengthened. To show you this briefly, recall or review by reading the very testimonies brought forward from the holy Scriptures which he set down as if against us, and those which I too set down in my answer against you; and see how I showed that those he set down are not against us but rather against you, while he did not touch at all those most necessary ones which I set down; and in that one text of the apostle which he tried to handle as if for himself, you will see how he found no way out.

For the part of the letter which he wrote to his people, from the beginning to the place where he says, “The Lord commands us this: When men persecute you in this city, flee to another; and if they persecute you in that, flee to another,” came into our hands first; to this we answered. When this answer of ours had come into his hands too, he wrote this letter which we are now refuting, and we show that he did not answer ours. In that first part of his writings, then, which we answered first, these are the testimonies of Scripture which he thought were against us: “A good tree bears good fruit, and a bad tree bears bad fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns?”, and again, “Every good man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and every evil man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth evil things,” and again, “He who is baptized by a dead man, his washing does not profit him”; by these testimonies wanting to show that the one baptized becomes such as the one by whom he was baptized. I, on the other hand, showed how these testimonies should be taken and that they did not help his purpose at all. As for the other things he set down, said against wicked and criminal men, I showed sufficiently that they are not against the Lord's grain, spread through the whole world as was foretold and promised, and that they could rather be said by us against you. Review it and you will find it.

But what I set down for the assertion of the Catholic Church is this. As regards baptism, so that what we are regenerated, cleansed, and justified by God's grace may not be attributed to the man who gives it: “It is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in man,” and, “Cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man,” and that “salvation belongs to the Lord” and “vain is the salvation of man,” and that “neither he who plants is anything nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth,” and that he in whom one believes “justifies the ungodly, so that his faith is reckoned as righteousness.” For the unity of the church itself, which is spread among all nations, with which you are not in communion, I set down these testimonies foretold of Christ: that “he shall rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth,” and, “I will give you the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession”; and that God's testament made to Abraham should be read for our, that is, the Catholic, communion, where it is written, “In your seed all nations will be blessed,” which seed the apostle interprets, saying, “And to your seed, which is Christ.” From this it appears that not only Africans or Africa, but all nations, will have the blessing in Christ, through which the Catholic Church is spread, promised so long before. And that chaff is with the grain until the last winnowing, so that no one may excuse the sacrilege of his separation, by slanders about others' crimes, for having left and deserted the communion of all nations; and so that Christian fellowship may not be divided because of bad stewards, that is, leaders, I also set down that testimony: “Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” These testimonies from the holy Scriptures set down by me he neither showed should be taken otherwise, so as to show that they are not for us or against you, nor would he touch them at all; rather he worked, by the tumult of his abuse, that, if possible, these things I said should come to the mind of no one who wished to read his letter after reading mine.

But see for a moment what kind of thing it is that he tried to handle for himself out of what I set down from the writings of the apostle Paul. “You said,” he says, “‘The apostle Paul rebukes those who said they were the apostle Paul's, and says: Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul? Therefore, if those who wanted to be Paul's were in error and would have perished had they not been corrected, what hope at last is there for those who wanted to be Donatus's? For what these men are after is that the origin, root, and head of the baptized person should be none other than the one by whom he is baptized.’” These words, and this testimony of the apostle, he cited from my letter and set himself to refute. So see whether he answered what was proposed. For he says: “This is empty, puffed up, childish, foolish, and far removed from the reason of our faith. You would rightly say this if we said, ‘We were baptized in the name of Donatus,’ or, ‘Donatus was crucified for us,’ or, ‘We were baptized in our own name.’ But since these things neither have been nor are said by us, because we follow the form of the divine Trinity, it is certain that you who charge us with such things are mad. Or if you think that we were baptized in the name of Donatus or in our own, you are utterly mistaken, and at the same time you sacrilegiously confess about yourselves that you defile wretched people in the name of Caecilian.” This is what Petilian answered to those words of mine, not noticing, or rather making noise so that no one might notice, that he answered nothing at all relevant to the matter in hand. For who does not see that this testimony of the apostle was set down by us all the more rightly precisely because you do not say that you were baptized in the name of Donatus nor that Donatus was crucified for you, and yet for the party of Donatus you separate yourselves from the communion of the Catholic Church; just as those whom Paul rebuked certainly did not say that they had been baptized in the name of Paul or that Paul was crucified for them, and yet made a schism over the name of Paul? So, just as to those for whom Christ, not Paul, was crucified, and who were baptized in the name of Christ, not of Paul, and yet said, “I am Paul's,” it is said all the more rightly, “Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”, so that they might cling to him who was crucified for them and in whose name they were baptized, and not be divided over the name of Paul; so to you too, much more, since you do not say, “We were baptized in the name of Donatus,” and yet want to be of the party of Donatus, it is fittingly said, “Was Donatus crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Donatus?” For you know that Christ was crucified for you and that you were baptized in the name of Christ, and yet, for the name and party of Donatus, you fight with such stubbornness against the unity of Christ, who was crucified for us and in whose name you were baptized.

But that Petilian aimed in his writings to make the origin, root, and head of the baptized person none other than the one by whom he is baptized, and that this was said by me not emptily or childishly or foolishly, review the beginnings of his letter which I then answered, and you will see. Or rather, attend carefully as I recall them: “For it is the conscience,” he says, “of one who gives in holiness that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver. For he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt.” And as if someone asked him, “How do you prove this?”, he says, “For everything consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have something as its head, it is nothing; nor does anything regenerate well unless it is regenerated by good seed. Since these things are so, brothers, what perversity can it be that one guilty of his own crimes should make another innocent, when the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘A good tree bears good fruit, a bad tree bears bad fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns?’ and again, ‘Every good man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and every evil man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth evil things,’ and again, ‘He who is baptized by a dead man, his washing does not profit him.’” You see what all these things aim at: that the conscience of one who gives in holiness (so that no one receiving from a faithless man receives not faith but guilt) should itself be the origin, root, head, and seed of the baptized. For wishing to prove that the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and that he who knowingly receives faith from a faithless man receives not faith but guilt, he at once added, “For everything consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have something as its head, it is nothing; nor does anything regenerate well unless it is regenerated by good seed.” And so that no one would be so slow as still not to understand that he was speaking of the one by whom each is baptized, he explains this next and says, “Since these things are so, brothers, what perversity can it be that one guilty of his own crimes should make another innocent, when the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘A good tree bears good fruit, a bad tree bears bad fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns?’” And so that the hearer or reader, blind with incredible dullness of heart, might not still fail to see that he is speaking of the man who baptizes, he adds another text in which he even names man: “And again,” he says, “‘Every good man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and every evil man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth evil things,’ and again, ‘He who is baptized by a dead man, his washing does not profit him.’” Surely it is now plain, surely it now needs no interpreter, disputant, or demonstrator, that these men aim to make the origin, root, and head of the baptized person none other than the one by whom he is baptized. And yet, overcome by the force of truth, and as if forgetting what he had said, Petilian afterwards concedes to me that Christ is the origin and root of the regenerate and the head of the church, not any man who is the steward and minister of baptism. For when he had said that the apostles baptized in the name of Christ and laid Christ as the foundation in order to make Christians, and had proved this by testimonies and examples from the holy Scriptures, as if we denied it, he says: “Where now is that voice of yours, with which, rattling with petty and frequent little questions, you said many involved things about Christ and for Christ and in Christ, invidiously and loftily, against human rashness and pride? See: Christ is the origin of the Christian, Christ is the head, Christ is the root.” Hearing this, what should I do but give thanks to Christ himself, who compelled the man to confess it? So what he said at the beginning of his letter is false, when he wanted to persuade that the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and that when someone knowingly receives faith from a faithless man he receives not faith but guilt. For wanting to show, as it were, how much lies in the man who baptizes, he had added, as great proofs, “For everything consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have something as its head, it is nothing.” But afterwards, when he says what we too say, “See: Christ is the origin of the Christian, Christ is the head, Christ is the root,” he deletes what he had said before, that the conscience of one who gives in holiness is the origin, root, and head of the receiver. So the truth has won: that a man who desires Christ's baptism should not place his hope in a human minister, but should come securely to Christ himself as to an origin that does not change, a root that is not torn up, a head that is not cast down.

Now who does not notice from what a swollen vein it comes when, as if expounding the apostle's sentence, he says: “He who said, ‘I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth,’ what else did he say but, ‘I made a man a catechumen in Christ, Apollos baptized him, God confirmed what we did’?” Why, then, did Petilian not add what the apostle added and I especially commended, so as to expound this too for us: “So neither he who plants is anything nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth”? If he wants to expound it according to what he set down above, it certainly follows that neither he who makes a catechumen nor he who baptizes is anything, but God who gives the growth. For what does it matter now how “I planted, Apollos watered” was said, whether it really should be taken as if he said, “I made a catechumen, Apollos baptized,” or whether there is another truer and more fitting understanding? See, meanwhile, according to his own exposition, neither he who makes a catechumen nor he who baptizes is anything, but God who gives the growth. And there is a great difference between confirming what another does and doing it; for he who gives the growth does not confirm the tree or the vine but creates it. For by that growth it comes about that even a planted cutting puts out and fixes a root; by that growth it comes about that a seed thrown down sends out a shoot. But why argue longer about this? It is enough that, according to him, neither he who makes a catechumen nor he who baptizes is anything, but God who gives the growth. But when would Petilian say this so that we might understand him to say, “Neither is Donatus of Carthage anything, nor Januarian, nor Petilian”? When would that swelling allow it, by which a man thinks himself something when he is nothing, and deceives himself?

Finally, a little later, when he set out and aimed to handle again those words of the apostle which we had put to him, he would not set down what I had said, but other words in which human pride could somehow breathe. “For,” he says, “to go over again the sayings of the apostle which you had put to us, he said, ‘What then is Apollos, what is Paul? Ministers of him in whom you believed.’ What else does he say, for example, to all our people, but, ‘What is Donatus of Carthage, what is Januarian, what is Petilian, but ministers of him in whom you believed’?” This testimony of the apostle I did not set down; I set down the one he would not mention: “Neither he who plants is anything nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth.” But he chose to insert those words of the apostle where he asks what Paul is or what Apollos is and answers, “Ministers of him in whom you believed.” This the stiff neck of heresy could somehow bear; but that other text, where he did not ask and answer what they were but said they were not anything, it could not bear at all. But now I want to ask whether a minister of Christ is not anything. Who would say so? How, then, is it true, “Neither he who plants is anything nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth,” except that for one purpose he is something and for another he is not anything? For ministering and dispensing the word and sacrament he is something; but for cleansing and justifying he is not anything, because this is not worked in the inner man except by him through whom the whole man was created, and who, remaining God, became man; he, namely, of whom it was said, “cleansing their hearts by faith,” and, “to one who believes in him who justifies the ungodly.” This testimony Petilian chose to set down among my words, but in his own he neither handled nor touched it.

The minister, then, that is, the steward of the gospel word and sacrament, if he is good, becomes a partner of the gospel; but if he is bad, he is not for that reason not a steward of the gospel. For if he is good, he does it willingly; but if he is bad, that is, seeking his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, he does it unwillingly, for the sake of other things he seeks. Yet see what the same apostle said: “If I do this willingly,” he says, “I have a reward; but if unwillingly, a stewardship has been entrusted to me”; as if he said, “If, being good, I proclaim good, I too attain it; but if bad, I still proclaim good.” Did he say, “If I do it unwillingly, I will not be a steward”? Peter and the other good ones proclaimed; Judas proclaimed unwillingly, yet, sent with them, he proclaimed. They have a reward; to him a stewardship was entrusted. And those who received the gospel when all of them proclaimed it could be cleansed and justified not by the planter or the waterer but by him who gives the growth. For we are not going to say that Judas did not baptize while he was still among the disciples, when what is written was being done: “He himself did not baptize, but his disciples.” Either, because he had not yet betrayed Christ, the one who had the purse and took what was put in, and who could not be an innocent keeper of money, was nevertheless a steward of grace without loss to those who received; or, if he did not baptize, you surely admit that he preached the gospel. And if you count this very small and light, see what you think of the apostle Paul himself, who said, “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel.” Add to this that Apollos, who watered by baptizing, begins to be more important than Paul, who planted by preaching the gospel; whereas Paul claims for himself the office of father toward the Corinthians on this account, and does not grant this name to those who had come to them after him. For he says: “Though you have ten thousand tutors in Christ, yet not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I begot you through the gospel.” He says, “I begot you,” to those to whom he says in another place, “Thanks be to God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius and the household of Stephanas.” So he had begotten them not through himself but through the gospel. And even if he had sought his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, and had done this unwillingly and without his reward, he would still be dispensing the Lord's money, which, though bad himself, he would not make bad or useless to those who received it well.

And if this is rightly said of the gospel, how much more must it be said of baptism, which belongs to the gospel in such a way that without it no one reaches the kingdom of heaven, but only if righteousness accompanies the sacrament! For he who said, “Unless one is reborn of water and the Spirit, he will not enter the kingdom of heaven,” also said, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The form of the sacrament is given through baptism, the form of righteousness through the gospel; the one without the other does not lead to the kingdom of heaven. Yet even the less learned can baptize perfectly, but to preach the gospel perfectly is a much more difficult and rarer work. That is why the teacher of the Gentiles, more excellent than very many, was sent to preach the gospel, not to baptize, because the latter could be done by many, the former by few, among whom he was eminent. And yet we read that in several places he said, “my gospel,” but he never said “my baptism,” nor anyone else's through whom it was ministered. For only that baptism which John gave was called John's baptism. That man received this special gift of his stewardship, that the forerunning sacrament of washing should be called by the name of the one through whom it was dispensed; but the baptism which Christ's disciples ministered was called none of theirs, so that it might be understood to be his of whom it was said, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water in the word.” If, then, the gospel, which is Christ's in such a way that the minister too can call it his because of the office of stewardship, can be received without danger even through a bad steward, by doing what he says and not doing what he does, how much more can anyone who comes to Christ in good faith receive, without contagion from a bad minister, the baptism of Christ, which none of the apostles ministered in such a way as to dare to call it his own!

So if Petilian, while I did not omit to show that the testimonies from Scripture he set down were not against us, partly did not touch at all those I set down, and partly, in those he chose to handle, showed nothing but that he could not get out, you do not need long exhortation or warning to see what you ought to hold and what to beware of. But perhaps he appeared so in the testimonies of the holy Scriptures, but in the documents of what was done among men about the schism itself he had some strength? Rather, in these too (though after the divine testimonies they are superfluously sought), what did he mention or what did he prove? Though he inveighed heavily against traitors and proclaimed many testimonies against them even from the holy books, he said nothing by which to show us to be traitors. But I mentioned Silvanus of Cirta, whom he himself succeeded, with some others between, who, when he was still a subdeacon, was set down in the municipal records as a traitor. Against this he dared not mutter a word. And surely you see how great a necessity compelled him to answer, namely to show his predecessor, not only his fellow member but, so to speak, his fellow holder of the chair, innocent of the crime of handing over; especially since you make your whole case rest on calling traitors those whom you either pretend or think to have succeeded traitors by the line of communion. He, then, who by the very necessity of your case would be compelled to defend by all means even someone of your party from Rusicade or Calama or any other city if I said he was shown a traitor in municipal records, was silent about his own predecessor. Why, unless because here he found no fog to spread by which to deceive at least men very slow and very sleepy of mind? For what would he say, except that these things were falsely thrown about concerning Silvanus? But we read out the records, both when it was done and when it was presented to Zenophilus the consular. How would he resist them, hemmed in on every side by the very good cause of the Catholic Church and your very bad one? This is why I recall these words from that letter of mine, to which he wanted to seem to have answered by this one which I now refute, so that you may see how invincibly it was set down, against which he could find nothing safer than silence.

For when he had set down as if against us the testimony from the gospel where the Lord says, “They will come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves; by their fruits you will know them,” I answered and said, “So let us consider the fruits.” Then at once I added and joined: “You charge us with the handing over of the books; we charge you with that very thing, with much more probability. Not to run through many cases: in this same city of Constantina your forebears, at the very beginning of their schism, ordained Silvanus bishop. While he was still a subdeacon, he was set down in the municipal records as a most manifest traitor. If you also bring forward some documents against our forebears, fairness demands that we believe both to be true or both to be false. If both are true, you are beyond doubt guilty of schism, since you pretended to flee in the communion of the whole world crimes which you had in the little fragment of your own cutting-off. But if both are false, you are beyond doubt guilty of schism, since on account of false charges of handing over the books you are stained with the monstrous crime of separation. And if we bring forward some documents and you none, or we true ones and you false ones, there is no need to discuss how thoroughly your mouths are shut. What if the holy and true church of Christ were to convict and overcome you even if we had no documents, or false ones, about the handing over of the books, and you had some true ones? What would remain for you then, except to love peace if you are willing, or, if you are not, at least to be silent? For whatever you might produce now, I could say very easily and very truly that you ought at that time to have proved it to the full and Catholic unity of the church, already spread and established through so many nations, so that you would remain inside and those you convicted would be driven out. If you tried to do this, you were beyond doubt unable to prove it, and, defeated or angry, you separated yourselves with monstrous sacrilege from the innocent, who could not condemn things uncertain. But if you did not even try, then with a most accursed and ungodly blindness you cut yourselves off from the wheat of Christ, which grows through the whole field, that is, the whole world, until the end, because you were offended by a few tares in Africa.” To these things, which I have recalled from that former letter of mine, Petilian answered nothing at all. And surely you see that the whole case between us is contained in these few words. For what would he try to say, where whatever he chose he would be defeated?

For when documents about traitors are brought forward both by us against yours and by you against ours (if indeed any are brought forward by you, which to this day we do not know at all; for Petilian would not have omitted to insert them in his letter, he who took such care to cite and insert against me parts of proceedings relevant to the case), yet, as I had begun to say, if such things are brought forward both by us and by you, then certainly either both are true, or both false, or ours true and yours false, or ours false and yours true. Nothing more can be found to say.

But in all four of these cases the truth is for the Catholic communion: because, if both are true, you ought by no means to have deserted the communion of the world because of men such as you too had; if both are false, the most atrocious crime of division was to be avoided for no crimes of handing over at all; if ours are true and yours false, you have long had nothing to say; if yours are true and ours false, we could be deceived, together with the world, about men's iniquity, not about the truth of the faith. For the seed of Abraham spread in every nation ought not to have attended to what you said you knew, but to what you proved to the judges. How do we know what those whom your forebears accused did, even if true things were charged against them, so that, either to the judges of the case or at least to the church spread everywhere, which ought to attend only to the judges' sentences, those things might be thought not true but false? God does not thereby acquit whatever crime of men that men, being men, cannot know; yet I do not think anyone is rightly judged guilty who believed a man not convicted to be innocent. How, then, is the world guilty, if it could not know even the perhaps true crime of Africans, and could not know it either because no one reported it to it, or because, in what was reported, it believed the judges giving judgment rather than the defeated grumbling? In this, then, Petilian is to be praised, that, seeing this was altogether unconquerable, he passed it over in silence; but plainly not to be praised, that the other things, likewise unconquerable, which he nevertheless thought could be obscured, he tried to cover with fogs of words, and that, having failed in the case, he made me the case, saying nothing even about me except what was either wholly false, or not blameworthy, or no longer concerned me. But meanwhile you, whom I have set as judges between him and me, do you have the sense to distinguish between true and false, between puffed up and solid, between turbid and calm, between swollen and sound, between divine predictions and human presumptions, between proofs and accusations, between documents and inventions, between pleading a case and turning away from it? If you have the sense, well and good; but if you do not, we will not regret having taken care of you, because, even if your heart is not turned to peace, our peace nevertheless returns to us.