3. 38. 42. But you admonish me also by a testimony from the Scriptures, what I should yet answer you to these things. For you say it was written on this account: Do not walk in the legal customs of your fathers (See Ezek 20:18)—nor do you notice that it was said to the Jews, that they should not imitate the bad deeds of their fathers, not that they should be cut off from that people of God. If, then, it was permitted to King David, to Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and the rest of the holy ones and prophets of God to keep the commandments of God among the despisers of the law of God, and to hurl many worthy and true words against those very transgressors of the commandment, and not to imitate, not to follow, but to detest and flee those sins of their fathers too, by which under Moses they so offended God that none of them was worthy to enter the land of promise, and to rebuke in those who committed them the likeness of such fathers—and yet not to set up for themselves another people, as it were purged and refined, by a sacrilegious separation: how is it not permitted to us neither to imitate the deeds of I know not whom, which you rather object than prove, and yet not to be separated from the holy Church which, as the Apostle says, fruits and grows in the whole world (See Col 1:6)? Did the betrayers institute any sacraments in which I might be baptized? Did they compose any books about the doing or imitating of handing over for posterity, and do we hold and follow their doctrine? But if they had done this, and did not allow any to commune with them except those who read and approved those books, they would divide themselves from the unity of the Church; in whose division if you saw me, then you ought to say that I am in the Church of the betrayers. But if they wrote out their most wicked precepts about the doing of handing over, and yet were not gathered outside the Church into their own congregation and communion, they would on that account be counted as weeds, for whose cause the wheat would not be rightly deserted.

3. 40. 44. Here perhaps you may say: but about Caecilian it has already been judged. It is answered you: it had already been judged about Primian too, by a hundred of your bishops, to whom Maximian had persuaded that he was most iniquitous, before you held the Bagai council. But in the first judgment he was condemned absent, in the second he was absolved present. If after the first those whom he baptized cannot be rebaptized, how much more after the second. So too Caecilian was first condemned absent in the judgment of Secundus of Tigisis at Carthage, in the second judgment he was absolved present, by Miltiades of Rome. Still you are unwilling that we be certain about him: at least permit us to doubt. For he conquers you not only who knows Caecilian to be innocent, but even he who does not know him to be guilty. But you judge that both must be rebaptized—both those who say "we know," and those who say "we do not know what sort of man Caecilian was." Those whom Primian baptized after the first judgment by which he was condemned absent are not to be baptized; and those whom Caecilian baptized after the second judgment by which he was absolved present are to be baptized. It was not permitted to condemn that condemned man; let it at least be permitted to doubt about this absolved one. Whose crimes, even if they were certain to us, would by no means stain us, set in the Church which the Holy Spirit foretold as a threshing floor with chaff (See Matt 3:12), since the sins of others, not imitated, do not stain. And yet, even if they are said to be uncertain to us, we are not only constituted defendants, but even judged to be rebaptized. Do you act thus? Do you so pervert all things, only so as to reckon that it is truly permitted you, that what you wish be holy, what you wish be unclean? Restrain yourselves, do not advance in evils, lest you perish from the good.

3. 41. 45. Now that which I said: "But if you deal with persecutions, I answer quickly: if you suffered anything iniquitously, it does not pertain to those who, although doing such things improperly, nevertheless tolerate them laudably for the peace of unity"—how deceitfully you wished to refute it, not considering at all that your letter would have a reader of sound head. For you answer as though I had said that persecution ought to be done to you for the peace of unity. Which in that place indeed I did not say, but I said: "If you suffered anything iniquitously, it does not pertain to those by whom they are laudably tolerated for the peace of unity, who do such things against you, although improperly." Since this was said most openly, let at least those whom you wished to deceive attend to it explained; for I do not think you did not understand what is so plain, but by the brevity of my sentence you thought it could easily be cast into a fog, where, saying whatever else, you might seem to have answered it. But why I said that the bad of our communion—that is, the chaff of the Lord's threshing floor—when they act iniquitously against you, are laudably tolerated by our good for peace, what need is there for me myself to show, myself to defend, when on my behalf blessed Cyprian says most openly and most candidly that, even when the bad are discerned in the Church, the Church is not to be deserted on their account (See Cyprian, Letters 54)—which is what I said, that they are to be tolerated for the peace of unity? For they do not persecute you more than us, who, persecuting you iniquitously, give you a likeness of glory—false, for deceiving the unskilled—but to us a great wound of sadness.

3. 42. 46. Then, mentioning also I know not what dead men, whom you say were killed by our people, as though set on the field of your eloquence, you most amply expand the topic, in which you seem to yourselves like the martyrs—when daily we suffer the incredible deeds of your clergy and Circumcellions, far worse than those of any robbers or brigands. For, armed with frightful weapons of every kind, wandering terribly, they disturb not, I say, the ecclesiastical, but the very human quiet and peace; by nocturnal assaults they leave the invaded houses of Catholic clergy bare and empty, and the clergy themselves they cast away half-dead, snatched up and beaten with clubs and gashed with iron. Moreover, by a new and hitherto unheard-of kind of crime, pouring and stuffing into their eyes lime mixed with vinegar, those whom they could have plucked out at a stroke, they choose rather to torment more than to blind more quickly. For at first they used only lime for this deed, but after they learned that those to whom they had done this quickly recovered their health, they added vinegar.

3. 43. 47. I pass over how great things they committed before, by which they compelled the same laws to be established against your error—laws tempered more by Christian gentleness than exerted with the force of fitting vigor against such great crimes. A Catholic bishop of Thubursicu, Servus by name, when he was reclaiming a place invaded by your people, and the agents of both parties were awaiting the proconsular examination, suddenly, with your armed men rushing upon him in the said town, scarcely escaped alive. By whom his father, a presbyter grave in age and morals, after a few days departed this life from that slaughter by which he was vehemently afflicted. Maximianus, the Catholic bishop of Bagai, when by a judicial sentence pronounced between the parties he had won the basilica of the Calvianensian estate, which your people had at one time unlawfully usurped—when he held it by clear right, in that very place, under the altar to which he had fled, that same altar being broken over him, and with its wood and other clubs, and cruelly cut even with iron, he covered that whole place with blood. He had received also a great wound in the groin, from which, the blood flowing more freely, he would have at once died, had not their greater cruelty profited him through the hidden mercy of God. For when, with his limbs bared on that side, he was dragged half-dead and face down, the dust secretly stopped his overflowing veins. Thence, when he was being carried by the hands of our people, with them rushing upon him again, he was violently wrenched away and more grievously battered, and cast down by night from a high tower, he lay below softly received on a heap of dung, his senses lost, scarcely holding his last breath. There a certain poor man, passing by, found him, when he had turned aside to that place for the sake of relieving his bowels. He recognized him, when, frightened, he called his wife—whom modesty had kept at a distance—carrying a lamp. Then they both carried him home, either out of pity or hoping also for some little gain, since, whether alive or dead, gathered up, he might be shown to our people. What more? By a marvelous cure he was healed, he lives; more scars are counted on his body than members. Rumor had announced him to the overseas lands as killed by your people, and the monstrousness of that deed, with grave indignation, wherever it could be heard, had moved all things with horrible grief. After he himself followed there, his most recent scars defended that lie of his reputation; for he whom, beholding then, they would scarcely believe alive, did not seem rashly to have been bruited as killed. Here, when he had found there the colleague of Thubursicu, whom I mentioned a little before, and several others who had suffered like or not much lesser things, and when no means of returning to their own places seemed open to them, and because the notable fury of your Circumcellions, furnishing a horrible bodyguard to your clergy, had everywhere become most odiously known, a vast envy blazed up against you, and thence it came about that both all the past laws against you were stirred up, and these new ones were established. The severity of all of which, however, if it be compared with the savagery of your people, ranging disordered and without any law, must be called marvelous gentleness. For by these laws Catholic meekness, having received so great a power, is rather commended than heretical monstrousness is punished; nay rather, against us, by devising, threatening, exercising slaughters, plunderings, burnings, blindings, it rages more boldly and more insanely.

3. 44. 48. For I wished to mention these things, through which it came about that in these our times those imperial statutes were passed against you—rather against your error. For what, if you are wise, can be so much on your behalf? But all the savage deeds of your people, which I have either learned from the writings of earlier men or myself come to know, by which from the beginning of your division up to this time they have persecuted the Catholic Church, if I should wish to recount, what tongue, what pen, how much time and leisure would suffice?

3. 45. 49. When I was dealing with Optatus, and you wished rather to excuse this than were able to clear it, you said "your people cannot on this account be defendants, because no one has brought a charge to punish them." So many protestations of our people about the most furious violences of your people have filled the public archives sooner than those deeds merited any punishment among you. But perhaps it may here be said that protestations were indeed lodged, but none brought forward to punish those men. Hear, then, certain things which I myself have experienced. When we had learned the case of the Maximianians, received by your people whom they had condemned, and were broadcasting it with fervent insistence wherever we could, those men, not finding what they could answer to matters so recent and so clear by their manifestation, began, with the violences and furious mobs of the Circumcellions more frequent and bolder than usual, to deter us from preaching the Catholic truth and refuting their fallacy. And because many, entangled in the snares of their error, with whom we were dealing that they might be freed from it, answered us that we ought to deal with their bishops, and that they vehemently desired a conference of ours, where they could see by whose assertions truth overcame falsehood, it pleased us in the Carthaginian council of all Africa that, with the testimony of public acts also employed—whereby we could prove to those who demanded it that we were by no means lacking to their desire—your bishops should be peacefully approached, each by that one of us who resided in the same place where he resided, so that, the error being removed through our conference, we might enjoy Christian and fraternal fellowship, unity, love, peace; having regard to this, that if they were willing for this to be done, with the mercy of God helping, whatever was in our cause could most easily be recognized, but if they refused, at least their diffidence would not vainly appear to those who had demanded this of us. It was done, they were approached, they refused; with what words, with what guile, full of cursing and bitterness, it is now long to demonstrate.

3. 46. 50. Meanwhile Crispinus of Calama, your bishop, when he was approached before the acts in that same city by my colleague Possidius, first deferred to your council, promising that there, with his colleagues, he would see what he ought to answer. Then, after no small time, the meeting being renewed, he again answered before the acts: Fear not the words of a sinful man (See Sir 28:22 (Vg)), and again: In the ears of a foolish man take care to say nothing, lest, when he has heard, he mock your sensible words (See Prov 23:9). Finally I define this answer of mine by a patriarchal saying: let the impious depart from me, I will not know their ways. When the learned and unlearned laughed at this answer of his—a man saying that he does not fear the words of a sinful man, whom he by no means dared to answer; and that he is unwilling to say anything in the ears of a foolish man, as though he were about to entrust rashly some secret to the ears of a fool, when the things he would say many prudent men could hear, for whose sake the Lord Christ too spoke so many things to the Pharisees, foolish though they were; and that he is unwilling to know the ways of the impious, as though those whom he thought impious wished to teach him their ways, and not rather he himself, if he held the ways of God, ought to teach even the impious, as it is written, I will teach the iniquitous your ways, and the impious will turn to you (Ps 51:13 (50))—when, therefore, this answer was understood by many, and was demonstrated to many how empty it was, as far as it pertained to the cause, but how bitter and slanderous, which did not pertain to the cause, and so his most learned old age (as it is reckoned among you) was laughed at, since against a raw recruit standing opposite yesterday it could prove nothing against the truth—suddenly, after a few days, as Possidius was making a journey, another Crispinus, his presbyter and, as is reported, his kinsman, set an ambush of armed men, into which our man had now nearly fallen, had he not, on their being descried and announced, turned aside in flight to a certain estate, where that man would dare nothing, or not prevail, or, if he did anything, could not deny it. On learning of this, he immediately followed, blinded with such great madness that he now reckoned it shameful to lie hidden. Then to hedge with armed men the house in which Possidius had shut himself in with his companions, to pelt it round with stones, to surround it with flames, to attempt entry on every side. But the multitude of inhabitants that was present, mindful of their own danger, if so great a crime were carried out in that place, partly entreated him to spare—a man whom they did not dare to offend by resisting—partly extinguished the fires set beneath. When he, no less fervid and inexorable, pressed his undertaking, the door at length yielded to the blows, they entered, and, the beasts wounded which they had seen in the lower part of the house, brought the bishop down from the upper rooms, afflicting him with blows and insults. There, lest they should rage more grievously, Crispinus himself intervened, as though bent by others entreating; whose entreaty he seemed not so much to heed in his anger, as to fear testimony in the crime.

3. 47. 51. After these things were made known in the town of Calama, it was awaited how Crispinus, your bishop, would punish his presbyter. There came also a protestation expressed in the municipal acts, by fear or shame of which he might be compelled to exercise ecclesiastical punishment. When he altogether despised this, and so great a tumult of your people arose that it was thought—nay rather, was now even discerned—that they were about to close the roads to the preaching of the truth, to which they could not answer, the laws which were not lacking, but which, as though lacking, were resting in our hands, were stirred up against Crispinus your bishop, rather that our gentleness might be demonstrated than that their boldness might be punished. For it would not otherwise become known what, with the help of Christ, the Catholic Church could and would not do against its enemies—not, according to heretical presumption, with the Circumcellions raging by private fury, but, according to prophetic truth, with kings subjected to the yoke of the Lord God. Crispinus, therefore, being produced, and—what, when the proconsul asked, he had denied himself to be—most easily convicted a heretic, was nevertheless, by the intervention of Possidius, not compelled to pay the ten pounds of gold which the elder emperor Theodosius had established as a fine on all heretics. Not content with this most mild sentence, by I know not what counsel—which was said to have displeased all of you—he thought he should appeal to the sons of the same Theodosius. It was accepted, it was rescripted—what else but that the party of Donatus might now know that it pertained to that gold penalty along with the other heretics, with whom, on account of the communion of such persecution, let it either reckon itself to have a common righteousness, or, if it does not so reckon, let it not boast itself just on this ground, that it is coerced by that penalty by which it sees coerced also those heresies which it concedes to be unjust, and let it at last understand that it is not the penalty that makes a martyr of Christ, but the cause; but that we are persecutors so savage—let it charge—that not even after the imperial rescript did Crispinus pay out that gold to the treasury, indulgence being obtained for him by Catholic bishops; and now, even among these most recent laws threatening proscription to your bishops, he sits secure in his own property, while Catholic clergy stake, among the hands of your Circumcellions and clergy, their houses, their food, their safety, and the light of their bodies.

3. 48. 52. Those who do these things—why should I call them equal to robbers, pirates, to some truculent kind of barbarians, when not even they themselves are to be compared with the devil, the master of all cruelties? He, with all his goods taken away, struck the holy man Job with a most grievous wound from head to foot; and yet there was there a place sound amid the sound, and he did not extinguish the eyes of him whose whole body he had received into his power (See Job 2:6-7). But these things, forsooth, are not carried to your people, since Crispinus preferred to journey to Carthage, to be overcome by his own obstinacy, to refuse the most mild sentence pronounced against him through the intervention of episcopal gentleness, to appeal to the sons of him by whose law he saw himself ensnared, to stir up the whole party of Donatus to what he alone neither wished nor was compelled to suffer, rather than to punish by mere degradation the most bold and most odious deed of his one presbyter.

3. 48. 53. There was a certain Restitutus, your presbyter, in the region of Hippo. When he had come over to Catholic peace, before it was commanded by these imperial laws, moved by the reasoning of truth, with manifest willingness, he was snatched from his own house by your clergy and Circumcellions, led openly in daylight to the nearest fort, and, with a multitude watching and daring to resist nothing, beaten with clubs at the will of the raging men, rolled in a muddy pool, dishonored with a covering of rushes; after he had sufficiently tormented the eyes of the grieving and sated those of the mocking, thence led to another place, where none of our people dared to approach, he was scarcely released on the twelfth day. Of this I myself complained to Proculianus, your bishop of Hippo, by municipal acts indeed, lest, if it were necessary to do anything, he should deny that this had been brought to him. What he answered, how he dissembled from inquiring into the cause, and thought our intention should be more guilefully eluded afterward by not answering, the same acts sufficiently testify. But now, what the clergy who have come over to us from you suffer from your people, when can we suffice to relate? Finally, not only do those who come over to us from there abandon the truth under persecution, but many do not come over to us from there, because they fear to suffer persecution from your people for the truth.

3. 49. 54. Take away, therefore, from our midst the superfluous envies of the troubles which, for your error, you suffer by royal commands—very small, and almost none, in comparison with the great fury of your people—imputing even to us the things which are done by the earthly powers themselves, in order to drive off the assaults of your people from their own safety, of necessity, not of will. For neither, if those forty who had conspired to kill the apostle Paul (See Acts 23:12-21) had rushed upon the armed men by whom he was being escorted and had suffered punishment, were these things to be imputed to Paul. I pass over that you transfer even voluntary deaths, which they themselves bring upon themselves, onto us by lying. For about Marculus I have heard that he threw himself down. Which is surely more credible than that any Roman power could have ordered this—a thing too unusual to Roman laws—since this evil, among so many heresies erring under the Christian name, is proper to your heresy. Whence what does it profit that your bishops boast of having forbidden and condemned this in their councils, as you yourself mentioned, when so many cliffs and steep rocks are made deadly daily from that Marculan instruction? I have said, then, what I have heard about Marculus, and whence this can seem more credible; but what is the truth, God knows. But about the other three, whose deaths you likewise objected, what or how it was done, I confess that I did not ask of those whom I reckon to know.

3. 50. 55. Yet to no good men in the Catholic Church does it please, if there be raging unto death against anyone, even a heretic. Nor indeed, if the lust of avenging, far from anyone's death, requites evil for evil by troubles, do we approve it, detesting much more, if anyone, on the occasion as it were of striving for unity, should carry off coveted goods of others—not those things which under the name of the Church ought not to be possessed by heretics, but any private goods whatever. All these things displease the good, and they forbid and restrain them as much as they can; but as much as they cannot, they bear them, and, as I said, tolerate them laudably for peace, judging those things not laudable, but damnable, and neither on account of the weeds desert the crop of Christ, nor on account of the chaff the threshing floor of Christ, nor on account of the dishonored vessels the great house of Christ, nor on account of the bad fish the nets of Christ.

3. 51. 56. Kings, when they are in error, pass laws against the truth on behalf of that error; when they are in the truth, they likewise decree against error on behalf of the truth: thus the good are tested by bad laws, and the bad are amended by good laws. King Nebuchadnezzar, when perverse, gave a savage law, that an image be adored (See Dan 3:1-6); the same man, when corrected, a severe one, that the true God not be blasphemed (See Dan 3:29). For in this kings serve God, as it is divinely commanded them (See Ps 2:10-11), insofar as they are kings, if in their kingdom they command good things and prohibit bad—not only those which pertain to human society, but also those which pertain to divine religion.

3. 51. 57. In vain you say: "Let me be left to free choice." For why do you not proclaim that you ought to be left to free choice in murders and rapes and any other crimes and shameful deeds? All of which it is nevertheless most useful and most salutary to repress by just laws. God indeed gave man a free will, but he willed neither that the good will be fruitless, nor that the bad be unpunished. "Whoever persecutes a Christian," you say, "is an enemy of Christ." You say truly, but only if he does not persecute in him that which is an enemy to Christ. For neither ought a master in a servant, a father in a son, a husband in a wife, when both are Christians, to fail to persecute the faults contrary to Christian truth. Or, if they do not persecute them, will they not deservedly be held guilty of negligence? But in all things a measure is to be kept fitting to humanity, suited to love, so that neither is the whole of what belongs to one's power exerted, and in that which is exerted love is not lost, while in that which is not exerted gentleness is shown. But where no power is granted by divine or human laws, let nothing be dared improperly and imprudently.

3. 52. 58. Hear now about the Maximianians what a little before I deferred, so that you may both know that your bishops lied to you, and may know that not only what pertains to the question of baptism, or to the toleration of others' sins in the Church without one's own defilement, but even what pertains to the envious charge of persecution—in which, indeed, your people against us surpassed all Roman laws and protections—is brought to an end in this one case of the Maximianians. For if it did not weary you to read that memorable sentence of your three hundred and ten bishops of the Bagai council, of which I inserted above what seemed sufficient—since those words most openly show the twelve condemned with Maximian, by whose hands when present he was ordained, but a delay of returning to your communion granted to those who, although they were in the communion of Maximian and had condemned Primian, nevertheless, when Maximian was ordained, were not present (for not all could be present, nor by custom ought to have been)—I greatly marvel how you permitted yourself to be deceived by I know not whom lying, when the very words, which are not obscure and require not an acute wit by which they may be discussed but only a mind by which they may be attended to, you were able to recite, lest you be deceived by him. But because it can happen that you did not read it, and with simple affection easily believed a bishop or bishops insinuating something else to you, receive it and read it, and attend to how truly it is told you by me. For they cannot, for the sake of covering their lie, amend—nay rather, falsify—as they pleased, that which they alleged in public judgment before the proconsul, which so often they took care to insert in the municipal acts, for the necessity of their cause, when they were acting against those men, that they might be expelled from the basilicas.

3. 53. 59. Thus, certainly, that sentence begins: "When, by the will of Almighty God and of his Christ, we were holding a council in the church of Bagai—Gamalius, Primian, Pontius, Secundian, Januarian, Saturninus, Felix, Pegasius, Rufinus, Fortunius, Crispinus, Florentius, Optatus, Donatus, Donatian, and the rest, to the number of three hundred and ten—it pleased the Holy Spirit who is in us to confirm a perpetual peace and to cut away the sacrilegious schisms." Then, when it had vomited many horrible things against them, a little after it says: "Maximian, the rival of faith, the adulterer of truth, the enemy of the mother Church, the minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram, the thunderbolt of the sentence has struck out from the bosom of peace." You see, I reckon, that Maximian was condemned without any doubt. Then, after a few but plainly most grave things which it pleased to declaim against him, adding his ordainers and condemning them with him without delay: "Nor does just death condemn this man alone," it says, "for the chain of sacrilege drags also very many into the fellowship of the crime." Then, when it had poured out what it thought should be declaimed for exaggerating their crime too, it named them and so concluded them condemned: "The defendants, then, of a notorious crime—Victorianus of Carcabia, Marcianus of Sullectum, Beianus of Beia, Salvius of Ausafa, Theodorus of Usula, Donatus of Sabrata, Miggin of Elephantaria, Praetextatus of Assuras, Salvius of Membressa, Valerius of Melzita, Felicianus of Musti, and Martialis of Pertusa, who by a deadly work glued together a filthy vessel of perdition with collected dregs; and also the clergy at one time of the Church of Carthage, who, while they took part in the crime, lent procuring to an unlawful incest—know that they have been condemned, by the judgment of God presiding, by the truth-speaking mouth of a universal council." What plainer, what more manifest, what more express can be said?

3. 54. 60. Hear now to whom a delay of time was granted, that you may see them to be those who were not present when hands were laid on Maximian as he was ordained: "But those," it says, "whom the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings—that is, who withdrew their own hands from the head of Maximian out of a modest shame of faith—we have permitted to return to the mother Church." You discern how they do not say that these were condemned, but that they were to be held by that same sentence of condemnation if, after the appointed day had passed, they refused to return; which day they so appoint: "And lest a narrow time take away from those returning the hope of salvation by the pressure of a constricted day, to those acknowledging it, to whom it is permitted, with the preceding statutes remaining, we open the door of acknowledgment to all up to the eighth day before the calends of January next coming, so that, returned, they may have the foundations of whole honor and faith. But if anyone is unable to enter it through lazy sluggishness, let him know that the way to all pardonable approaches has been taken from him by his own will. For the pronounced sentence will remain about them, and for those returning after the appointed day a fixed penance."

3. 55. 61. Surely now you perceive, most eloquent man, that you ought rather to retort upon those from whom you heard the lie all those things which you thought should be said against us, as though we had lied about this matter. Surely you perceive that those two of whom we are dealing are of the number of those who were condemned with Maximian, the twelve, without delay; not of those to whom a time of returning was granted. Surely it is clear, it shines, it stands out, it can in no way be confused, obscured, covered over—what he by whom that sentence was pronounced distinguished, illustrated, expressed with so great eloquence. Why are words still being given? Why is there contention against the most lucid truth on behalf of a manifest error? Why do men deceive themselves? If you bind and wrap more tightly the snares of the devil, which you ought to loosen and break, receive still that whence you may more vehemently—and would that with some fruit of correction—blush.

3. 56. 62. In the said Bagai council the day and consul were written down, not only of when the decree of the council was framed, but also of the delay itself. Therefore from the eighth day before the calends of May after the consulship of Theodosius Augustus for the third time and of Abundantius—which is the day of the Bagai council—up to the eighth day before the calends of January—which is the day of the delay—about eight months are counted. But there is found a petition before the proconsul Herodes—see how long after the things said against Felicianus and Praetextatus—about expelling them from the places of Musti and Assuras, of which I have subjoined a few things: "After the consulship of our lords Arcadius for the third time and Honorius for the second, Augusti, on the sixth day before the nones of March, at Carthage, in the secretarium of the praetorium, Titianus said: The presbyter Peregrinus and the elders of the Church of Musti and of the region of Assuras pursue such a desire: When the man of venerable memory, Donatus, was asserting the holiness of the Catholic Church from the error of perfidy, the observance of almost the whole world, nourished into his name and worship, grew together. But when the poisons of a certain Maximian were polluting the praiseworthy and admirable purpose of that religion, an assembly of many bishops, gathered into one with God conspiring, condemned the man—or rather the pestilence which displeased the supernal majesty—even by the coercion proper to a pure mind. Those also whom the error of another's presumption had drawn in, it restrained, with an equal admonition of vigor, having first set forth a harbor of repentance, if they wished to return within the time appointed to the path of religion. But iniquity delights in its own institutions, and does not desert itself, when once, headlong, it has fallen. For that same Maximian nourishes the boldness he began, and associates others to himself unto fury. Among whom also a certain Felicianus, who, first following the right, is darkened by the defilement of this depravity—set in the city of Musti—believed that the walls consecrated to Almighty God, and the venerable Church, must be held as by a kind of siege. This man Praetextatus too imitates in the parts of Assuras. But when the fellowship of the priests became known to the power of your equity, you commanded, as the acts testify, that, every effect of contradiction being exploded, the churches vindicated from profane minds ought to be restored to the most sacred priests." You see, surely, that up to the day of this petition, from that of the appointed delay, a time of about three months has elapsed. But this conflict is prolonged, as far as we could trace from the proconsular and municipal acts, up to the proconsul Theodorus—that is, up to the eleventh day before the calends of January of the following year, on which day the clergy and elders acting under the bishop Rogatus, who had been substituted in the place of the condemned Praetextatus of Assuras, alleged the order of the said proconsul, when they were outside your communion, and the enemies of that same communion of yours were being arraigned in public judgments, and were being demanded to be expelled from the places consecrated to the most high God as though sacrilegious.

3. 57. 63. Of whatever number, then, they were—although it sufficiently appears of which they were—who within the appointed day of delay did not restore themselves to your communion, how could they, alienated from you all that time, baptize? How did they return, with those whom they baptized outside your communion, not expiated by another baptism? In which deed we do not reprehend you, that you recognized the baptism of Christ, by no means sacrilegious, even in a sacrilegious schism; that, with the perversity of men corrected, you approved that which had been right even in the perverse; that you did not confound human faults with the divine seals; that the gifts of the Church—which, apart from the Church too, could be had and given unto the punishment of those having and receiving them—you judged should be neither condemned in the condemned nor changed in those received.

3. 58. 64. Nor do we reprehend this, that those very defendants of a notorious crime, even after the sentence of their condemnation and after the day of delay appointed for others, you nevertheless, on account of the weak peoples who adhered to them—recalling, I believe, the solicitude of the householder, lest together with the weeds the wheat too be rooted up (See Matt 13:29)—believed should be gathered without any degradation, and expiated by the very abundance of love. Nor do we reprehend this, that you persecuted them even through earthly powers, while they were still held by the notorious sacrilege of schism. For this was done, as the outcome itself indicated, out of zeal for correcting, not for harming, so that, agitated by those troubles, they might be compelled to consider their crime, and, the furies of animosity being repressed, to amend it. But because we do not reprehend these things, therefore we rightly blame the crime of your schism, deservedly detest it, by every reasoning convict it, by which you separate yourselves from us—nay rather, from the Catholic communion of the whole world—objecting to us such things as you cannot, I reckon, deny that you yourselves did in the case of the Maximianians. For if there is the baptism of Christ, and therefore in no way to be destroyed, which was given through Felicianus and Praetextatus, when, separated from you, they were joined to Maximian, condemned with him by you for the crime of a nefarious schism, how is it not the baptism of Christ, or how is it to be destroyed, which is given in the Church which, to use Cyprian's words, extends its branches through the whole earth in the abundance of its fertility; which is given, finally, in those churches which you never ceased to recite in the apostolic letters, never condemned by any council as you did Felicianus and Praetextatus? If it pleased to restore the condemned to their whole estate for the patching up of the party of Donatus, what offends you in the unity of Christ diffused through the whole world, which either could not condemn the unheard, or altogether neither condemned nor absolved the unknown, or believed innocent those whom it learned to be absolved? If you expelled from their seats the Maximianians cut off from you, by persecuting them through the commands of the judges, why do you complain that you suffer unworthy things through the emperors, who send those same judges—you who by a nefarious schism cut yourselves off from that Church of which it is written that all the kings of the earth will adore him, all nations will serve him, and that he will have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth (See Ps 72:8-11 (71))?

3. 59. 65. Behold, now I do not say: if it is not lawful to make persecution, Optatus made it, lest you still say that whatever Optatus did with them unknowing does not pertain to your people, when they themselves do not permit lands most remote from Africa to say that whatever Caecilian did with them unknowing does not pertain to them. Who were betrayers in Africa, what evil the African bishops did, we do not know; but plainly I say, if it is not lawful to make persecution, your people made it against the Maximianians in such a way that you cannot deny it. If those who suffer persecution are innocent, the Maximianians suffered it. Will you even now say: "The people, with no one of our people as author, destroyed the basilica or cave of Maximian"? Although, if it be inquired of what communion that crowd was—lest they be believed sent by your people—they themselves will perhaps be found to be yours, or certainly mingled in by helping yours. But what is that to us? For you answer: "We did not do it, we did not send them in, who they were we do not know." Yet that he whom you confess to be unjust suffered persecution from whomsoever—since the matter is clear—the things you suffer cannot demonstrate you to be just. But by whom even the Maximianians suffered persecution, the proconsular acts testify. Advocates were instructed, judgments approached and stirred up as against heretics; those men sought protection for themselves as possessors, your people alleged the Bagai council and demanded that the condemned be expelled from the sacred seats, it was pressed, the case was pleaded, when, with Salvius of Membressa present, you showed them to be heretics, conquered them, expelled them. I see, then, that they suffered persecution, that you made it; I seek the just, you will declare yourselves to be them; I conclude: not, then, is he who suffers it consequently just, nor he who makes it consequently unjust.

3. 60. 66. You again will accuse the dialectical arts; yet you will at least silently approve that I say the truth, and you will choose rather to correct your opinion, by which you said that there is no just persecution, than to call the persecutors of the Maximianians unjust, whom you have at last recognized, by the proconsular acts, to be yours. Not indeed without fruit did you persecute the error of your schismatics; for Felicianus and Praetextatus you corrected by that same conflict and those troubles. And Optatus indeed, the Gildonian, threatening graver destructions, the people of Musti and Assuras are said to have feared—as I heard from them too, when present—and to have compelled their bishops to return to the communion of Primian. But since Optatus exacted this by no public acts, what should I do with such men against you, ready to deny whatever you can deny? There exist proconsular and municipal acts, by which, when recited, we showed with how great force the said men were urged by your people to yield their places. We do not blame, we do not envy: you did not labor in vain, you did not terrify to no purpose, you did not act fruitlessly. Their animosity displeased them when afflicted, they were broken, they were amended, they were corrected and received after their condemnation, after the delay of others, after your persecution. But they were received as they had been honored, with no humiliation of graver penance either expiated or degraded—neither they themselves, nor those with whom they were received, whom they had separated with themselves against you, had baptized outside you, whom perhaps they had rebaptized after you.

3. 62. 68. Accordingly, since those by whose accusation Caecilian, present, was absolved, tried with most bold wickedness to bespatter, not only those by whom he was absolved, but even all Catholic Christians established in any nations, who either were altogether ignorant of that dissension of the Africans or in it preferred to believe the judges pronouncing, as it seemed to them, at their own peril, rather than the conquered accusers—to bespatter them with the crimes of Caecilian, whether feigned or certainly unproved, and to deny that all are Christians: the case of the Maximianians was at last sent to you, in which they themselves should condemn, themselves persecute the condemned, themselves receive the persecuted into the same honor, themselves accept the baptism of the condemned, so that those who dared to accuse the innocent should be compelled to absolve the guilty—not those whom they had believed innocent, but those whom, as they say, "by the truth-speaking judgment of God presiding, they had condemned by the mouth of their plenary council." Who ever said to anyone: because you believed the judge absolving rather than me accusing, you are guilty along with those whom I accused? And yet this is said to the Christian world, which, if it were said to one man, would seem, I do not say most iniquitous, but most insane. O thing marvelously unworthy! Africans accused Africans of the crime of handing over, the overseas judges absolved the accused, and the peoples of the nations were made betrayers, because they believed the judges absolving rather than the accusers charging.

3. 63. 69. Deservedly, party of Donatus, the case of the Maximianians is offered to you to drink: drink the cup from the hand of the Lord correcting and admonishing. If you understand and acquiesce, it is the mercy of one amending, lest you fall into the judgment of one punishing. To you it is said: O proud and stiff of neck, be reconciled to the Christian peoples everywhere whom you iniquitously accused, being now at least reconciled to your own condemned. Why do you rescind the baptism of Christ in those, or from those churches, which the Apostles founded? You have already received the baptism which your condemned, before they were reconciled to you, gave. Why do you glory in the persecution you suffer? If it is a sign of righteousness, the party of Maximian is more righteous; for it both suffered from you and suffers with you. Hear the divine psalm: Do not be like the horse and the mule, who have no understanding (Ps 32:9 (31)). For you call us your persecutors, when, desiring you to be saved, we medicinally pursue your wounds which we wish to be healed; whence by the clergy and Circumcellions, as by your teeth and heels, we are gravely afflicted while we cure you. Do not be ungrateful for such medicine, which you have imitated; you too corrected Felicianus and Praetextatus by persecutions. And would that you corrected the whole, and, as they returned to you, so they and you returned to the Catholic mother.

3. 63. 70. Against which, brother Cresconius, you have been raised up with such great boldness that you tried to refute even those divine testimonies mentioned by me, and to clamor against the words of God. For I set down in that letter against which you speak what is in the holy book about the seed of Abraham, God saying to that father of ours: In your seed all nations will be blessed (Gen 22:18). Which the Apostle calls a testament, saying: Brethren, I speak after the manner of men. Yet no one annuls or adds to a man's testament when it has been confirmed. To Abraham the promises were made, and to his seed. He does not say, And to seeds, as of many. But as of one, And to your seed, which is Christ (Gal 3:15-16). The fertility of this seed was promised so copious that it was said to him: So will your seed be, as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the sea which cannot be numbered (See Gen 22:17). To this multiplication and abundance of the Church, which is spread through the whole world, which is so believed to have been prophesied, is so exhibited to the eyes even of all the unfaithful, that it shuts even the mouths of the pagans, who, very few, have remained against it—you dare to prefer the party of Donatus, saying that you have, even beyond Africa, I know not whom, of whom, however, since they do not appear, you do not deny that you are accustomed to send bishops from Africa, one or two or at most three; and you argue vainly against the most evident truth, that the whole world therefore does not commune with us, because either there are still many barbarian nations which have not yet believed in Christ, or under the name of Christ many heresies alien from the communion of our fellowship.

3. 64. 71. Nor do you attend, nor at least ask of those who know, how many of those barbarian nations you mentioned are already given over to the name of Christ, and how the Gospel does not cease, by growing, to bear fruit in the rest, until, when it has been preached among all, the end comes. For the Lord himself says: And this Gospel will be preached in the whole world for a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come (Matt 24:14). Unless perhaps insane pride hurls you even into such a precipice that you think what was foretold ought to begin from the party of Donatus. Not from those churches which the Apostles planted, with which the party of Donatus does not commune. Or will it try to rebaptize even these, in order to fill the world, when, with the Catholic Church growing through all things, that party is daily diminished even in Africa itself? O insane perversity of men! You believe yourself to be praised for believing in Christ what you do not see, and you do not believe yourself to be condemned for denying about the Church what you see; since that head is in heaven, this body on earth.

3. 64. 72. You recognize Christ in what is written, Be exalted above the heavens, O God, and you do not recognize the Church in what follows, and over all the earth your glory (Ps 57:5 (56)). You recognize Christ in what is written, They dug my hands and feet, they numbered all my bones. They themselves considered and looked upon me, they divided my garments among them and over my robe cast lots (Ps 22:16-18 (21)), and you do not recognize the Church in what follows a little after, All the ends of the earth will be reminded and turned to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will adore in his sight, for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he will have dominion over the nations (Ps 22:27-28 (21)). You recognize Christ in what is written, O God, give your judgment to the king, and your righteousness to the king's son, and you do not recognize the Church in what the same psalm testifies: he will have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth. Before him the Ethiopians will fall down, and his enemies will lick the earth. The kings of Tarshish and the islands will offer gifts, the kings of the Arabs and of Sheba will bring presents. And all the kings of the earth will adore him, all nations will serve him (Ps 72:1, 8-11 (71)). You recognize Christ where it is said to the Jews, I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord Almighty, nor will I accept sacrifices from your hands (Mal 1:10)—because surely the coming of Christ took away all those sacrifices of the Jews—and you do not recognize the Church in what follows: for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering. For my name is great among the nations, says the Lord Almighty (Mal 1:11). You recognize Christ in what the prophet says, Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter (Isa 53:7), and the rest which are there read of him as in the Gospel, and you do not recognize the Church in what he says a little after: Rejoice, O barren one who do not bear, break forth and cry out, you who do not travail, for the children of the deserted one are more than of her who has a husband. For the Lord said: Enlarge the place of your tent and fix fast your halls—there is no reason for you to spare—stretch out your cords farther, strengthen your stakes, extend them again and again to the right and to the left. For your seed will inherit the nations, and you will inhabit the cities which were deserted. There is no reason for you to fear—for you will prevail—nor to blush that you were detestable. For you will forget your confusion forever, you will not remember the disgrace of your widowhood. For I am the Lord who made you, the Lord is his name, and he who delivered you, the same God of Israel, will be called of the whole earth (Isa 54:1-5).

3. 65. 73. In these holy writings, certainly, Cyprian learned the Church, so that he said: "So the Church of the Lord, suffused with light, stretched out its rays through the whole world, extended its branches through the whole earth in the abundance of its fertility." Against this so great manifestation of the divine words, Cresconius, you slander, by gazing at the remnants of the nations which the Church has not yet occupied; how much it has occupied, whence it is daily diffused to hold the remnants, you do not attend. For how would you not deny the future perfection of these prophecies, you who do not hesitate to deny so great an advance, to which the very perfection is owed—I do not say against the divine voices, but now even against your own? For even from you it was wrung out by the great force of truth itself, that you said, not knowing or not attending to what you said, that "into the Christian name the whole world is daily turned." Why, then, does the party of Donatus not commune with this Church, which by growing is spread through the whole world? Forsooth, lest it be polluted by sinners. And where is it, that Cyprian was unwilling to desert—not this Church of yours, which, remaining in Africa, slanders the world, or sojourns out of Africa in a few hidden ones, but that one which extends its branches through the whole earth in the abundance of its fertility—even if in its communion there be, nay even appear, sinners, saying: "For even if there seem to be weeds in the Church, yet neither our faith nor our love ought to be hindered, so that, because we discern that there are weeds in the Church, we ourselves should withdraw from the Church"?

3. 66. 74. Here you too answer, if it pleases you to answer anything true. And how will that be fulfilled which is written, A bad son calls himself just, but does not wash away his going out (See Prov 30:12-13)? Let the bad son be convicted, let him condemn and persecute the Maximianians, let him be reconciled to the condemned and persecuted: let him either be thus convicted, or thus confounded, or thus corrected. "How," you say, "is the whole world full of your communion, where there are so many heresies, of which none communes with you?" Nay rather, not only with heretics, but even with the rest of bad men is the world full, and with the holy and faithful servants of God the world is full; because the sea too is full of bitter waves, and full of sweet fishes.

3. 66. 75. "Among the few," you say, "the truth is frequently found, to err belongs to the many"; and lest by your words you should seem to contradict the fertility of that so great barren one, to whom it was said, The children of the deserted one are more than of her who has a husband (Isa 54:1), you brought forward a testimony from the Gospel: that few are those who are saved (See Luke 13:23). Solve, then, the question—how the Lord himself says, How strait and narrow is the way that leads to life, and few are those who find it (Matt 7:14), and the same says elsewhere, Many will come from the east and the west, and recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven (Matt 8:11); how also in the Apocalypse is demonstrated their multitude, which no one can number, from every nation and tribe and tongue, having white robes and bearing palms, who had sustained tribulations for the faith of Christ (See Rev 7:9)—how the same are few who are many. For neither of these is true, the other false, since both were uttered by divine truth, except that these same good and true Christians, who in themselves are many, in comparison with the bad and false are likewise few. So many grains, by which great barns are filled, we call few in comparison with the chaff; so too—to speak of that testament of God which was made to Abraham concerning his seed, which is Christ—the many stars which we cannot number, by which so vast a heaven gleams on every side, we call few in comparison with the sand of the sea. Perhaps the stars signify spiritual Christians, but the sand of the sea the carnal, through whom and from whom even heresies and schisms come about. Yet with both kinds the world is full, because the same Lord says, the field is this world (Matt 13:38), and you yourself said to yourself, the truth wresting it out, "Into the name of Christ the whole world is daily turned." Through the whole field, then—that is, through the whole world—is the wheat, through the whole the weeds, because of both he who cannot be deceived said: let both grow until the harvest (Matt 13:30).

3. 67. 76. Let the impious deserters, therefore, restrain themselves from the wheat growing with so great abundance through the whole world, and not dare to glory in the fewness of certain separated weeds. But if they glory, even in this very thing those same Maximianians proceed against them in the divine judgment, set to confound them in all things and, if they are wise, to correct them—whom, far fewer, they persecuted by overconfidence in their own multitude, and by persecuting converted some of them anew to their own communion, and so left the rest, most just, the fewer.

3. 67. 77. "The East," you say, "does not commune with Africa, nor Africa with the East." Not indeed in the heretical chaff separated from the Lord's threshing floor; but in the Catholic wheat and the inner chaff, the East altogether communes with Africa and Africa with the East. For some heretics here, others elsewhere and elsewhere, fight with the everywhere-diffused Catholic unity. For it is everywhere, that one from which went out those who could by no means be everywhere, saying according to what was foretold of them, Behold, here is Christ. Behold, there (See Matt 24:23)—some in this place, others in that, showing the proper little particles of their presumptions, or rather amputations, and by impious pride denying the root from which they were broken off. To this Church, then, which, with copious successions, while it is spread through the whole world, brings forth from every nation, tribe, and tongue a multitude of those clothed in white and bearing palms, as it is written in the Apocalypse (See Rev 7:9), which no one can number—to this Church, I say, with which it is manifest that the party of Donatus does not commune, your forebears ought to have proved whatever true proofs they had about the betrayers. But if they had done this, they themselves would be in it, but outside it those whom they accused. But now, since we see that the accused remained in it, what good ought we to think of the accusers, whom we see outside it? And through this, in that fourfold distribution of mine, where I said that, when proofs are brought forward on both sides about the betrayers, either both are true, or both false, or ours true and yours false, or ours false and yours true, since you saw that in the first three you were most easily overcome, in vain you chose this last for yourself, as though by it you might escape. For although you may notice how shamelessly it is said, yet those very true human proofs of yours, if there were any, ought to have been proved to that Church which the divine proofs prove.

3. 68. 78. Tell me, I beg you—but do not pour mists over the unskilled, so that, because you cannot convict the accused betrayers, you should over and over wish to accuse the dialectical arts—tell me, then, I ask, was this case of yours, with your true proofs, brought to the judgment of the overseas churches founded by apostolic labor, or was it not brought? If it was brought, did you win in that judgment, or were you conquered? If you say you won, why did you not commune with those churches in whose judgment you won? But if—what your communion, alienated from them, sufficiently indicates—you were conquered, why do you litigate with us over a cause lost, whether bad or good, having this as your greatest crime, that with the crime of betrayers, whom in the judgment of the overseas churches, even bringing forward true proofs, you could by no means convict, you bespatter the Christian world, because in that case, in which it could not be present, it chose to believe the judges, not the conquered accusers? Not, then, are you guilty for this reason, that you lost a good cause—to speak according to you—in the overseas judgment, but because you by no means hesitate to object the crime of the defendants—and, to yield too much to you, even of the judges—to so many innocent Christian peoples diffused far and wide through so many nations; to whose communion, by cleaving as to the Lord's wheat, you ought, according to the evangelical writings, even with Cyprian admonishing, to have tolerated as chaff, up to the time of winnowing, both those men, as you say betrayers, and those bad judges, as you reckon, lest by deserting the threshing floor you should perish. But if that case of yours, with its true proofs—which you chose for yourself—was not brought to the judgment of the overseas churches, how could so many bishops, established among their own peoples, be justly condemned by them, the case unknown and not at all referred to them? Or how ought the African Christians—I do not say those who had thought them innocent, but even those, if any, who knew them to be betrayers—on account of the weeds which they discerned to be in the Church, to separate themselves from the so manifest innocence of the wheat growing so far and wide and ignorant of these men, so that, on account of another's crime, by which, tolerated for unity, they would not be stained, they should be condemned by the crime of that very unity violated?

3. 69. 79. What, then, does it profit your cause to have chosen this from those four propositions—that your proofs be true, but those which we bring forward against your people be reckoned false? Behold, here too you are conquered, since by your proofs which you think true, the betrayers could not be convicted where they ought to have been—whether those same proofs were concealed by your people, or the betrayers themselves by some cunning hid themselves from the judges, or were hidden by those very depraved judges. Look back to the seed of Abraham, which in the testament of God grows through all nations like the stars of heaven and like the sand of the sea (See Gen 22:17), and dare to say, dare to believe, dare—if there is any fear of God in you—to think, whether on account of some African weeds, concealed for whatever causes, so copious a harvest could perish through the field of the world.

3. 69. 80. You exaggerate the persecutions which you say you suffer, by which, while you rebel in so sacrilegious and manifest an obstinacy against the peace of the holy Church, you are spared with marvelous gentleness; and you say in the first parts of your letter that "when the crime of Caecilian became manifest to the emperor Constantine, he too by his own sentence condemned him to live in exile at Brixia." In which who would doubt that you are either deceived or deceiving, when you also mentioned that Felix of Aptungi was convicted, in the judgment of the proconsul, of handing over, by I know not what Ingentius?

3. 70. 80. Behold, I insert the sentence of the proconsul Aelianus, by which Felix was cleared and absolved. If you wish to read the whole acts, receive them from the archive of the proconsul. "Aelianus the proconsul said: From the declaration of Caecilian, who says that the acts are false and that very much was added to the letter, it is manifest with what intention Ingentius did these things, and therefore he will be taken back into prison; for he is necessary for a stricter interrogation. But that Felix, the religious bishop, is free from the burning of the deific instruments is manifest, since no one was able to prove anything against him—that he handed over or burned the religious Scriptures. For the interrogation of all the above-written is manifest, that no deific Scriptures were either found or corrupted or burned. This is contained in the acts, that Felix the religious bishop in those times was neither present, nor lent his connivance, nor ordered any such thing to be done."

3. 70. 81. I insert also the rescript of the emperor Constantine to Probianus attesting this same thing, and showing how troublesome accusers of innocent men your forebears were before him. "The emperors Caesars Flavius Constantinus and Maximinus and Valerius Licinianus Licinius to Probianus, proconsul of Africa. Aelianus your predecessor deservedly—when the true vicar of the prefects from the rank of the perfectissimi was at that time detained by ill health—having performed the duties of those same parts, believed that among other things this business too, or rather odium, which seems to have been stirred up against the bishop Caecilian and the Catholic Church, should be recalled to his own examination and command. For when he had now caused Superius the centurion, and Caecilianus the magistrate of the Aptungitans, and Saturninus the former curator, and Calibius the younger, curator of the same city, and the sole public slave of the above-written city, to be present, he afforded a competent hearing, so that, when it had been objected to Caecilian that the episcopate seemed to have been conferred on him by Felix, against whom the betrayal and burning of the divine Scriptures seemed to be objected, it was established that Felix was innocent of this. Finally, when Maximus contended that Ingentius, a decurion of the city of the Ziquenses, had falsified a letter of Caecilian from the duumvirs, we saw that same Ingentius, racked upon the acts which were at hand, and therefore by no means tortured, because he asserted that he was a decurion of the city of the Ziquenses. Whence we wish that you send that same Ingentius under suitable escort to the court of me, Constantine Augustus, so that, with those who at present are acting and do not cease to interpellate on the daily days hearing and standing by, it may be able to appear and be made known that they wished in vain to procure odium against the bishop Caecilian and to rise up violently against him. For so it will come about that, such contentions being set aside, as is fitting, the people, without any dissension, may serve their own religion with due veneration."

3. 71. 82. I insert still also the words of Constantine from his letter to Eumalius the vicar, where he testifies that he had inquired between the parties and found Caecilian innocent. For when he had related, in those things which he said above, how the parties had been brought to his judgment after the episcopal judgments: "In which I perceived," he says, "that Caecilian was a man endowed with all innocence, and observing the due offices of his religion, and serving it as he ought, nor could any crime be found in him, as had evidently appeared; just as it had been composed against him, absent, by the dissimulation of his adversaries."

3. 71. 83. Why did you not insert the sentence of Constantine by which you say he was condemned and set in exile at Brixia, most eloquent man? How much more fittingly you would have inserted this than I know not what of the Serdican council, which is shown to pertain neither to you nor to the cause which is between us and you at all. For why Caecilian was at Brixia—which you most slanderously call exile, when he preferred his presence to be absent from the Church rather than its peace—what need is there for me to say? You, meanwhile, recite no sentence of a condemning emperor, and yet rashly think that Caecilian, condemned by the emperor, should not, I do not say be heard or said, but even be written. Yet according to your words, behold, I see Caecilian in exile, with the emperor condemning him: at least answer by whose accusation, and now ask me what, in your letter, after many empty things, you likewise emptily set down: "Who consents less to the testament when it is brought forward—he who suffers persecution, or he who makes it?" These, certainly, are your words. Look, then, at Caecilian suffering persecution and, as you yourself said, set in exile; look also at your people, as the emperor himself testifies in his own words, "not ceasing on the daily days to interpellate" against Caecilian, and answer me asking in these very words of yours: "Who consents less to the testament when it is brought forward—he who suffers persecution, or he who makes it?" But when you have diligently read everything through, you will find that Caecilian suffered persecution from your people even before the emperor, but you will not find him condemned by the emperor; nay, you will even find him absolved.

3. 72. 84. Moreover, if—what you chose for yourself as a great thing, that of the crimes of handing over the proofs you bring forward are true, but those we bring forward are false—even in that the truth of God overcomes you, which, as it foretold, so renders the Church fruiting and growing in the whole world, since the proofs of others' crimes, though true, prejudice it in nothing—proofs which, to the nearer overseas bishops, through whom into more distant parts either the report of such matters passes or does not pass, either were not demonstrated as they ought, or were not believed by those to whom they could be demonstrated, or, believed and concealed, by no means reached others; nor can anyone, not even one man—how much less so great a number of Christians established among so many nations—be guilty of a shared crime of another, if he has either known none of its true proofs, or someone has deceived him by a feigned innocence with false proofs: if, then, as I had begun to say, in this, which you chose for yourself as a great thing—that the testimonies you bring forward about betrayers be true, but those brought forward against you false—you avail nothing against the Catholic Church diffused through the whole world and against the providence of God, by which "into the Christian name," to use your words, "the whole world is daily turned"; how much more do you fail in your accusations, when "this very handing over"—at whose name, as it were shuddering, those who made this schism, separated from the body of Christ, handed over themselves to the devil—much "more probably," as I said in that letter and now say, "we object to you," who only hear betrayers named and the crimes of betrayers spoken by you, but we show both the ecclesiastical acts, by which they themselves confessed about themselves, and the municipal acts, by which they are read to have done this.

3. 73. 85. But you, a clever examiner and weigher of words, teach us what the comparative degree means, and exult as though a victor, that I could not say "We object handing over to you more probably," unless I confessed that you object it to us probably. "For if you," you say, "more probably, then we probably"; and teaching this: "that 'probably' and 'more probably' are so related that, if you say 'truly' and 'more truly,' and because that degree augments what was placed before, does not disprove what was said before," you add other words, by which we may understand this more evidently, and say: "So there is 'well' and 'better,' 'badly' and 'worse,' 'horribly' and 'more horribly,'" showing that "probably" and "more probably" are so related. Whence you think it is gathered that, if I object more probably what is false, it remains that you should confirm that you have objected probably what is true. Here do I say that, in an ecclesiastical question or disputation, you try to teach us the technical points of grammar—what the comparative degree means, "that it augments what was placed before, does not disprove what was said before"? For I see how ineptly I would object to you what you were unwilling to see. When you thought you should object to me "counter-accusation" as though from the art of rhetoric—which kind of question, where it is said, "I did not do it, but you did it," I demonstrated even in prophetic authority.

3. 74. 86. Yet consider more diligently, lest perhaps you find in the authors of Latin speech, whom the technical points of the grammarians serve, that this degree does not always augment what was placed before, but sometimes is borne over to the contrary. An example of which speech for the moment occurs to me from the Apostle's letter which he wrote to the Hebrews. For when he was speaking of the blessing of the earth, which, having received rain, returns fruit, he then subjoined: but bringing forth thorns and thistles, it is reprobate and near to a curse, whose end is in burning (Heb 6:8). And lest he should seem to have wished this for those to whom he was speaking, but we are confident, he says, about you, dearest brethren, of better things and things that cling to salvation (Heb 6:9). You attend, surely, how here he said better things, not because the things he had said above were good—to bring forth thorns and thistles and to merit burning—but rather because they were bad, so that, those being avoided, they might choose and wish for better, that is, good things contrary to such great evils. But perhaps you think the Apostle should be heard in the way he himself says of himself, as a man "though unskilled in speech, yet not in knowledge" (See 2 Cor 11:6), and therefore you think that not the authority of words in him, but of things and meanings, is to be followed, contending that "good things" ought to have been placed where he himself placed "better things." What, if I too, now accustomed to these letters and having forgotten those I learned as a boy, said thus: "You object handing over. This very thing much more probably we object to you," as though I said "probably," placing the comparative for the positive—not because you probably, but rather because improbably, just as he said "better things," not because those were good, but rather because bad? Why do you so rashly conclude from this that I have confirmed that you object probably, because I said that we object more probably?

3. 75. 87. Although neither would you, even according to the grammarians, reprehend me as having erred in a word, if you had at least wished to read attentively, or to recall from memory, the authors of those very words. For there are boyish letters, but not said by an unskilled boy:
The gods grant better things to the pious, and that error to the enemies!
They tore the torn limbs with bare teeth (See Virgil, Georgics 3).
How, then, "better things to the pious," as though those were good things for these men, and not rather great evils, who "tore the torn limbs with bare teeth"? Now you see surely that, just as this poet could wish "better things" for the pious, although those things in comparison with which he wished them were not good, so I too could say: "Handing over we object to you more probably," although you did not object it to us probably—to pass over that even "probable," when it is said, is not consequently true, since those things are said which can and are wont to happen, and are therefore probable—that is, approved and believed—even if they were not done; but what is true, when it is shown, is necessarily probable, and surely more probable than that. Recall the books where you learned words: you will surely find how I do not deceive you.

3. 76. 87. Whence, even if I granted that your people objected handing over to ours probably, I would not therefore contend that they objected something true, and I would rightly say that we object it more probably, since from you we are accustomed only to hear betrayers named, but by no acts, whether ecclesiastical or public, recited and demonstrated as having confessed; but by us are brought forward both public acts, where your people handed over, and ecclesiastical ones, where, having confessed, they were left to God the judge.

3. 77. 88. But I do not pass over so manifest a help of yours, by which, even unknowing, you greatly favor us, by teaching the rules of the comparative degree, "that it augments what was placed before, does not disprove what was said before." For according to this rule of yours, according to certain words of yours in your letter, without any difficulty we have obtained our cause. For you said in the first parts of your letter, as though charging our obstinacy, that "so many legal proofs cannot persuade us what is better and truer." Where I conclude, according to your technical points, that we now hold the true and good, if what is truer and better cannot be persuaded to us. Since, then, we do not rescind, to speak according to you, the truer and better baptism of yours, why do you rescind the true and good baptism of ours? Likewise, when you had said, "This we too wish, that Christ be the origin and root and head of the Christian," you at once subjoined: "but we ask through whom this is better done." By saying which you surely conceded that it is done well even through a bad minister, but better through a good one. Since, therefore, we do not rescind the baptism which you say is given through your minister as through a good one, why do you rescind the baptism which you contend was given through ours as through a bad one? For you said: "We ask through whom it is better done," and your rule is: "that this degree augments what was placed before." Whence, if through your minister, as you think, it is done better, then through ours too it is done well, and through this, when you rebaptize one baptized through us, you rescind by sacrilegious presumption that which, from this rule of yours, you concede to have been done well.

3. 78. 89. I fear lest I press your modesty too much, if I should show how lightly and scurrilously, as though urbane and witty, you thought certain words of mine too which I set down figuratively—"brow" for shame, "mouth" for speech, "trident weapon" for threefold speech, "three-headed beast" for the error raging with three calumnies against the innocence of so many peoples—ought to be harried. Keep boyish things rather for boys. For it does not move me that you say the Neptunian weapon, on account of the trident, does not befit a bishop, since it is also a fisherman's, and through this apostolic, in that the Lord made his apostles fishers of men (See Matt 4:19). For Scripture says that our God too has both wings and arrows (See Ps 91:4; 7:13), and yet we do not worship Cupid.

3. 78. 90. Moreover you reprehend me for not having kept the gentleness promised in my exordium, in that, mention being made of the Manichees, moved, I said: "Just as Satan cannot, as the Lord says, cast out Satan (See Matt 12:26), so the error of the Donatists cannot overturn the error of the Manichees"—as though I had compared Petilian to Satan, and not the error, from whose snares I desire him to be freed. It is well that the Apostle fortified us against such calumnies in that very place where he admonishes us to be mild, patient, and modest, when we correct one who dissents. For when he had said, but the servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but be gentle toward all, an apt teacher, patient, correcting with modesty those who think otherwise, he at once subjoined, that perhaps God may grant them repentance to know the truth, and they may recover from the snares of the devil, having been captured by him according to his will (2 Tim 2:24-26). Behold apostolic gentleness! Those with whom he commanded that one deal calmly, patiently, and modestly, those same he says are captured by the devil, and yet he did not lose the gentleness which he was commending, because he was unwilling to keep silent the truth which he was teaching.

3. 79. 91. But see for yourself whose part you play, who, by charging my words as abusive and savage, strive to stir up to litigation those whom you are unwilling to convene for disputation; for I am unwilling to say that it delights you too to litigate. For more sparingly indeed and more modestly, but as though obliquely, you object to me things which do not pertain to me at all. For what should I judge about the most pestilential and—by all Christians to be anathematized—vanity of the Manichees, if I were only accustomed to say it, and did not even testify by many and manifold books written, not even so would there be any place for your calumny against me. For the Catholic Church would not marvel that I am falsely charged by you, by whom the whole Christian world, with so many churches—even those first ones propagated by apostolic labor—is accused with false crimes. But since against the Manichees, who had once deceived me as a youth, my so great writings anyone who wishes can read, no one is so foolish as to believe about me your words rather than his own eyes and senses.

3. 80. 92. But "a letter of your prince," you say, "in which he wrote I know not what about you when he did not wish you to be ordained, not a few of our people hold." That letter, indeed, I would least care for—not even if a sentence, not unclear, on our behalf were read of him by whom it is said to have been written, condemning that calumny and falsehood; how much less does the Catholic Church care for it, whose cause we are pleading against you—the Church which, confident in so many divine testimonies, no human testimonies about any man whatever, whether true or false, deprive of the truth in which it rejoices! Cease from such things: I am one man. The cause of the Church is being dealt with between us, not mine—of the Church, I say, which learned from its Redeemer to place its hope in no man. Although neither about myself ought you, who are my enemies, even if you knew my manner of life, rightly to be believed. For the estimation of men, there is a great supply of witnesses who have known me; but for the sight of God, the conscience alone, which, although I bear it undaunted against your accusations, I do not yet dare to justify myself under the eyes of the Almighty, and I rather await from him the overflowing largesse of mercy than the highest examination of judgment, considering what is written: When the just king sits on the throne, who will boast that he has a chaste heart, or who will boast that he is clean from sin? (See Prov 20:8-9)

3. 81. 93. But what is it to the matter of which the question turns between us, what sort I myself am, since in the Lord's threshing floor I am stubble if bad, grain if good? Yet you, if you were grain, would not flee the chaff mingled in, before the time of winnowing, as Cyprian himself too admonishes (See Cyprian, Letters 54). Accordingly we, if we have found in you a known bad man, rightly object him to you; for there your whole defense consists, that you separated yourselves on this account, lest you perish by the contagion of others' sins. Whence you boast that you made a new kind of threshing floor, either having only wheat, or in which only wheat appears, to which a winnower is not necessary, but a searcher. For your Parmenian too, comparing your splendid cleanness, as though from the contrary, with our uncleanness, dared to insert a sentence of the prophet Jeremiah, where he says, What has the chaff to do with the wheat? (Jer 23:28) Which he said, as the reading itself indicates, against those who equated their own dreams with the divine oracles. Yet your arrogance and horrible pride is declared by Parmenian's letter, where he proclaimed you, against the divine Scriptures and against the admonitions of Cyprian, before the last winnowing which the world awaits, as wheat purged from the chaff.

3. 82. 94. What, then, more worthily against this most deceitful exaltation could be procured for you than the case of the Maximianians? Whatever you are accustomed to say against us as against betrayers, against the Maximianians, whom you received condemned, when they were condemned you said graver things. About the emperors you stir up envy against us as persecutors: you, before the judges whom the emperors themselves sent, made persecution against the Maximianians. You contend that the baptism of the Church cannot be given outside the Church: you, the baptism which the Maximianians gave in the crime of schism, did not rescind in those received to whom they gave it. If these things ought to have been done for the peace of unity, you do not find whence you may accuse us; but if they ought not, do not accuse us, unless you condemn yourselves. I do not want you to spread yourself out through many things; for I too could briefly recall to memory the things that have been said against you. But from this alone consider, set the case of the Maximianians before your eyes. If about this you can answer us, approach the rest; but if you cannot, you would do better to be quiet than to kick against the goad (See Acts 9:5).

4. 1. 1. Although I have now, in three not small volumes, diligently and sufficiently answered your letter, Cresconius, by which you thought the writings of Petilian should be defended against my replies, by which they were refuted: yet I have undertaken even in this briefer work to deal with you about the case of the Maximianians alone, and from this one to show how vainly, how emptily you said all the things which you set down in that letter. For the benefit of God is not to be despised, which he deigned to furnish both for the abridgment of our task, and—if you are wise—for the help of your correction: who, with you not knowing and us not acting for this, so ruled the minds of your bishops that those who charged that the Christian world was stained, through the communion of the sacraments, with the sins of others—although even those false and unproved—were compelled, in the case of Maximian, to confess that those set in one communion of the sacraments were not stained by the sins of those whom they condemned, namely those to whom, as to innocent men, they gave a delay for returning, and who, if not ordainers of Maximian, were nevertheless, set in his party, condemners of Primian; and those who were unwilling to recognize the baptism of Christ, even given in those churches which the labor of the Apostles propagated and founded—contending that baptism cannot be given outside the one Church, and blaming us because we did not rescind the baptism given through those whom we deny to be in the true Church—should receive those baptized in the sacrilegious schism of Maximian, and not dare to rescind the baptism in them; and those who, from the laws of Christian emperors, by which their perversity is commanded to be corrected, accuse us as though of the crime of persecution, should approach the judges sent by those very emperors, and gravely accuse Maximian and his associates before them, allege in the proconsular acts the council by which they condemned them, and obtain most effective orders by which those men were expelled from their seats. With all these things done by them, they still try to pour mists over the unskilled: overcome most evidently, not only by the holy Scriptures, and by the many and certain proofs of earlier deeds when they separated themselves from unity, but even by their own most recent deeds and examples.

4. 2. 2. Hence, then, alone I shall deal, hence to all the parts of your letter, as much as the Lord helps me, without any difficulty—nay, with great ease—I shall answer. And first that—where, contrary to yourself, you wished eloquently to disparage eloquence, as though it were the enemy of truth and rather the patroness of falsehood, so as in that way to show me, as though eloquent, to be guarded against and fled by the unskilled: if indeed my eloquence were as great as you, although accusingly, attribute to me, would you not, when the decree of the Bagai council was recited, by which, as it is there written, "Maximian, the rival of faith, the adulterer of truth, the enemy of the mother Church, the minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram, the thunderbolt of the sentence struck out from the bosom of peace," be compelled to praise eloquence? Moreover, if that subject were proposed to me, when could I say: "Although the womb of the poisoned belly long covered the noxious offspring of the viperous seed, and the moist clots of the conceived crime warmed themselves with slow heat into the limbs of asps; yet the conceived venom, with its little covering vanishing, could not be hidden. For even if late, the brood of crimes, pregnant, brought forth its public deed and parricide"? When would I constrain myself in searching out these words? When would I roll myself in expressing them? When with so great force, so great a sound, would I rouse the mind of the reader or hearer to hatred of the noxious? Are these things therefore said less truly against those against whom they were said? Is the credit of so great a council diminished by this eloquence, or its authority shaken? Surely that which seemed more eloquent was for that very reason chosen, that all might wish it to be their own, by which one alone the silent mouths of three hundred and ten might resound. Behold, the eloquence which you disparaged, which you admonished should be detested and avoided as seditious, and even, by a Greek name, maliciously artificial, so charmed so many of your bishops that in their plenary council each was unwilling to bring forward his own sentence, but the one which could be more eloquently and ornately spoken by one, all made their own. Let it be permitted us, then, without envy, to dispute against the errors of men not altogether without polish, if it was permitted to so many and so great bishops of yours to condemn those very men so eloquently and ornately.

4. 3. 3. That too—since you reprehend by the faulty name of contention and animosity our zeal for contending on behalf of the truth, because we often wished to confer with your people, so that, the error being removed, fraternal love might rejoice in the bond of peace—was it not better, I beg you, that the cause of truth and unity be dealt with in peaceful words and more peaceful places among bishops, than that it be litigated in the forum by bishops through advocates? Which was done by the partisans of Primian, your bishop of Carthage, against Maximian and against those who with him were condemned in the Bagai council, before the legate of Carthage and before four or more proconsuls. Certainly in a conference of disputation this is to be guarded against, lest one break forth into a lawsuit, and it both can and is wont to be guarded against by the modest and gentle; but when, with advocates struggling on both sides, the controversy is turned in the forum, then without doubt one litigates. Nor do I reprehend this in your people, if they were compelled to it not by love of litigating, but by the necessity of taking counsel; yet I admonish you, a man endowed with good wit, to notice, to perceive, to understand that those who did not decline, but undertook and exercised, the forensic clamor and judicial wrangling by which they might convict and expel the accused whom in the council they had already condemned, could much more easily have conferred peacefully with us, had they not preferred to cover a bad cause by excuse rather than to end it by disputation.

4. 4. 4. Now indeed, as to the fact that, before you come to my discourse by which I reprehended Petilian, you ask of me for the moment by whom it is fitting for you to be baptized—whether rather by him whom even I affirm to have baptism, or by him whom his own people contend not to have it—this question too, by the case of Maximian, has been removed from the empty loquacity of the unskilled, as far indeed as concerns you—for among the Maximianians themselves it still remains; for your people, when Maximian was condemned for the sacrilege of schism—whom Primian had condemned as his deacon, and by whom, with very many colleagues conspiring against himself, he had been condemned—at once with him condemned by the same sentence the twelve ordainers of that same Maximian. Of whom two, Praetextatus of Assuras and Felicianus of Musti, when they had accused them in the proconsular judgment, when they had demonstrated them condemned with the Bagai council by alleging through advocates that same sentence, when, the proconsul ordering it, they had tried but by no means been able to expel them from the places they held, they afterward so received that they communed with them in their whole honors, and, their peoples being together brought into peace, rebaptized none of those whom they had baptized in the schism.

4. 4. 5. There exists the decree of the Bagai council, alleged before the proconsul, the advocate Nummasius pursuing it, when he was acting that the church of Membressa be handed over to the communion of Primian, with Salvius expelled, who held it from of old, where he had merited the episcopate in the party of Donatus. But he was sought to be expelled for this reason, because he recited him as condemned by the Bagai council among the twelve ordainers of Maximian, whom the same Nummasius, erring in number, calls eleven. This petition of Nummasius, Titianus afterward recited, acting expressly and by name before the same proconsul against Praetextatus and Felicianus. Whose advocate's words are these: "But iniquity," he says, "delights in its own institutions, and does not desert itself, when once, headlong, it has fallen. For that same Maximian nourishes the boldness he began, and associates others to himself unto fury. Among whom also a certain Felicianus, who, first following the right, is darkened by the defilement of this depravity—set in the city of Musti—believed that the walls consecrated to Almighty God, the venerable Church, must be held as by a kind of siege. This man Praetextatus too imitates in the parts of Assuras. But when the fellowship of the priests became known to the power of your equity, you commanded, as the acts testify, that, every effect of contradiction being exploded, the churches vindicated from profane minds ought to be restored to the most sacred priests." Then a little after, that the same advocate may show what was commanded, he recites the petition of Nummasius which I mentioned above, in which, when the proconsul had said to Nummasius, "Read the episcopal judgment," that Bagai judgment was recited, in which Maximian is condemned in these words: "Maximian, the rival of faith, the adulterer of truth, the enemy of the mother Church, the minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram, the thunderbolt of the sentence has struck out from the bosom of peace, and because the gaping earth has not yet swallowed him, it has reserved him for greater punishment to those above. For, snatched away, he would have gained the avoidance of his punishment by the shortcut of death; now he gathers the interest of a heavier loan, since, dead, he is among the living." Then against those twelve ordainers of his the Bagai sentence is thus brought forth: "Nor does just death condemn this man alone," they say, "for the chain of sacrilege drags also very many into the fellowship of the crime, of whom it is written: The venom of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Affliction and calamity are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes (Rom 3:13-18). We would indeed not wish them to be cut off as from the joint of our own body. But since the pestiferous rottenness of a festering wound has more of solace in cutting off than of remedy in remitting, a more salutary remedy has been found, lest the pestilent poison creep through all the members—that the newly arisen wound be lopped off with a brief pain. The defendants, then, of a notorious crime—Victorianus of Carcabia, Marcianus of Sullectum, Beianus of Beia, Salvius of Ausafa, Theodorus of Usula, Donatus of Sabrata, Miggin of Elephantaria, Praetextatus of Assuras, Salvius of Membressa, Valerius of Melzita, Felicianus of Musti, and Martialis of Pertusa, who by a deadly work glued together a filthy vessel of perdition with collected dregs, and also the clergy at one time of the Church of Carthage, who, while they take part in the crime, lent procuring to an unlawful incest—know that they have been condemned, by the judgment of God presiding, by the truth-speaking mouth of a universal council." After the condemnation of these, among whom are read Praetextatus of Assuras and Felicianus of Musti—with whom, as I said before, after the proconsular orders obtained against them, they came into concord—to the rest set in the same schism of Maximian, even condemners of Primian, only because they had not been present at the ordination of Maximian, they gave a delay defined by a certain limit of day in the same Bagai council, which is contained in these words: "But those," they say, "whom the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings—that is, who withdrew their own hands from the head of Maximian out of a modest shame of faith—we have permitted to return to the mother Church. For as much as we are purged by the death of the guilty, so much we rejoice over the return of the innocent. And lest a narrow time take away from those returning the hope of salvation by the pressure of a constricted day, to those acknowledging it, to whom it is permitted, with the preceding statutes remaining, we open the door of acknowledgment to all up to the eighth day before the calends of January next coming, so that, returned, they may have the foundations of whole honor and faith. But if anyone is unable to enter it through lazy sluggishness, let him know that the way to all pardonable approaches has been taken from him by his own will. For the pronounced sentence will remain about them, and for those returning after the appointed day a fixed penance."

4. 5. 6. From all these things, then—since you do not deny that some returned to your communion, and in so recent a memory, the men of whom we are dealing being even still alive, the knowledge is most celebrated and clear—when both those to whom the delay was given (since, as the words of the same council sufficiently indicate, they invite them to return to the mother Church and rejoice over their return as over that of the innocent) and those whom they condemned with Maximian with no delay interposed baptized outside your church all that time—whether up to the day of delay, when they communed with Maximian and were set in his schism, or even after the day of delay had passed, when the advocate Titianus demanded by name that Praetextatus and Felicianus be expelled from the basilicas, with whom Primian afterward came into concord in their whole honor—how do you dare now to say that one baptism cannot be given except in the one Church, when you have recognized the baptism given by these men in a sacrilegious schism without any controversy, have received it, and have not dared to rescind it? Nor yet can you say that you furnished nothing to those whom you received in that same baptism. If, then, I ask what you furnished, without doubt you will answer: lest by the very sacrilege of schism they should perish, lest they should have the baptism of Christ not unto reward but unto judgment, not unto salvation but unto ruin—as is the soldier's mark in deserters—we furnished peace, we furnished unity, we furnished the fellowship of the Church, so that they might merit to receive the Holy Spirit, through whom love is poured out in our hearts, without whom no one attains to the kingdom of heaven, even if he be imbued with all the lawful sacraments. These things you would answer truly, if you held the true Church. Yet for your admonition it suffices that you understand that you would receive this in the true Church, which you believed those whom they baptized in the sacrilegious schism of Maximian, who with them returned to you from there, received in your communion; and so that you too, even with the baptism of Christ received, are to be punished if you do not hold the unity of the Catholic Church, just as you would without doubt not doubt that those baptized in the schism of Maximian were to be punished, if they were not joined to your communion—in whom, coming to you from there, you judged that baptism was not to be rescinded. You see, then, that this too, which moved you about the sacrament of baptism, is already resolved in the case of the Maximianians.

4. 6. 7. Now then let us see those things by which you believed you had refuted my letter. And first, that you ask "why I call your people Donatists," adding that "Donatus was not the author and founder of a Church which did not exist before, but one of the bishops of a Church led down from Christ and ancient": you do not attend that Maximian too says this of himself, by whose name nevertheless you call his whole communion. Nor do you distinguish the schism which he made by any term from yourselves or from other sects, except either "Maximianists" or "Maximianians" or whatever else may be derived from the name of Maximian, or certainly, more simply and without fear of the grammarians' rods, you call it the party of Maximian. Will you say anything to this except that Maximian made a schism from your communion, but Donatus did not make one from the Catholic communion? But Maximian does not say this, who rather affirms that Primian and all of you made a schism from the party of Donatus, in which he himself remained, and recites the decrees of councils—first that which was made at Carthage by forty-three, by which Primian was pre-condemned; the other which a hundred or more of your bishops then framed at Cebarsussi, by which he was perfectly and more fully condemned. To him bringing forward such proofs what will you answer, except that the Bagai council is of greater authority, in which three hundred and ten condemned the same Maximian and his associates—when Primian was not pleading his cause before them as one to be cleared, but was sitting with them as a most innocent judge, bringing forth the sentence against Maximian and his twelve associates, by whom present he was ordained, and, with delay given, was recalling to his own peace, as innocent, so many others, by whom he himself had been condemned?

4. 7. 8. In this conflict of yours, what do you wish that we, in the middle, should judge, since we are detained neither by the communion of Maximian nor by yours? What, I say, do you wish that we judge here, except that, against the two councils by which Primian was condemned, the one later Bagai council ought to avail on his behalf, by which Maximian was condemned—reckoning, of course, that to be the firmer, in that, being later, it was able to judge about the earlier ones? Behold, in this we favor you; we have another cause with the Maximianians, if we should dare to judge. We favor you, I say. A third Bagai judgment was made on behalf of Primian against Maximian and his colleagues, by which, being later, the earlier ones could deservedly be deleted. Although from the two earlier judgments to the third we neither read nor hear any voice of appeal by Primian, except that, absent, he was first pre-condemned and secondly condemned. But even against Maximian and his associates, absent, that most eloquent Bagai sentence was brought forth. And this those forty-three at Carthage testified that they had conducted themselves more modestly, more cautiously, and more diligently, in that they sent legates to the same Primian not once, but a second and a third time, so that, if he himself was unwilling to come to them, he might permit them to come to him. With him refusing both, as they write, and treating those who were sent with an injurious repulse, they perceived that a necessity lay upon them now to provide for the Church, and so, not yet daring to precipitate the final judgment, but by a kind of prejudgment taking counsel, that to him, if he trusted his own cause, a place of answering and clearing himself might be left in a following and more celebrated council; to which when he was unwilling to come, they now thought he must necessarily be condemned without any suspension of sentence. But indeed in the decree of the Bagai council we not only do not read that any legates were ill-treated by Maximian, but we do not even read that any were sent that he might come: yet we see that an altar was raised against an altar and a bishop ordained against him who in the chair where he had been ordained so sat that he was not deserted by the assembly of his own people, nor was his communion severed by the rest of the many bishops—and that this stirred up so great indignation, the sacrilegious schism being perpetrated, that the condemnation neither of Maximian himself nor of his ordainers was to be any longer deferred.

4. 7. 9. Since these things are so, yet such things do not move you on behalf of Caecilian. Against him, while he remained and presided over his people, an altar being raised against an altar, Maiorinus was ordained. Against him not two judgments, as against Primian by the Maximianians, but one is brought forth, hastened by the haste of horrible rashness. He did not, like Primian, refuse to have his colleagues come to him, but rather invited them to come—which not even they themselves could keep silent in the decree of their own council which they framed against him. On his behalf not one, as on behalf of Primian, but four later judgments are recited. His adversaries were confuted not absent, like Primian's, but present, before those judges to whom they consented as those who would judge—even before the emperor Constantine himself, before whom they first accused Caecilian, before whom afterward they complained about the episcopal judges, by whom that man had wished the case itself to be heard, as though not judging rightly, to whom again they appealed from another episcopal judgment, so that, with him too, after one and another episcopal judgment, inquiring between the parties, they were overcome—of whom there was not lacking even a fourth conviction. For when in Caecilian's own crimes they had been found to be calumniators, and had brought against him a question about the handing over of Felix of Aptungi, his ordainer, Felix too himself was cleared by the proconsular judgment, with that same Constantine ordering that his case be discussed, whom they wearied with assiduous interpellations. These evils the Maximianians did not exercise against Primian, nor were they so often conquered, nor were they conquered present, nor were they conquered before the judges whom they themselves chose; and yet—what is manifest—they themselves made a schism from your communion, and you are unwilling to notice that your people made one from the Catholic communion: by what shamelessness of most empty animosity, I altogether do not know. For if you wish all the things you say about Caecilian and Felix his ordainer to be true, because some seventy bishops judged about this matter, why do you not wish the things said about Primian to be true, since both there first forty-three, afterward a hundred bishops judged, and confirmed the earlier prejudgment by a later judgment? But if you reckon those crimes of Primian to be false, because on his behalf the later Bagai council is recited against his enemies, why do you not wish to confess that the crimes objected to Caecilian are most false, on whose behalf so many later judgments are recited? If Caecilian, against whom it had once been judged by those seventy, ought not now to have found a place of clearing before other judges, neither ought Primian, whom now so many more than seventy, confirming the first, had condemned by a second cognizance. But if to a man twice condemned a third judgment, because it was made on his behalf, gives most sufficient support, why do you contend, with I know not what brazen brow, that to a man once condemned a second, third, fourth, and fifth judgment does not suffice for absolution? But if perhaps the number moves you, so that you reckon the Bagai council to avail against the hundred by whom Primian was condemned, because in it there were three hundred and ten, why are you unwilling to consent to so much greater a number of bishops of the whole world?

4. 8. 10. But as to your objecting to Caecilian that inexpiable sin against the Holy Spirit, of which the Lord says, It will not be forgiven, neither in this age nor in the age to come (See Matt 12:32)—we too could prove that you objected against Felicianus of Musti, whom today you have as a bishop along with Primian, one of the ordainers of Maximian and condemners of Primian himself, by whom you did not rebaptize even those baptized in the sacrilegious schism, a sin against the Holy Spirit, since you objected to him the sacrilege of schism, as was declaimed in the sentence of the Bagai council. For just as you think that those whom you accuse of having handed over the divine Scriptures to be burned by the persecutors sinned with that irremissible guilt against the Holy Spirit, because men of God spoke those same Scriptures moved by the Holy Spirit (See 2 Pet 1:21), so too we could not only object this same thing rather to your betrayers, whom the acts convict, but could show that you objected this to Felicianus, as I said, in the crime of sacrilegious schism, because in the Holy Spirit the unity of love and peace is preserved—the Apostle saying, bearing with one another in love, being eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Eph 4:2-3)—which surely he violates who commits schism. But this guilt of an unforgivable and eternal sin, which is committed against the Holy Spirit, we object neither to you, whom, when corrected while you live, we do not despair can be healed, nor to your people who handed over the holy codices to be burned by fire—except that, severed from unity up to the end of this life, they had an unrepentant heart. Nor do you show that you objected this to Felicianus and Praetextatus, with whom you afterward communed, who, in the chain of sacrilege drawn with Maximian into the fellowship of the crime, are read to have been condemned by the truth-speaking mouth of your plenary council, and after the day of delay—granted indeed not to them, now condemned, but to others as innocent—are proved to have been received.

4. 9. 11. But as to the fact that the derivation of the name does not please you—that "Donatists" be named from Donatus—and you reckon that, according to the rule of Latin speech, it should rather be declined otherwise, I do not spurn your admonition; yet seek grammarian judges, before whom you may contend about this art with the Maximianians and convict them. For now I am unwilling to call even them "Maximianists," lest I offend your so erudite ears—who certainly, as I reckon, will not as easily yield to you as I, that they call "Claudianians" or something else those whom they called "Claudianists," when they set them, received into communion by Primian, among the other crimes by which they both pre-condemned and condemned him. And recognize at the same time that this rule of declension pleased not me alone, as you reprehend, but that perhaps I alone yielded to you with such great ease in a matter that does not pertain to the cause.

4. 10. 12. But as to your thinking that I should be more vehemently arraigned, because, when I said "the sacrilegious error of the Donatist heretics," calling a heresy what you rather wish to be thought a schism, we nevertheless receive them into communion not expiated from sacrilege: you who arraign us in this cause so gravely, answer how your people expiated the sacrilege of Felicianus and Praetextatus, with whom they afterward communed, joining them to themselves and restoring them as bishops as they had been before, and not baptizing anew any of those whom they had baptized in the sacrilege of schism. Or perhaps they were not stained by sacrilege, as some of you foolishly say, saying that they did not sin against God, but against a man? But sacrilege is so much the graver sin in that it cannot be committed except against God; whence you thought I should be pressed by your disputation for no other reason than that we so receive those who come over to us from you, except that I said "your sacrilegious error." Read, then, the Bagai council. These surely are the first words there: "When, by the will of Almighty God and of his Christ our Savior, coming from all the provinces of Africa, we were holding a council in the holy church of Bagai—Gamalius, Primian, Pontius, Secundian, Januarian, Saturninus, Felix, Pegasius, Rufinus, Fortunius, Crispinus, Florentius, Optatus, Donatus, Donatian, and the rest, to the number of three hundred and ten—it pleased the Holy Spirit who is in us to confirm a perpetual peace, to cut away the sacrilegious schisms." Do you hear, notice, attend? "To cut away," they say, "the sacrilegious schisms." Therefore, not against a man, but against God, by a wicked perversity, was Maximian alone in that schism held by the crime of sacrilege, when that sentence was pronounced? Read a little after what they say about his associates, among whom the names of these of whom we are dealing are written: "Nor does just death condemn this man alone," they say, "for the chain of sacrilege drags also very many into the fellowship of the crime."

4. 11. 13. What is it, most eloquent man? What have you to say to me? Read what follows, see, among the very many whom the chain of that sacrilege drags into the fellowship of the crime, Praetextatus and Felicianus bound. I see sacrilegious bishops: what will you do, if you do not prove them expiated? Surely you are pressed to yield to the truth, by which we say that your people are expiated, when they come to us, by the very bond of fraternal peace, and that love covers their sins, as it is written, love covers a multitude of sins (1 Pet 4:8). What of those whom, separated from your communion and bound to Maximian in the fellowship of that sacrilegious chain, they baptized, whom you received with them, in that same baptism, into peace and concord? Will you answer anything except that you rightly approved the same sacraments in them which we too approve in you? For you will be more consistent with yourself if you answer this and do not struggle against the words of your letter. In which, when you tried to show that not a heresy but rather a schism was committed between us and you, you said: "To us and to your people there is one religion, the same sacraments, nothing different in Christian observance." For you could not accuse the repetition of baptism more gravely than by these words, when those seduced by us are rebaptized by your people, in whom you both perceive and say and write that there are the same sacraments. By what shamelessness of crime, then, is not preserved in those whom the Christian world baptizes in holy unity what was preserved in those whom Praetextatus and Felicianus baptized in a sacrilegious schism? Our cause, therefore, which we have with you, you have already ended by your own judgment, when those who were struck by your condemnation, who most insistently admonished the peoples not to come to you, who judged that one must be baptized even after you, you received—with those whom they baptized outside your communion while set in the sacrilege of schism—into the concord of the altar without any degradation, without repetition of baptism, and believed them expiated from that crime of sacrilege by no other thing than the holy fire of love. Which would truly come about, if you held that same love in true unity.

4. 12. 14. But yet let us see also, concerning the words of Petilian's letter, which you wished to defend against me, how you extricate yourself in this cause of the Maximianians, of which alone I have now resolved to deal against your letter. He certainly set down these words of his: "The conscience of the one who gives holily is attended to, that it may cleanse the conscience of the receiver." To whom I said: "What if the conscience of the giver is hidden and perhaps stained—how will it be able to cleanse the conscience of the receiver?" This unavoidable question, because it is by no means solved in the words of Petilian, you undertook to solve by your own, and you said—not against me, but against him whom you wished to defend. For he says: "The conscience of the giver is attended to, that it may cleanse that of the receiver"; but you, having confessed that a hidden conscience cannot be seen, said that it is attended to in such a way that it itself is not seen, but what is known about it in public reputation. Whence it is gathered that it is now not true that the conscience of the giver cleanses the conscience of the receiver: but his reputation cleanses, according to you, which surely deceives the one looking, when it speaks good things of the worst man, chaste things of an adulterer, religious things of a sacrilegious man. For then it cleanses, when it lies. For if reputation should speak the truth about a hidden criminal, then it does not cleanse, but stains him who receives baptism from him. And through this, see what sort this reputation is which you wished to employ as patroness of so bad a cause, which lying cleanses and truthful pollutes—so that, forsooth, by your marvelous disputation, then there is no deceitful water with it, when it itself is deceitful.

4. 13. 15. But what need is there to speak longer about this, when Felicianus today sits among your bishops, who, when he was disjoined from them and clung to Maximian in the chain of sacrilege, whomsoever he baptized, no one rebaptized after him? I ask of Petilian what sort of conscience that man then had, and I read the decree of the Bagai council, where it is written: "Nor does just death condemn this man alone; for the chain of sacrilege drags also very many into the fellowship of the crime, of whom it is written: the venom of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness (Rom 3:13-14)." For among these very many Felicianus too is numbered, whose water, given with such lips and such a mouth, you did not reject, did not rescind, did not destroy; and because by the evangelical words, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, it was consecrated through whatever tongue and conscience, you recognized it as not deceitful but truthful, and received it. But of you I ask, concerning that Felicianus whose conscience was so bad when he baptized in the chain of sacrilege, what was then in the public reputation; and I again recite that same council, where it is written: "The defendants, then, of a notorious crime—Victorianus of Carcabia," and among the rest, whom it irks to repeat, "Praetextatus of Assuras and Felicianus of Musti, who by a deadly work glued together a filthy vessel of perdition with collected dregs," a little after: "know that they have been condemned by the truth-speaking mouth of the plenary council."

4. 14. 16. What do you answer to these things? If one separated from your communion does not baptize, I read that those drawn with Maximian into the fellowship of the crime baptized. If one who sins against God does not baptize, I read that those bound by the chain of sacrilege baptized. If the conscience of the one who gives holily is attended to, that it may cleanse that of the receiver, I read that those venomous with the bites of asps baptized. If, in order that the conscience of the giver may be able to cleanse, his public reputation is attended to, I read that defendants of a notorious crime baptized. Felicianus still remains in the body; with him are all those baptized by him in the sacrilege of schism, but received into your communion and rebaptized by none. Against Petilian, one stained with a sacrilegious conscience baptized; against you, a defendant of a notorious crime baptized. By what reasoning, I ask, do you defend yourselves, except that, what we too say, convicted at last by your own deeds, you should say that neither the conscience nor the reputation of the giver cleanses the conscience of the receiver, but the faith of the receiver himself, and the grace of God the giver, not of man; but that if there is not in the receiver also the questioning of a good conscience, and the very faith wavers either wholly or in some part, the morals of men are to be corrected, not the sacraments destroyed, which you confess to be not other or similar, but altogether the same—just as you reckoned that the life and will of those whom Felicianus and Praetextatus baptized in the sacrilegious schism were to be corrected, lest they remain in that sacrilege of schism, but that the baptism, though ministered by the most unworthy through the most unworthy, was not to be violated.

4. 15. 17. In vain, therefore, with a slanderous mouth you wished to accuse our conscience as published and condemned by the crime of incense-offering, of handing over, of persecution, so that from this you might as it were prove that we cannot give baptism—when you both bandy false things, and, however it may be, surely a conscience condemned by the crime of the Maximianians' sacrilege was able to give the baptism which you feared to rescind, and which can be given even by persecutors is taught even by your own selves, who, having most sharply persecuted those same Maximianians, contend not only that they are baptized, but that you alone ought to baptize.

4. 16. 18. You say it is written in the law: I do not want the oil of the sinner to anoint my head (Ps 141:5 (140)). Which is neither so written nor to be understood as you think. But is not the oil of the sinner the oil of the sacrilegious men Praetextatus and Felicianus? You say likewise it is written: He who is baptized by a dead man, what does his washing profit him? (See Sir 34:25) Which you neither attend to diligently, nor understand from the very circumstance of the reading what it is. Yet attend to what that most eloquent Bagai sentence sounds forth: "Desired indeed," it says, "is the brotherhood of peace and concord, joined together, as it is written, Justice and peace have kissed each other (Ps 85:10 (84)). But the shipwrecked limbs of some have been cast by the truth-telling wave upon harsh rocks; after the manner of the Egyptians, the shores are full of the corpses of the perishing, for whom in death itself the punishment is greater. For after their soul has been wrenched out by the avenging waters, they do not even find burial." These men, then, not only dead, but even—what is graver—unburied, how could they baptize? How did the washing profit those who were baptized by these dead men, whom, received in that same washing, you did not wash anew, if, as you suppose, it is so to be understood? For as to what, in my letter to which you seem to yourself to answer, you think that I excepted only the worshiper of an idol as guilty of the gravest sin, and you press vehemently to prove that no sinner is excepted in what you say is written, I do not want the oil of the sinner to anoint my head (Ps 141:5 (140)): look at Felicianus and Praetextatus, whether they were not sinners, when they were said by so great a council to be dragged in the chain of sacrilege with Maximian. Dare to assert, dare to contend, dare at least to say that they were indeed sinners, but hidden—whom there I read to be defendants of a notorious crime. Although even if they had sinned lightly, even if they had been hidden, you, by this testimony which you set down about the oil of the sinner, try in this suggestion to wrest out that no sinner is excepted. Where will you be, if it is so, whither will you flee, in what hiding places will you be able to hide yourselves with your sacrilegious men, with your defendants of a notorious crime, with your unburied corpses?

4. 16. 19. You say that, when it is objected "by what license we claim for ourselves the right of baptism, that we treat not of the merit of deeds, not of innocence of life, but say that it is lawful for anyone, and, as though guilty by crimes already prejudged, while we wish to show that the faculty of baptizing is in sinners too, we openly confess that we have sinned"—as though we ought to speak against God on account of our merits, so that we may make baptism as just as we ourselves are just, when neither ought any man to presume on his own righteousness, and from this above all we prove that baptism is Christ's, not men's, because it is not made various by the variety of human merits. Whence I would dispute more amply, were I not using rather the shortcut given by you. For, baptism being received and not destroyed which the Maximianians gave—asps, vipers, parricides, Egyptian corpses, and whatever else was declaimed against them with grandiloquent mouth in the Bagai council, so that our cause might be made most easy—you yourselves too sufficiently judged that baptism is not established by the merits of those by whom it is ministered, nor of those to whom it is ministered, but by its own holiness and truth, on account of him by whom it was instituted, unto ruin for those using it badly, unto salvation for those using it well.

4. 18. 21. But, forsooth, you seem to yourself to have found where you might extend your eloquence, when to what I set down in my letter—"whether anyone receive the sacrament of baptism from a faithful or from a faithless dispenser, let all his hope be in Christ"—you exclaim and say: "O splendid command of a priest, O praiseworthy precepts of justice of a good father! 'Distinguish nothing,' he says, 'between the faithful and the faithless, let the pious and the impious seem the same to you, it profits nothing to live by good morals, because whatever is lawful for the just the unjust too can fulfill. What can be said more iniquitous than this precept: let the stained purify another, let the filthy wash, let the unclean cleanse, let the faithless give faith, let the criminal make innocent?'" These, certainly, are your words, by which you reprehend my sentence, when I altogether neither consented to this nor wrote it; for both between the faithful and the faithless there is a great distance—not as to the sacrament, if both have it, but as to merit, because the one has it unto salvation, the other unto punishment; nor whatever is lawful for the just can the unjust too fulfill, because, although the unjust man can baptize, yet the unjust man cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven; nor does he who ministers baptism to anyone purify or wash or cleanse or make anyone innocent, but the grace of God the giver and the good conscience of the receiver. But you, look whether there was no distinction between Primian and Felicianus, when Primian was sitting among the three hundred and ten by whom that man was said "that the venom of asps was under his lips, and that he had feet swift to shed blood, and affliction and unhappiness in his ways, and that he did not know the way of peace, nor was there fear of God before his eyes"—whether then he was not stained, unclean, filthy, who "glued together a filthy vessel with collected dregs," not faithless "having the venom of asps under his lips," not criminal "a defendant of a notorious crime." And yet he too now sits as your bishop with Primian, and those whom he then baptized, nowhere afterward washed, you now have with you.

4. 19. 22. And still you fight against the truth, and do not concede that "Christ always gives faith, Christ is the origin of the Christian, in Christ the Christian fixes his root, Christ is the head of the Christian." To which words of mine, set down in that letter against Petilian, you subjoin your words and say: "This we too persuade, this we wish, but we ask through whom this is better done." Nor do you attend that Petilian does not persuade this, to whom I then answered, and whose letter you try to defend and affirm against my reply. For he openly said: "The conscience of the one who gives holily is attended to, that it may cleanse that of the receiver. For he who takes faith from a faithless man receives not faith but guilt." Tell me what place he left to Christ for cleansing the conscience of the baptized, or from whom the baptized receives faith, when he says that the conscience of the giver is attended to, that it may cleanse that of the receiver, and that he receives not faith but guilt who takes faith from a faithless man. You indeed seem to yield to so great a weight of truth, and say that you persuade this and wish this, that Christ give faith and, for entering upon a new life, Christ wash the Christian; but you ask through whom it is better done, which ought not to be done without a minister. Petilian, however, did not say: The conscience of the minister is attended to, through which Christ may cleanse that of the receiver, or through which Christ may give faith; but he wished the conscience of the giver itself to cleanse the conscience of the receiver, nor did he say: Whoever takes faith through a faithless man receives not faith but guilt, so that he might seem to take it from Christ though through another, but he said altogether: "He takes it from a faithless man." And to this, as though he were proving it, he added: "For every thing consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have a head, it is nothing"—namely the minister himself, whose conscience he said is attended to, not through which Christ cleanses, but which cleanses that of the receiver, making altogether the minister himself the origin, root, and head of the baptized.

4. 20. 23. Accordingly in this place I answer not Petilian, whose words you did not defend, but you, who said for your own opinion I know not what other thing, not what he said. For you, as you write, wish this, persuade this, not, as he said, that the conscience of the one who gives holily cleanse the receiver or give faith to the receiver, nor that it itself be the origin and root and head of the believer, but that through it Christ cleanse, through it Christ give faith, through it Christ be the origin of the Christian, through it the Christian fix his root in Christ, through it Christ be the head of the Christian. For therefore you ask through whom it is better done which you concede is done by Christ, where you too, as far as I see, do not deny that this can be done even through a bad minister, but say it can be done better through a good one. For what else is it that you say: "This we too persuade, this we wish, but we ask through whom it is better done"? And through this Christ cleanses both through the stained conscience of one not giving holily, but better through the clean conscience of one giving holily; Christ gives faith both through a bad minister, but better through a good one; Christ becomes the origin of the Christian both through a faithless dispenser, but better through a faithful one; the Christian fixes his root in Christ even through a reprobate husbandman, but better through an approved one; Christ can be the head of the Christian both through Felicianus, but you reckon better through Primian.

4. 20. 24. There is, then, small or perhaps no dissension between us in this matter. For I too say that the divine sacraments are better dispensed through a good minister than through a bad one, but this is better on account of the minister himself, that he may accord, in life and morals, with the things which he ministers—not on account of him who, even if he falls upon a bad minister dispensing the truth, receives security from his Lord admonishing and saying: What they say, do; but what they do, do not do. For they say and do not do (Matt 23:3). I add also that it is better for this, that he to whom it is ministered, by loving the probity and holiness of a good minister, may more easily imitate it; but the things ministered are not therefore truer and holier because they are ministered through a better man. For those things are true and holy through themselves, on account of the true and holy God whose they are; and therefore it can happen that one approaching the fellowship of the people of God may find one by whom he is easily baptized, and choose another whom he salutarily imitates. For he is certain that the sacrament of Christ is holy, even if it is ministered through a less holy or unholy man, but that he himself is punished by the holiness of that same sacrament, if he receives it unworthily, if he uses it badly, if he does not live fittingly and suitably to it.

4. 21. 25. For I ask of you: if perhaps one whom Primian baptized in your communion should live most wickedly, but one whom Felicianus baptized in the schism of Maximian should live most excellently, to which of them do you reckon the kingdom of God lies open—to him whom, according to you, a good man baptized as a bad man, or to him whom, according to the Bagai council, a sacrilegious man baptized as a religious man? But perhaps you say, and you say truly: one set in schism cannot be religious. I agree. Yet one set in your communion can be sacrilegious or hidden, baptized by Primian, whom you believe religious. Moreover, if one whom Felicianus baptized in the chain of sacrilege, having left the sacrilege of schism, were corrected by ecclesiastical communion, would you dare to say that a better baptism would be made in him—although you would not dare to deny that the man himself could be made better? For this you judged even by the deed itself, since all those whom Felicianus and Praetextatus baptized in the schism condemned and detested by you, you received, with those returning to you, without any destruction or repetition of baptism. But if, in what you said, "But we ask through whom it is better done," you set the comparative degree for the positive, saying thus, "We ask through whom it is better done," as if you said, "We ask through whom it is well done," wishing it to be understood that through a bad minister it is done badly: I do not press you by a word, but rather admonish that you ought to have said "we ask through whom it is done" rather than "we ask through whom it is well done," as if it could happen that Christ should not give faith well, that Christ should not be well the origin and head of the Christian, that the root should not be well fixed in Christ. For either it is not done, or, if it is done, without doubt it is done well.

4. 21. 26. Yet we treat these things lest, on account of bad dispensers—not of their own, however, but of the Lord's sacraments, who must be mingled, up to the time of winnowing the Lord's threshing floor—the very unity of the wheat be deserted. But to make a schism from the unity of Christ, or to be in schism, is surely an evil, and a great evil; nor can it at all come about that Christ should give to a schismatic not faith, but the sacrilegious error. Either the schismatic has fixed his root in Christ, or Christ is the origin or head of the schismatic; and yet, if he gives the baptism of Christ, it will have been given, if he receives it, it will have been received—not unto eternal life, but unto eternal punishment, if he perseveres in that sacrilege, not by turning the good he has unto good, but by having the good unto his own harm so long as he has it as a bad man.

4. 22. 27. You ask perhaps that I prove this. What else should I say to you than what I have undertaken in this work? Read the Bagai decree, gaze at Felicianus and Praetextatus. Schismatics gave, schismatics received; both were received and gathered by you, neither the former degraded nor the latter rebaptized. Now surely you do not ask whether it is done better through a just minister or through an unjust one, since the baptism which Primian, according to you just, gave is not therefore better than that which Felicianus, unjust, gave. Surely now you are compelled to understand how the Apostle said, neither he who plants is anything nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase (1 Cor 3:7), and you recall that you said in vain: "Just as one who plants and waters is sought to be none but a diligent and faithful husbandman, so too in the sacrament of baptism none but a most just workman is approved." Behold, neither diligent, nor faithful, nor most just, but rather negligent of his own salvation, and faithless, and most unjust was Felicianus, when, associated with Maximian and—as your three hundred and ten resound with one most eloquent mouth—set in the chain of sacrilege, he ministered the baptism which you did not dare to rescind.

4. 22. 28. Surely you discern that the testimony which you set down from the prophet does not pertain to this cause: I will give you shepherds according to my heart, and they will feed you, feeding you with discipline (See Jer 3:15). For Felicianus was neither sacrilegious according to the heart of God, nor did he feed his sheep in the sacrilegious schism with discipline; and yet he baptized those in whose reception you recognized that what he gave was not his, but God's. Surely you perceive how it was mentioned by me from holy Scripture that it is good to trust in the Lord rather than to trust in man (Ps 118:8 (117)), and that you answered emptily, as far as pertains to this cause, "that you therefore the more seek that he be just and faithful through whom this sacrament is celebrated, because you have the hope and trust of God, not of man, and that faith and righteousness are God's, which you always attend to in his ministers." Behold, in Felicianus, when he was a defendant of a notorious crime, there was neither righteousness nor faith, and yet there was baptism; and those to whom it was given by him, when they were gathered by you, you say that righteousness accrued to them, you do not say that baptism was lacking.

4. 23. 29. Accordingly, as to what you next ask of me: "If baptism given by whomsoever and in whatever way ought not to be rescinded, why did the Apostles baptize after John"—you now solve the question, if, as you say, the Apostles baptized after John, why did your people not baptize, after Felicianus, those whom he had baptized in the sacrilegious schism; and from this at least learn that whatever that is which is either read or discussed about the baptism of John, it is utterly alien from this cause. But I do not know what seemed good to you, that you should say that the Jews, to whom Peter says, let each of you be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (See Acts 2:38), had already been baptized by Moses—they who were born so many generations after that servant of God led their forebears across the Red Sea. Or if they had baptism from Moses for this reason, because they were propagated from those whom the Apostle says were baptized in Moses (See 1 Cor 10:2), dare to say that all who are born of faithful Christians already have Christian baptism. Which you see, I reckon, with how great vanity it is said. But however that matter stands, even if the Apostles had baptized after Moses the servant of God, I would press you to render an account why your people did not baptize after Felicianus the sacrilegious Maximianian.

4. 23. 30. Now that which I set down: "If those who wished to be of Paul erred, what hope, then, is there for those who wish to be of Donatus?"—I do not think you refuted it in the earlier parts of your letter, which you yourself too consider in the things we have sufficiently said above. Not, then, as you seem to yourself, and as though certain you exult, do you conclude that all those things which were said by Petilian or anyone else were rightly said. For by that very order in which they were run through by you briefly, as though recalling and recollecting, I rather, in this cause of the Maximianians, conclude them to have been not rightly said. Because neither was there in Felicianus the conscience of one giving holily, when, clinging to Maximian, he was drawn in the chain of sacrilege; and by a defendant of a notorious crime, and through this by a manifest faithless man, those were baptized who were baptized by him; nor was the sacrilegious man their origin and root and head unto salvation; nor was he a good tree, condemned in the fellowship of a sacrilegious schism and still set in that same sacrilege; nor was he good who from the good treasure of his heart brought forth good things (See Matt 12:35), when of him and of his other associates it was said, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness (Rom 3:14). And yet, when your people came into concord with him, they recognized at last, frightened by the force of truth, that the baptism which such a man had given was not his, but Christ's.

4. 24. 31. Come now, let us see in its place how, in your letter, you extricate yourself in the cause of the Maximianians. For all who read these letters await without doubt either what was said by you about this where it was said, or what was answered by me. And so, as to what you answered to my objections about Optatus the Gildonian, I am unwilling to discuss it, I am unwilling to linger longer in the cause of a man about whose condemnation by your people I do nothing. I certainly make a loss of this objection, and this perhaps among posterity, when his memory has been obliterated. But now, as long as there are men who knew his life and morals, they will complain rather that I said too little about him than that I said anything false. For they do not read our letters as you do, who ask of me what that one, whom I called as it were a rabid wave, swallowed up, when there you have Praetextatus and Felicianus. For my words there stand thus: "So indeed," I said. "These men insult their schismatics, so as to call them both dead and unburied. But surely they ought to have wished that they were buried, lest, out of the multitude of corpses lying unburied on the shore, Optatus the Gildonian, advancing with a military column like a rabid wave leaping farther forward, should afterward swallow back inward Felicianus and Praetextatus." When you have read these words of mine there, why did you not set them all down, when you tried to answer them? Why do you as it were arraign me for not having said what that rabid wave swallowed up, when you see written there: "should afterward swallow back inward Felicianus and Praetextatus"?

4. 25. 32. For what else do your people usually answer, as though for their great defense, when such a reception of the condemned Praetextatus and Felicianus is objected to them, except: "Optatus wished this, Optatus did this"? Which the very cities of Musti and Assuras too testify, who say that, fearing the Gildonian soldier out of the threat of Optatus, they compelled their bishops to return to the communion of Primian. But you, because you saw that it could not without shamelessness be denied that this was done by him, denied that this was written by me, reckoning perhaps that my letter could be unknown rather than that matter. But granting that it was permitted to your bishops, by I know not what Donatian or Numidian privilege, to be ignorant about their own colleague of whatever all Africa was clamoring, when they do not allow the crimes objected by Africans against Africans, never proved, so often absolved, to be unknown to the eastern and western ends of the earth; let the baptism given by Optatus avail with you, which you so refused to condemn that you nevertheless did not dare to absolve him, and let the baptism given in the Churches founded by apostolic labor—of the Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, Thessalonians, and the rest written of in the holy writings which you too read, where not, I say, that false crime of Caecilian, but perhaps not even his true name, was heard—not avail; let Optatus have had the conscience of one giving holily in that life which you, as your writings indicate, even if on account of us you were ashamed to condemn, yet on account of God you feared to absolve, and in that public reputation too where it seemed to you that a hidden conscience could be attended to; and let the conscience of so many and so great Christian nations be accused, because it was ignorant of the most remote lawsuits of the Africans: could they not likewise have been ignorant even of the crimes of these men—namely Felicianus and Praetextatus—whom three hundred and ten condemned in a plenary council?

4. 26. 33. And still you object to Catholic unity I know not what deeds of our people, which are either false, or are not sins, or, even if they are true and sins, cannot stain the fellowship of the good. For neither do the good commune in the sins of others, in whose doing they surely do not consent, although with those very men who do them, until they are separated from the Lord's threshing floor like chaff by the final winnowing fork (See Matt 3:12), they commune not in their sins, but in the sacraments of God, and within the same net, like good fishes with bad, until the separation which will take place on the shore (See Matt 13:48)—that is, at the end of the age, as at the end of the sea—they are disjoined from them not by a segregation of bodies, but by a diversity of life and morals; just as the eleven Apostles did not commune in the thefts of Judas, and yet visibly clung with him to the same Lord, heard the same Master, received the same Gospel to be believed, took the same sacraments, mingled with him in bodily assembly, separated by spiritual unlikeness; just as the apostle Paul did not commune in the obstinacy and envy—that is, the diabolical faults—of those who preached Christ not chastely (See Phil 1:15-17), and yet preached with them the same Christ, partook of the sacraments of the same Christ, and said of these: whether in pretense or in truth Christ is proclaimed (Phil 1:18)—for the martyr Cyprian, most loving of unity, both understood and wrote that these were not separated by any schism or heresy, but were mingled with the brethren in bodily assembly; just as that same Cyprian did not commune in the avarice, robberies, and usury of his colleagues, whom he said wished, while the brethren in the Church went hungry, to have silver in abundance, to seize estates by insidious frauds, to increase their gains by multiplying usuries—which evil he compared even to idolatry—whose bodily assembly nevertheless he did not flee, but stood at the same altars, took the same most sacred food and drink. For those men ate and drank judgment, not to others, but to themselves (See 1 Cor 11:29), but he communed with such men not in their sins, but in the mysteries of Christ, most closely joined in assemblies, most disjoined in morals. For to this end both those similitudes in the Scriptures and those examples were set forth before us, that we might learn to be wheat and not desert the Lord's threshing floor on account of the admixture of chaff, to be good fishes and not, on account of the admixture of the bad, go outside with the nets broken, to be vessels of mercy made for honor and cleansed, and not, on account of the vessels of perdition and dishonor, flee from the great house. For in the temporal assembly and admixture of both, there is no cause for which the bad are laudably tolerated, except lest the good be damnably deserted. And since you too, in your own so many and so manifest evils, do this by the same necessity, you can easily, if you will, notice that you separate yourselves from the Christians of so many and so great nations by nothing but sacrilegious animosity.

4. 27. 34. And so, not only let Optatus, most notorious in that Gildonian fellowship, but let any obscure man among you, with you knowing it, have done some evil—when you could not separate him from your communion, because either you are not believed when you accuse, or you do not dare to accuse, lest you be unable to prove it—either the party of Donatus must be deserted by you, or you will be such as he whose sin you do not ignore, although you live unlike him. This is said to you most rightly, not according to the true, but according to your own opinion. For who does not know that you are a stranger to his evil, if by consent you do not commune in his sin? But from this you are compelled to recognize with how great impiety you object to the Christian world either false or certainly unknown crimes of the Africans, when you are unwilling that what you know about another be objected to you, because you cannot persuade of it those from whose fellowship you are unwilling to depart. So, lest you desert those you think good, you are compelled to bear those you know bad; and through this the truth convicts all those bad who, on account of others' crimes, whether true or false, yet unknown to the rest and not going to harm themselves, with the unity of so many nations broken, deserted the good. Lest in any way you should be able to excuse this so great wickedness of the party of Donatus, the cause of the Maximianians was procured for you, in which, your depravity being beheld as in a mirror, you may, if you will, correct it; but if you will not, I am unwilling to say anything graver, since I know that you have a heart. For what will you say against these things?

4. 28. 35. It is well that you yourself write that, "when you had read about the condemned and received Maximianians the whole that I inserted in my letter, you were greatly moved." I believe it: I plainly see the cause which ought to have greatly moved you. Let us see, then, by what reasoning rendered that disturbance of yours was calmed. "At once," you say, "you more diligently inquired of your bishops, and, with them informing you, you came to know both the decree of the council, and the sentence pronounced against those who were condemned, and the order of the whole matter." Then, believing me too still to be ignorant of what was done, and admonishing me that I should learn what the truth holds, you related plainly—not what the truth holds, but what your people substitute for the truth to the incautious and negligent. For you say that, "when the error of Maximian was striving to associate to itself very many bishops, a council being gathered by your people, a sentence was pronounced against all those who had persisted in his schism," which you mention that I too read. "And when this sentence was confirmed by the consent of all, it nevertheless pleased, by decree of the council, that a delay of time be given, within which, if anyone wished to be corrected, he would be held innocent. So it came about that not only those two whom I mention, but also many others, purged and innocent, were restored to the Church, whose baptism you think therefore ought not to have been rescinded, because, restored within the appointed day, they were not held by the peremptory sentence, nor, when they baptized, had they been separated from the Church—not yet, that is, disjoined by the fixed limit of the elapsed time." Here, in that very falsehood of your narration—since I have set down not only your meanings but even your very words—I marvel at your wit, I marvel at a mind struggling against its wit. Never anywhere has it so appeared how much the prejudice of human presumption avails, either for not beholding the most manifest truth, or for affirming the most shameless falsehood. Do you not perceive that you set down things so openly conflicting that it is scarcely credible that one man could have said both? For you say that "against all those who had persisted in the schism of Maximian a sentence was pronounced, and that it pleased that a delay of time be given, within which, if anyone wished to be corrected, he would be held innocent." How, then, do you yourself likewise say "that they did not baptize outside the Church, before they had corrected themselves from that schism"? So, when they were with Maximian, were they not outside the Church? Do you notice what you say, do you find a way out, whither to flee, where to hide yourself?

4. 29. 36. You see surely that, while you try to defend others' manifest errors, you do nothing but subjoin your own more manifest ones. Behold, read your words—thus are they mentioned by me altogether as they were written by you: "When the error of Maximian," you say, "was striving to associate to itself very many bishops, a council being gathered by our people, a sentence was pronounced against all those who had persisted in his schism, which you too testify that you read. And when this sentence was confirmed by the consent of all, it nevertheless pleased, by decree of the council, that a delay of time be given, within which, if anyone wished to be corrected, he would be held innocent." In saying these things, do you so shut up your meaning against yourself that you do not notice that all these, who therefore merited that the sentence of the council be pronounced against them because they were associated with Maximian, before they corrected themselves within the time of delay, were standing in that same schism? There, then, they also baptized. I beg you: why do you sprinkle an empty fog over perspicuous things, which again, by no less perspicuity of your own words, you scatter? For I say that Praetextatus and Felicianus, the ordainers of Maximian, baptized in that sacrilegious schism which they committed, and that those baptized by them were received with them, with the baptism not rescinded which they had given in the schism, which sacrilegious men had ministered, which they had consecrated with a mouth full of cursing, with lips bearing the venom of asps. For such things are said against them in that sentence which you do not deny was pronounced against them all.

4. 30. 37. Here you answer "that not only those two whom I mention, but also many others, purged and innocent, restored themselves to the Church within the day of delay." By which word you help me, by which word you assert with me the truth and scatter that fog which you were trying to pour out. For when you say that they restored themselves to the Church, without doubt you confess that they were outside the Church. Where, then, before they restored themselves to the Church, they were, there they baptized; therefore the baptism which they gave was outside the Church. While you try to unravel yourself from this inextricable entanglement, you are again entangled. For you say "that their baptism therefore ought not to have been rescinded, because, restored within the appointed day, they were not held by the peremptory sentence." How, then, do you say that before the day of restoration they were not separated from the Church, whom before the day of delay you confess to have been restored to the Church? If we are men, if we have any reasoning, if we have human sense, if we are not beasts speaking to beasts, if we are not wood and stones speaking to wood and stones, it stands out, appears, shines forth—not only by my words, but even by your very own—that your people did not dare to rescind the baptism given in the sacrilegious schism of Maximian, who do not hesitate to deny that men baptized in the Churches which the Apostles, in the grace of the Lord, propagated by their own labor, are Christians, to blow upon them, to rebaptize them. You say, you write—behold, hear yourself, read yourself—you, I say, say, you write that "against all those who had persisted in the schism of Maximian, a council being gathered by your people, a sentence was pronounced"; you say, you write that "this sentence being confirmed by the consent of all, it nevertheless pleased that a delay of time be given, within which, if anyone wished to be corrected, he would be held innocent"; you say, you write that "not only those two whom I mention, but many others, purged and innocent, restored themselves to your church"; you say, you write that "their baptism therefore ought not to have been rescinded, because, restored within the appointed day, they were not held by the peremptory sentence."

4. 31. 38. What, what so prevails in so good a wit as so bad a cause, O sensible man, O lettered man? These men, against whom that sentence was pronounced for this reason, because, as you yourself say, they were persisting in the schism of Maximian, before, as you say, they were restored, where they were, there they celebrated the sacraments, there they baptized, and, to use rather the words of that plenary council, there "they warmed with slow heat the noxious offspring of the viperous seed," there "they brought forth the brood of crimes, the pregnant vows of their public deed and parricide," there "they travailed with injustice, conceived labor, and brought forth iniquity," there "their names, in the now unconfused forest of crimes, were marked out for punishment," there "at the end of indulgence, while the line of clemency was let down, the cause had now found whom it might punish; thither, as upon harsh rocks, the truth-telling wave had cast their shipwrecked limbs; there were the shores of the perishing, full of corpses after the manner of the Egyptians, not even finding burial themselves," there "not only had it struck Maximian, the rival of faith, the adulterer of truth, the enemy of the mother Church, the minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram, out from the bosom of peace by the thunderbolt of the sentence, and not only did just death condemn his own crime, but it also dragged very many into the fellowship of the crime by the chain of sacrilege," there "was the venom of asps under their lips," there "their mouth full of cursing and bitterness," there "their feet swift to shed blood," there "ruin and unhappiness in their ways," there "they did not know the way of peace, nor was there fear of God before their eyes," there "lay cut-off limbs, which a pestiferous rottenness had so corrupted that there was more solace in cutting off than remedy in remitting," there "were the defendants of a notorious crime, Victorianus of Carcabia" and the rest, the twelve, with this man—among whom Praetextatus of Assuras and Felicianus of Musti, about whose reception we are dealing, who, present, had ordained that same Maximian, that is, "had glued together a filthy vessel of perdition with collected dregs by a deadly work, where the clergy of Carthage lent procuring to so great a deed as to an unlawful incest." Such ministers of the sacraments, not yet corrected, not yet given back and restored to you, baptized in the schism of Maximian; after such ministers of the sacraments, corrected, given back, restored, your people did not rebaptize.

4. 32. 39. Why does animosity alone prevail in you? Let the truth at some time be attended to, at some time be heard. Why are the most empty mists of the delay given thrown in? It was not given to those of whom it was said: "Know that they have been condemned," of whom it was even foretold what sort they were, what they did, why it behooved that they now be condemned without delay—namely, that, present, they ordained Maximian by laying on hands; for this is what they signified by saying "that by a deadly work they glued together a filthy vessel of perdition with collected dregs." But the delay was given to those who were not present at the ordination of Maximian, although set in his fellowship and schism, only because they did not lay hands on him, in that they had been absent. For thus they are distinguished from his condemned ordainers by the same sentence of the council. For when they had said of those—whose names too they wrote out—"Know that they have been condemned," "but those," they say, "whom the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings—that is, who withdrew their own hands from the head of Maximian out of a modest shame of faith—we have permitted to return to the mother Church." What plainer, what more distinct, what more open? Those they say "are defendants of a notorious crime, who by a deadly work glued together a filthy vessel of perdition with collected dregs; know that they have been condemned"; but these they say, "whom the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings—that is, who withdrew their own hands from the head of Maximian out of a modest shame of faith—we have permitted to return to the mother Church." And because of those condemned, two were afterward received with honor preserved, it is not found how this may be defended, except that it be said that delay was granted to all.

4. 33. 40. But let it be granted to all. Surely, however many returned to you from that schism, before they returned, they were there, there they baptized; thence returning to you, without destruction of their honor and baptism, if there be a brow, they shut your mouths. For when we ask, before they restored themselves, as you yourself said, to the Church, and before they were restored within the appointed day, where they were, what else does the matter itself compel you to answer than: in the schism of Maximian, on account of which that sentence was pronounced against all? There, then, they baptized those in whom—coming to you together from there—you did not dare to rescind the baptism of Christ, because you were compelled to recognize it. Whence by your very deed, by your work, by your judgment, against you it is deservedly and rightly concluded that the baptism of Christ is to be recognized, even if it was given outside the Church, and therefore that we piously recognize this in your people, you impiously rescind it in ours.

4. 34. 41. But perhaps you repent of having set down such words, which would press this truth too hard, since you said: "It came about that they restored themselves to the Church, and, restored within the appointed day, were not held by the peremptory sentence," so that it might be answered you: how did they restore themselves to the Church, how were they restored to it, if they were not separated from it? Or if they were separated, how did they baptize? But what else would you say, except what you had heard from those whom you consulted, when by this cause you were greatly moved by my letter? And yet perhaps they may arraign and reprehend you, that you set down such words incautiously. There is what may fortify you most of all against them and console your sadness. For they too, in the decree of that same council, set down such things; whence, if they should wish to answer us, when this little work of ours has been read, that the words of their layman do not prejudge them, we will at once recite their own words: "But those," they say, "whom the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings—that is, who withdrew their own hands from the head of Maximian out of a modest shame of faith—we have permitted to return to the mother Church." For when it is said to them: "These whom you permitted to return to the mother Church, before they returned, where were they?" they are pressed likewise as you a little before were pressed by the words set down by you. For where will they answer that they were, except in the schism of Maximian? But let them contend that they were wherever they wish: surely those who were permitted to return to the Church were not in the Church. Therefore they baptized outside the Church, and the baptizers and the baptized together, returning to the Church, lost neither those honors which they had held outside, nor that baptism which they had received outside.

4. 35. 42. And you indeed, as much as you could in a bad cause, spoke cautiously, so as to say: "It pleased nevertheless, by decree of the council, that a delay of time be given, within which, if anyone wished to be corrected, he would be held innocent." But they did not say that those to whom that delay was given were to be corrected, but as though they had been altogether unpolluted and innocent in the fellowship of Maximian, so they speak of them, when they prolong that very delay. For what else is it that they say: "But those whom the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings, we have permitted to return to the mother Church," except: "those whom the fellowship of Maximian did not pollute, we have permitted to return to the mother Church"? And lest it be too little, see what they add: "For as much," they say, "as we are purged by the death of the guilty, so much we rejoice over the return of the innocent." Why, then, do you say "that it pleased that a delay of time be given, within which, if anyone wished to be corrected, he would be held innocent," when you see it given to the unpolluted and innocent? But, forsooth, you feared lest it be said to you: why was delay given to those whom Maximian had not polluted? Therefore you reckoned that they were to be corrected by that delay. They feared lest it be said to them: why did you wish to receive the polluted into their honors? Therefore they said that they gave delay to the unpolluted.

4. 36. 43. Accordingly you each feared something, but each position is assailed by the other. For to you it is said: how do you reckon that those whom your people proclaim unpolluted are to be corrected? But to them it is said: how do you assert that those are unpolluted who, even if not by laying a hand on the head of Maximian, yet by the communion of his schism are stained? But whose mind, whose strength, whose tongue would suffice to utter so intolerable a grief? That the party of Donatus, torn apart, may be patched up, Maximian does not pollute even his African associates in Africa; lest the broken branches be permitted to return to the very root of unity, Caecilian pollutes so many most remote nations from Africa.

4. 37. 44. From the day of the Bagai council—that is, the eighth day before the calends of May—up to the day of that delay given—that is, the eighth day before the calends of January—eight months are counted. In this so long interval of time, were those to whom the delay was given stained by the fellowship of the condemned Maximian, or were they not stained? If they were stained, how is it said: "But those whom the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings, we have permitted to return to the mother Church"? If they were not stained, how could the contagion of the unknown—I do not say false—sins of others stain us and all the Christian nations that are everywhere? "But therefore," you say, "delay was given, which, if it had passed with them not returning, then they would be stained and incur the punishment of condemnation." Not, then, did the sin of that fellowship stain them, but the appointment of a day. If, then, no day were appointed, they would surely have remained unstained. What did the world deserve ill of you? Why do you declare it stained by the sins of others, for which you appointed no day of delay—since your power is so great that men are associated with sinners when they will, and are defiled when you will? Innocent and unpolluted were those to whom, in the party of Maximian, delay was given, within whose day, if they returned to you, they would have the foundations of whole honor and faith; but if that day passed with them not returning, then, polluted, then criminal, then lost, they would incur the punishment of condemnation, then they would be humbled, degraded by penance. O marvelous reasoning of men declaring, not now, as the old proverb has it, "What we wish is holy," but even when we wish and as long as we wish! Let it befall any one of you to pray with us in a ship: he is now polluted, now called a betrayer; the condemners of Primian commune at the altars with Maximian, the adulterer of truth, the enemy of the mother Church, the minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram, and for eight months they persist innocent and unpolluted. Accordingly, if any of these on the ninth day before the calends of January restored themselves to your communion, you rejoiced over the return of the innocent—namely those whom the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings. What did so many days of the eight months deserve of you, from the eighth day before the calends of May up to the eighth day before the calends of January, which you so sanctified that through them whoever clung to the communion of the sacrilegious and condemned Maximian was not polluted nor made guilty—and what did so holy a day, the very birthday of our Lord, offend you, that it alone, by its coming and passing, should pollute the innocent, and that in those who baptized in that schism the baptism of Christ should remain holy through all those days, and become unclean through the birthday of Christ?

4. 38. 45. What would human rashness not dare, when it is hurled headlong into an opinion of unspeakable error, which it is ashamed to abandon on account of vanity, and is not ashamed to defend against the truth? But what more from this, where any most obstinate man, who has hardened against all the voices of reason, must necessarily confess that those of whom it is said, "They restored themselves to the Church and were restored within the appointed day"—which words you yourself set down—those, finally, of whom it is said, "We have permitted them to return to the mother Church: we rejoice over the return of the innocent: and lest a narrow time take away from those returning the hope of salvation by the pressure of a constricted day, up to that day of acknowledgment we open the door, so that, returned, they may have the foundations of whole honor and faith. But if anyone is unable to enter it through lazy sluggishness, let him know that the way to all pardonable approaches has been taken from him: and for those returning after the appointed day a fixed penance"—which words the three hundred and ten so often drove home in their sentence—must, I say, any adversary confess that those of whom these things are said, before they restored themselves to you, before they were restored to you, before they returned to you, before, returned, they entered the door of delay, were not with you—that, outside your communion, in that schism by which they had separated themselves from you, they baptized? Thence given back and restored to you where they had been alienated from you, thence returning and coming back to you where they were outside you, they both held their honors undiminished and brought in with them their baptized not to be rebaptized.

4. 39. 46. Why do you still furnish a most stubborn patronage to a most evil cause? Acquiesce at last, not to me, but to the very truth by which you are convicted. See how truly I said, what you tried in vain to weaken, "how great things are to be tolerated for peace," and—to use the same words again which I used in that letter—"for the peace of Christ return to the Church which did not condemn things unknown, if for the peace of Donatus it pleased to recall things condemned." For if of those twelve, whom they had condemned with Maximian without delay, they afterward received Felicianus and Praetextatus, how is it false that they recalled things condemned? But if delay was given even to those whom they said "Know that they have been condemned," even if none of them afterward returned, it nevertheless pleased to recall things condemned, when, after the sentence by which it was said "Know that they have been condemned," delay was given, by which it might be permitted them, the condemnation being voided, to return. These things said would suffice, even if what you say were true—that, when by this cause of the Maximianians you were greatly moved, you learned it from your bishops; but what do you do, since it is also false? Seek, or, if you have it, inspect the day of the proconsular acts on which the petition was made by Titianus against Felicianus and Praetextatus, that they be expelled from their places, and see how long after the day of that delay this was done. For the day of the Bagai council is, in the consulship of the Augusti Arcadius for the third time and Honorius for the second, the eighth day before the calends of May; but the day of the delay is from this up to the eighth day before the calends of January; but that petition of Titianus was made after that consulship, on the sixth day before the nones of March.

4. 40. 47. Accordingly it appears that nearly the third month is being reckoned, when the proconsul is asked that Felicianus and Praetextatus be driven from their seats, as colleagues of Maximian, whom he had associated to himself unto fury. For when the said advocate had said of Maximian what seemed to suffice in that same petition: "Those also," he says, "whom the error of another's presumption had drawn in, having first set forth a harbor of repentance, if they wished to return within the time appointed to the path of religion, he restrained with an equal admonition of vigor. But iniquity delights in its own institutions, and does not desert itself, when once, headlong, it has fallen. For that same Maximian nourishes the boldness he began, and associates others to himself unto fury. Among whom also a certain Felicianus, who, first following the right, is darkened by the defilement of this depravity—set in the city of Musti—believed that the walls consecrated to Almighty God, the venerable Church, must be held as by a kind of siege. This man Praetextatus too imitates in the parts of Assuras." Do you hear the most clear and most manifest words of the advocate, by which he says that these men of whom we are dealing, because they despised the harbor of repentance set forth, while iniquity delights in its own institutions when once, headlong, it has fallen, must be expelled from the ecclesiastical places? Where, if the day of the acts could lie hidden, it would shine forth enough to any most dull man, that the proconsular power would not be approached against them in this way, unless either they had been condemned in that council—as is more apparent of them—with no delay imparted, or, within the day of delay, if it was given to all, had refused to be restored to you. But since even the day of the acts strikes the eyes and ears of any obstinate man so much that those men, even after the day of delay had passed, were not in your communion, and clung to Maximian, so that on this account so terrible an authority of judicial command was obtained against them—what is said to these things? Why is there still contention, with marvelous blindness of shamelessness, against truth so perspicuous? Why do those who, for the unity of the party of Donatus, wished to hold even the concord of sacrilegious condemned men, still rebel with such insanity against the unity of Christ? Why is the baptism of Christ, recognized with due veneration even in a sacrilegious schism, still rejected by impious presumption among so many Catholic nations, violated by sacrilegious repetition?

4. 41. 48. I am unwilling to ask how long after the day of this petition, by which Felicianus and Praetextatus are so gravely accused in the words of the advocate Titianus, they were received into your communion. It suffices that this same petition, so long after the end of that appointed delay, convicts that they, separated from your communion, were in the schism of Maximian—those whom you afterward received, whose honors you in no part diminished, the baptism given by whom, although in a sacrilegious schism—as in truth was to be feared—you feared to rescind. Would the tongue of any most stubborn man bestir itself against us in this cause, if it perceived that it bestirs itself in the mouth of a man and under the brow of a man? I plainly erred, I confess, in what I set down in that letter about that sentence of the Bagai council, since I said: "When it was recited among them as a thing to be decreed, they acclaimed with most ample mouth; but now, when it has been recited by us, they fall silent." It is true what you said: "Behold, they do not fall silent"; for shame, in matters so manifest, or even shamelessness itself, can fall silent, but insanity cannot. And do not take this as said of you, who believed your bishops lying, nor of all of them—for not all could you, moved by this matter, consult—but of those who, although they knew how great things and when were done against Praetextatus and Felicianus before the judges, dared to say to you this which you inserted in your letter, that before the day of the appointed delay Felicianus and Praetextatus, restored to your communion, were not held bound by the peremptory sentence. Or if they too perhaps did not know these things, now at least, when you read these things, let shame fall silent, let even the shamelessness, of whatever sort it is that belongs to a man, fall silent; let only insanity certainly be left, which clamors against truth so evident. And that perhaps will be curable, if it is restrained by the sound.

4. 42. 49. Now see how you said of me: "A lying witness will not be unpunished" (See Prov 19:5), when you thought that I had lied in this cause of the Maximianians. I do not repay this to you; for perhaps you said what you believed by incautious friendship, not what you feigned with a deceitful heart. We are men: by what vigilance, after all, can we bring it about that, either in thinking or in speaking, we do not slip in something? But against the medicine of correction we ought not to grow deaf.

4. 43. 50. Now attend with how great ease this cause of the Maximianians furnishes me, even in the other parts of your letter, for answering. Whatever you thought should be said about betrayers as though ours—although your people are rather shown to have done this, which I demonstrated more than enough in that work of three volumes—yet see and answer, if you can, whether this crime, whosesoever it was, could have polluted, in the unity of so many nations, Christians either far most remote or far later, if the crime of the sacrilegious shoot of Maximian could not stain even his African associates, to whom, giving delay, your three hundred and ten bishops said: "Whom the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings," or yourselves, who received not only those whom you called innocent, but even those already condemned in that sacrilege, with such great concord.

4. 43. 51. You say that the crimes of the betrayers were known to the Easterners, when to you, an African, the schism of the Maximianians, committed in the chief city of Africa, was unknown before, reading my letter, greatly moved, you consulted your bishops; and, when you had consulted, you could by no means hear the truth from them. Whom, if you defend, lest you say they lied, you concede that they were ignorant; and yet you do not permit even us, or so many and so great peoples of the East and the West, even to be ignorant of the cause of Caecilian, when these men are ignorant of that of Praetextatus and Felicianus, whom three hundred and ten—that is, either all or nearly all the bishops of the party of Donatus—Africans condemned Africans in Africa, Africans received Africans in Africa.

4. 44. 52. You insert the beginning of the Serdican council, whence you try to prove that the eastern bishops, having known the crime of the betrayers, communed with the party of Donatus—by this one great proof, forsooth, that among the bishops to whom they write the name of Donatus is found. Nor yet is anything read there that they had come to know about the African betrayers. Which council, lest it escape you, is of the Arians, whom you yourself already named among other heretics, and it is not usually read with the names of cities added, because this too is not the ecclesiastical custom, when bishops write a letter to bishops. Whence I marvel if this Donatus, I know not who, has not in your writings been made the Carthaginian—although those men, separated from Africa by lands so distant, could, at the very time they wished to write, inquire who was the bishop of Carthage, and find that it was Donatus. For I omit to say that perhaps the eastern heretics had tried in some way to associate themselves with the African heretics. But you, a prudent man, when you wished to solve the question—when it could be said to you: if these things are so, that the Easterners wrote to your Donatus, how were the Easterners afterward separated from the communion of your people?—you answered and said: "Because, in receiving our people again, they could not keep the constancy of the condemned cause. And it is written: he who is joined to a harlot is one body (1 Cor 6:16)." Where you now have atrociously accused your people, if in this cause of the Maximianians they could not keep constancy—execrably condemning the sacrilegious, honorably receiving the condemned. For that of the Easterners you do not at all prove, but this of your people you hear and read and discern and judge.

4. 45. 53. You bid me leave the Church of the betrayers, whom neither you among us nor your forebears among our forebears could convict and demonstrate; whom now, if you had demonstrated, I would condemn their deed and crime, not, on their account, desert the Catholic fellowship of so many nations to whom they are unknown. But see with what consideration you are unwilling that in our communion memory be made of those dead men whose deeds we do not know, whose good reputation even among their own we have learned by the succession of posterity, when in your communion, without any degradation, those live whose evils you perceived, whose sacrileges you condemned.

4. 45. 54. You dare to say to me, a prudent man: "He who handed over created you," not knowing that he is our creator, in that we are Christians, who is our creator in that we are men—although neither him whom you think my creator have you convicted of handing over. But I do not repay you this injury; I do not call Felicianus the creator of you, or of your sons or grandsons or great-grandsons, if they are in the party of Donatus. Only, since you permit it, I admonish, lest your Creator find you a deserter, running after the name of a man with impious vanity. Then you seem to yourself to add plausibly: "A stream is led down from a fountain, and the members follow the head. With a sound head the whole body is sound, and if there is in this any disease or fault, it weakens all the members. Whatever grows up in the stock looks back to its origin. He cannot be innocent who does not follow the sect of an innocent man, especially since it is written: Do not walk in the legal customs of your fathers (See Ezek 20:18)." In all these your words I omit that what you compared from the human body is not similar; for it can happen that the foot ache with the head sound, and the head with the foot sound. I omit also that it escaped you what you said a little before: "This we too wish, this we persuade, that Christ be the head of the Christian"—you who now wish I know not what betrayer to be the head of unknown Christian nations, where you are unwilling to recognize the baptism of Christ given and received, as though the baptized were created by none but that betrayer. I omit also how much it helps me that you yourself set down the testimony from Scripture, that it was said to the Jews, Do not walk in the legal customs of your fathers (See Ezek 20:18)—when surely whoever then wished to observe this precept, like the holy prophets and the seven thousand men who did not bend their knees before Baal (See 1 Kgs 19:18), nevertheless did not divide themselves from their own people and from the common sacraments. This I say, this, willing or unwilling, by repeating, however troublesome I may seem to you, I drive home: do not make Caecilian, so often absolved, the head of us who are later; since I will not make either Primian, condemned by Felicianus, or Felicianus, condemned by Primian, the head of your people who are later.

4. 46. 55. Now indeed concerning the envy of persecution, which you boast that you suffer for the party of Donatus from earthly powers—although in that work of three books I answered you sufficiently and abundantly—neither now will I keep silent from you what can be briefly answered from this cause of the Maximianians, nor whether you commend yourselves on that account to unskilled and imprudent peoples. For thus Maximian himself, thus his associates, who could not yield even to the persecutions of your people so as to return to their communion, commend themselves to the empty and unskilled. But those who soberly consider that, of those who suffer some trouble, not the penalties but the causes ought to be considered, understand that they suffered, deservedly and justly, even the commotions of secular judgments for the crime of sacrilegious schism, in which they were deservedly and justly condemned by you. For I do not mention what you set down in your letter, "that not Optatus but the people destroyed not the basilica but the cave of Maximian." Although even there, even if it is uncertain that your people did it, it is certain nevertheless that he suffered persecution, and yet is not just but impious. Whence you are now compelled to confess that one ought to attend not to what each one suffers, but why he suffers.

4. 46. 56. But it is too little for me to demonstrate for the moment by this example of Maximian that he is not consequently just who, under the cover and shadow of the name of Christ, suffers persecution, since the sacrilegious Maximian too suffered it, unless I compel you to confess that both the religious persecute the sacrilegious and the just the impious—not, indeed, out of zeal for harming, but rather by the necessity of taking counsel. Nor do I bring forward examples from the Old Testament, although you said that you wished to be taught even by prophetic examples. Those too ancient ones, I say, I do not bring forward; for they were of another dispensation and time. Now, after the gentleness revealed and commended at the opportune time, your bishops—which indeed we do not say is just, but as long as you are there and defend such a cause you are compelled to say—your bishops, I say, persecuted your schismatics.

4. 47. 57. And so now I do not say: Maximian suffered persecution, Optatus made it—since you answer that you are ignorant of this, and he did it in such a way that I can recite no acts from here; although, the memory being so recent, the cities themselves, if they are questioned, cannot deny it. This, then, I do not say, but I say: Maximian suffered persecution, Primian made it, and I recite acts by which I shall show that the house which Maximian was defending as his own, Primian, by a procuration committed under the name of the ecclesiastical exorcistery—with the priest, the legate, favoring him, which the acts themselves indicate—took away. But grant that he was a judge of justice, not of favor—I do not deny it, I do not refute it: why then did Primian, before the acts of the magistrate of Carthage, among other things which he ordered to be pursued contumeliously about us, say: "They take away what is another's, we cease from things taken away"—when he himself had taken away what was another's, if the house was Maximian's; but if Maximian had rather usurped it, would he not have ceased from things taken away? But if not even this do you wish to pertain to persecution, I say that your bishops and your clergy made persecutions against the Maximianians remaining in those seats in which they had been ordained of old, accused them before the proconsuls, obtained orders, and for executing those same orders merited the insistence of the offices and the auxiliaries of the cities, so that those who had already been condemned by the severity of the Bagai sentence, and cut off, with a brief pain, from the body of your communion lest the pestilent poison creep through all the members, and now causing you no danger by the morbid contagion of their communion, frequented their own conventicles together with their cut-off peoples, retained by perpetual possession the places and basilicas which they had not invaded, together with the peoples clinging to them, might be terrified, driven out, expelled, and, resisting, produced.

4. 48. 58. Read what was said about them, or against them, by the advocates pursuing the matter, what crimes of sacrilege were objected, with what an onset of accusation the powers were stirred up; ask what was done to Salvius of Membressa, because it could not be wrested from him by the agitations of that persecution that he return from the fellowship of the crime, and he preferred to commit himself to examination and to answer his persecutors in the proconsular judgment—with this confidence, I believe, that he knew his adversaries could not use, before a judge, the laws promulgated against heretics, unless they likewise ensnared themselves in them too. But this reckoning deceived him. For before Seranus, then proconsul, either favor prevailed more, or perhaps the Bagai council, which was there too recited against this same Salvius. By a certain interlocution, indeed, he showed what was being done on its own account—that is, that he should either restore Salvius to the choir of the bishops of Primian's communion, or put him to flight from his seats, so that Restitutus, whom Primian had ordained against him, might possess without an adversary all the places which were held by Salvius; and yet in the same interlocution he expressed that Salvius suffered persecution. For thus it is read in those same acts: "Seranus the proconsul said: A lawsuit of bishops is to be heard, according to the law, by bishops: the bishops have judged. Why do you not either return, with satisfaction, to the choir of antiquity, or, as you have it written, turn your back to the persecutors?" What does this seem to you? Does it please you to call this Salvius just, to whom the proconsul—before whom, with your bishop restored standing opposite, he was being accused—even gives counsel from holy Scripture, that he turn his back to the persecutors, since it is written in the Gospel, If they persecute you, flee (See Matt 10:23)? You see surely what an appearance Salvius shows among his own, of either a martyr or a confessor, who, with Restitutus persecuting, merited to hear these things from the proconsul, and yet is judged not only according to us, but even according to you, impious and sacrilegious.

4. 49. 59. Now indeed, after the sentence of the proconsul was alleged to the Abitinians, through whom, as a neighboring city, your people had merited that the judgment be carried out—because nearly all the men of Membressa loved Salvius—what those same Abitinians did to a man of most grave age, it irks me to say, because they did it not before the acts; but since, the memory being so recent, the very testimony of the cities is clearer than any documents, I shall briefly touch upon what I learned there when I was making a journey. For because Salvius had tried, by the confidence of the crowd favoring him, even after the proconsul's judgment, to resist for the sake of defending in whatever part his seats, conquered at last he was seized, no longer to be led to a judge, where the sentence had been pronounced between the parties, but to be triumphed over with a pitiable pomp. For having captured the old man, they bound dead dogs about his neck, and so danced with him as long as they pleased. If I wished to exaggerate this by speaking, would I not perhaps show that this punishment was scarcely to be compared with the torments of the Etruscan kings, who joined dead bodies to the living (See Cicero, Hortensius / Virgil, Aeneid 8)? Would not an old man, and one who wished to be held a bishop, by the judgment of all be banished from the fellowship of the living and the dead, if, two punishments being set before him, of which one had to be undergone, he chose not rather to cling to human corpses than to dance with canine ones?

4. 50. 60. Now look at those words of mine which you reckoned you had refuted—nay, no longer at them, but, in their place, at these which I shall say. For behold, I do not say: if it is not lawful to make persecution, Optatus made it; but I say: if it is not lawful to make persecution, Restitutus made it; nor do I say: if he who suffers persecution is to be held innocent, Maximian suffered it. But I say: if he who suffers persecution is to be held innocent, Salvius suffered it. I recite acts, I repeat the words you do not want: Restitutus made it, Salvius suffered it. Which of these two will you answer me is a Christian, except Restitutus; which sacrilegious, except Salvius? Let it lie, then, and let it be rejected as disproved, both what you said, "that there is no just persecution," and what you said: "Who is unwilling to consent to the testament when it is brought forward—he who suffers persecution or he who makes it?"—because the persecution which Salvius suffered and Restitutus made is also just. Salvius suffered it, and to you Restitutus is praiseworthy, Salvius damnable. For you will not say that it was done secretly, nor could it lie hidden from Primian, what was done in that city where he himself presided as bishop, and in so great a city, before so great a judge, that from this it could not be hidden even from other cities. Or if this too is to be reckoned among hidden things, why are you unwilling that the world be ignorant if Caecilian did any evil—which far be it that he did—in the time of persecution, if Primian could be ignorant of the persecution which Salvius suffered from him whom he himself ordained against him, and in that city where he holds the chief place over his colleagues? You will confess, then, willing or unwilling, lest you be compelled to condemn Restitutus, Primian, the party of Donatus, that not only the unjust suffer, but even the just can make persecution. Or if you think that what is done justly is not to be called persecution, you will be able to prove neither that you suffered persecution from us nor that your people did from ours, and we shall rather demonstrate that we suffer it from your clergy and Circumcellions, who, with a hard and tasteless heart, neither understanding nor bearing what we counsel them unto salvation, rage against us with such great fury that what they do to us I cannot suffice to number, or mention, or worthily set forth in words.

4. 51. 61. Accordingly, when a frenzied man harasses a physician and the physician binds the frenzied man, either both persecute each other, or, if there is no persecution except what is done badly, then surely the physician does not persecute the frenzied man, but the frenzied man the physician. Your savagery, then, and most violent boldness, through your Circumcellions, the satellites of your clergy, known to all, had to be repressed by the laws which were passed against you, and in a way bound—both so that you might, by that very terror at least admonished, wish to consider and amend in what error you were and by what sacrilege you were divided against the unity and peace of Christ; just as, agitated by your terrors through the commands of the secular powers, Felicianus and Praetextatus—which, with a heart too hard and most perverse, Salvius refused—corrected the schism which they had made from you, and returned to your communion and fellowship. But the whole would be corrected, if there were a return by you all to the Catholic root. But whatever was done against you that exceeded the tempering of Christian love is as little to be imputed to the Catholic Church as I would impute to Primian or Restitutus that which the Abitinians did to Salvius.

4. 52. 62. But as to the fact that, after exaggerating the persecutions which you said the party of Donatus suffered, and keeping silent the whole that preceded from your people and saying many things which are not proved against ours, you subjoined a testimony from the Psalms and said: "Was it not said of those who do such things, their feet are swift to shed blood, and they have not known the way of peace (Rom 3:15, 17)?"—these very things, and many others far graver, your bishops said against Felicianus and Praetextatus in that Bagai council. And certainly those men shed the blood of no flesh, made no onset of bodily violence against you; but those who said these things against them judged that they much more wickedly shed spiritual blood by the sacrilege of schism. Whence, if with them, after such grave and sharp things said against them, you made peace without the discoloring of their honor, without the rescinding of their baptism, it is not to be despaired that you can come into concord with us too. For the whole Christian world ought to allure you to making peace much more than Praetextatus and Felicianus, since, if those whom you condemned with such great atrocity of accusation did not defile you, much less does the unity of so many Christian nations defile you, to whom you have not demonstrated the crimes of I know not what Africans; and the crime greatly defiles you, by which you separated your fellowship from the fellowship of that Church on whose behalf so many and so great divine testimonies are recited—which divine testimonies you dared to contradict with human rashness, when you yourself too, I know not how, were compelled by that same force of truth to confess that into the Christian name the whole world is daily turned.

4. 53. 63. You dared, I say, to struggle against the testament of God, when the Apostle says: No one annuls or adds to a man's confirmed testament. To Abraham the promises were made, and to his seed (Gal 3:15-16). To annul this testament, to add the party of Donatus over this testament, you did not at all fear; and, when God in that same testament says to Abraham, So will your seed be, as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the sea (See Gen 22:17), you, annulling this and adding over it the party of Donatus, on whose behalf you recite no testimony, say: "Among the few the truth is frequently found, to err belongs to the many"—not understanding how it was said by the Lord that few enter through the narrow gate (See Matt 7:14), when he said also that many would recline from the East and the West with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (See Matt 8:11), and in the Apocalypse are demonstrated thousands clothed in white from every nation and tribe and tongue, which no one can number (See Rev 7:9). Who surely are both many in themselves, and the same are few in comparison with the far more numerous who are to be punished with the devil. Yet that wheat, destined for the eternal barns, associated through the whole world by the unity of love, whether from the scandals and violences of heretics, or from its inner, as it were its own chaff—many not living rightly—tolerates the heat and threshing of this age, to be purged at the final winnowing. But for you, to all these things nothing answers more easily than the cause of the Maximianians. For if among the few the truth is frequently found, and to err belongs to the many, allow that the Maximianians, by as much as they are unequal to you in fewness, by so much surpass you in truth. You do not do it: do not, then, glory in your fewness in comparison with the multitude of Catholic nations, just as you are unwilling that the Maximianians should glory in their fewness in comparison with your multitude.

4. 54. 64. But as to what you relate about the African betrayers—do you so not know, or, with whatever sort of human heart, not perceive, how vain and inept a narration is, in a conflict in which truth is sought, when proof does not follow? In refuting which I would not spend labor, were it not that I have in the cause of the Maximianians so easy a shortcut without any ambiguity. The holy writings are: The God of gods, the Lord, has spoken, and called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting: out of Zion is the form of his beauty (Ps 50:1-2 (49)). With this prophetic testimony the Gospel agrees, where the Lord himself says of himself: It behooved Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and the remission of sins be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:46-47). For what was there said, he called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting, this is said here, through all nations; and what was said there, out of Zion is the form of his beauty, this is said here, beginning from Jerusalem. For not only did Christ suffer there, but there too he rose again, thence he ascended into heaven, there he filled a hundred and twenty men gathered on the day of Pentecost with the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, there on one day he received three, on another five thousand believers converted into his body, thence into all Judea and Samaria and into the rest of the nations of the world the Church, by bearing fruit, diffused itself and diffuses itself. Foretelling which to his disciples and now about to ascend into heaven, he said: You will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and even to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). This Church, then, beginning from Jerusalem and diffusing itself through all nations with so evident a fertility that it compels you yourself to confess that into the Christian name, by the providence of God, the whole world is daily turned—this Church, I say, which, with the Lord God of gods speaking, is called from the rising of the sun to its setting, could in no way be polluted by African betrayers whom it altogether did not know, if the slips of the sacrilegious shoot of Maximian did not pollute so many of his colleagues, only because in ordaining him they did not lay hands on him—although they praised him condemned by Primian and condemned Primian, although, set in his schism, they received a delay by which they might return.

4. 55. 65. Moreover, because I said, "we object handing over to you much more probably," you answer that I in this way confessed that you objected it to us probably, teaching also the rule of speech "by which the comparative degree augments what was placed before, does not disprove what was said before," and adding: "Just as 'well' and 'better,' 'badly' and 'worse,' 'horribly' and 'more horribly,' so it is 'probably' and 'more probably.'" Whence you seem to yourself to gather and say: "If you more probably, then we probably." To this I answered you, in that more prolix work of three books, in its place, sufficiently—or perhaps more than sufficiently—and showed from those letters where we learned words, how the comparative degree does not always augment what it compares, sometimes disproves that to which it is compared. Thence is "the gods grant better things to the pious"; thence is "I wish for better auspices." Read diligently, you will find more yourself. But do you not marvel, I beg you, that in this cause of the Maximianians, from which I have now resolved to answer you on all things, an example of this speech too was not lacking to me? For in that most luminous and most eloquent sentence of the Bagai council: "A more salutary remedy has been found," they say, "lest the pestilent poison creep through all the members—that the newly arisen wound be lopped off with a brief pain." Surely, according to your rule, they ought to have said "salutary," not "more salutary"; for that was not salutary, but pernicious, that the pestilent poison should creep through all the members. The cause was more salutary, then, that the newly arisen wound be lopped off with a brief pain, although it was not salutary, but on the contrary destructive, that the pestilent poison should creep through all the members. So we object handing over to you more probably, although you do not object it to us probably.

4. 56. 66. Now as to what I said against Silvanus, your bishop of Cirta—that he was a betrayer, the municipal acts testify, drawn up there at Cirta by Munatius Felix, curator of the commonwealth. For as we read written there: "After the library was opened, empty cupboards were found there. There Silvanus brought forth a little silver box and a silver lamp, which he said he had found behind a jar. To whom Victor son of Aufidius said: 'You would have been a dead man if you had not found them.' But when Felix the curator had said to him, 'Search more diligently, lest anything have remained here,' Silvanus said: 'Nothing has remained here, we have thrown out all this.'" When these acts were recited before the acts of Zenophilus the consular, and inserted in them among many other documents of witnesses, the consular asked: "What did Silvanus then administer in the clergy? Victor answered: 'Under Paul the bishop, when the persecution arose, Silvanus was a subdeacon.'" Against this most evident document of public acts, that it be the less believed, you seem to yourself to oppose something great, because you mention the sentence which he pronounced against Caecilian as though punishing betrayers, and you argue that it could not happen that he was a betrayer who stood forth so severe an avenger of handing over: as though anything seemed more severe to those most wicked elders, when with such great insistence they raged for the killing of Susanna, while their conscience was pricked by that very crime which they pretended they wished to punish in her (See Dan 13:34-41). But let us pass over such things. What of Felicianus? Does he not now, with Primian, condemn what he himself committed with Maximian—but plainly more corrected by a better judgment, not more shameless? Which, if Silvanus had wished to do, he would have condemned, not a false handing over in Caecilian, but a true one in himself, by a salutary amendment, and would have crossed over to the innocence of Caecilian, even if not as a bishop, yet with his depravity corrected—if Felicianus could nevertheless cross over, even with episcopal honor, to Primian, whom he had condemned innocent just as the other did Caecilian, without a stain on Primian or on himself.

4. 56. 67. Nor should you take that which I said, "that they ought to have convicted I know not what betrayers whom your forebears arraigned, if they arraigned them truthfully," as though they ought to have done this before themselves. For you answer thus, "that they did it, and therefore judged that our people lost baptism." Read first diligently what you write against. And either understand what is said, or do not turn what you understand into something else. I said that they ought to have convicted them, not before your people, but before the overseas Churches, to whom those who were arraigned by your people seemed innocent. For the Maximianians too seem to themselves to have condemned Primian, convicted, but not before those who, set farther off and more removed from favor or envy, could pass such a judgment about him as would easily be proved to the whole party of Donatus. But now a hundred condemned him, and left him to be absolved by more than three hundred, before whom they themselves would incur the danger of condemnation. For they ought to have persuaded their own sentence to those so many more numerous, so that they themselves might be within with them, but Primian outside, if, condemned, he had rejected penance. But if they could not persuade this to so much greater a number of colleagues and to so many Churches of their communion spread through all Africa, either they should rescind their sentence by sounder counsel—in which, as men about a man, they could be deceived—or, if they had learned his true crimes without any doubt, which nevertheless they could not persuade to so many more of the rest, they should knowingly tolerate the guilty man more prudently and more patiently than separate themselves by an impious schism from so many innocent men who did not know these things. For they would hold that most full sentence of charity and piety of blessed Cyprian, by which he says: "For even if there seem to be weeds in the Church, yet neither our faith nor our love ought to be hindered, so that, because we discern that there are weeds in the Church, we ourselves should withdraw from the Church." Which indeed would then profit them, if, purged in the bosom of the Catholic Church, they tolerated the impurities which they could not separate before the time. But what we say they ought to have done in this fellowship of your error, which you reckon to be the true Church, this your forebears ought to have done in that one perspicuously true, in whose unity they were, lest they be separated from it. For just as any man of your party, altogether ignorant of the cause of Primian, nevertheless—although condemned by a hundred Maximianians—simply believes him innocent who proved himself to so many more, so too in the Catholic communion, one to whom the cause of Caecilian is hidden, not without reason persuades himself that he was innocent who, not only through Africa, but through the lands of so many Christian nations, could either become known as innocent to so many more other bishops, or be hidden as guilty—before whom he either merited to be absolved by one who recognized him, or did not merit to be condemned by one who was ignorant, or, absolved by a corrupted judge against what he had merited, could not be demonstrated to others who had not judged. You, then, are separated by a sacrilegious separation from the unity of so many and so great innocent peoples, who, since they could not be judges in this cause, either were ignorant that there were any judges here, or whether anything, or what, was here judged, or believed the chosen judges rather than the conquered litigants.

4. 57. 68. Hence it is taught, even in that which, from that fourfold distribution of mine, you chose for yourself as the last—for you could not do otherwise—how easily you are overcome. For I said that, if proofs of the crimes of handing over are brought forward on both sides, either both are true, or both false, or ours true and yours false, or ours false and yours true. And when in the three earlier ones I had demonstrated our most easy victory, in the fourth too either you understood too little that you are conquered, or—what I rather believe—lest it be understood by others, you thought you should dispute, with I know not what little shadings, by which you tried to cover it, about the kind of argumentation; whence we shall perhaps deal with you elsewhere, if there be need, lest we now spend time on unnecessary matters.

4. 58. 70. When, then, I said: "But if your proofs were any true, you ought to have proved them to the Church—that is, the Catholic Church—so that you might be within, but those whom you convicted be expelled outside," what is it that you wished to answer, "that the separation was therefore made, because we were driven outside, but your people remained in the plenary and Catholic Church"? If the Maximianians say this to you in just so many words, what will you answer, except that they are not worthy to be refuted, but only to be laughed at, who dare to affirm a plenary Church with bishops now fewer than a hundred against so great a number and multitude, over which more than three hundred preside—when through all the regions of Africa where the Maximianians are, the communion of Primian too is not lacking, but through other much more numerous and broader parts of Africa no one finds a single Maximianian except perhaps scarcely one sojourning? With what mouth, then, against the Church promised by the voice of truth from the rising of the sun to its setting and rendered, do you dare to call the party of Donatus the plenary Church, when it is only of Africa, but that one is, with so many nations, also of Africa? But, forsooth, this one sent that one outside. Do not, I beg, send this voice outside; the brow is on the face of a man, not under the shoulder. So, did this one send that one outside? Do you not see that, if she is sent outside, of whom God says to Abraham, In your seed all nations will be blessed (Gen 22:18), of whom it is read foretold that in the last days the mountain of the Lord will be manifest and all nations will come to it (See Isa 2:2), of whom it is sung foretold, All the ends of the earth will be reminded and turned to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will adore in his sight (Ps 22:27 (21)), of whom it is preached that in the whole world she fruits and grows (See Col 1:6), whom the Lord himself says is spread through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem (See Luke 24:47)—do you not see, I say, that if she is sent outside, she is sent outside with the law of God, with the prophets, with the Psalms, with the apostles, with the Gospel itself, with the whole testament, finally, and with the heir himself?

4. 59. 70. Which wickedness, if you attend to it, if you shudder at it, if you tremble, see where you are and return within, since you did not send out, but you rather have gone outside. See what spirited blindness does. It is said that Maximian sent Primian outside, and it is laughed at; it is said that the party of Donatus sent outside the labors of the apostles fruiting and growing through the whole world, and it is not shuddered at.

4. 59. 71. But lest you be deceived or deceive in anything, since you affirm—not noticing it, or pretending that you have not noticed it—that I said what I have so often mentioned, namely that the Catholic Church is not the Lord's wheat. For I so asserted the Catholic Church as the divine Scripture asserts it: the wheat alone will be stored in the barn; now the Church, like a threshing floor, is threshed together with the chaff. This is what presses and oppresses you, and, unless you are corrected, destroys you: because you said that you could not tolerate the chaff of this threshing floor—which you showed yourselves to be—and you shamelessly feigned yourselves to be purged wheat, and so, turbulent with empty calumnies, you have gone out of that very threshing floor, like the lightest dust of threshing lifted through the void, before the final time of winnowing. Finally, that most arrogant and most false voice is yours, not ours: What has the chaff to do with the wheat? (Jer 23:28) Which Jeremiah says of the dreams of empty men and the revelations of prophets, and Parmenian writes it as though it were said of us and you. Ask also of Maximian; he will say nothing else of himself. For there is no other swelling of impious pride among all who cut themselves off from the unity of Christ, than to boast that they alone are Christians and to condemn the rest—not only those to whom their lawsuit is known, but even those to whom not even their name has been heard.

4. 60. 72. Now how elegantly you seemed to yourself to say that, when I had said of the testament of God, "now, from wherever it has been brought forward, let it be recited," you thought it should be answered that this already contains a confession of crime, and that I therefore said, "from whomsoever it has been brought forward, let it be recited," because it is established with me that it was both burned by our people and preserved and brought forward by you. But indeed, if, trusting in the truth, you should wish a codex of the law to be brought forward by Maximian, from which you might recite Dathan, Korah, and Abiram, who were swallowed up alive by the gaping earth (See Num 16:31-33), to whom the Bagai sentence compared that man—will it not be recited the more firmly against him, because it is found in his codex? What I said, then, "let the testament, from wherever it has been brought forward, be recited," is not a confession of crime, but a confidence of truth. For what is more convenient, what more splendid, than that, if it can be done, what is read against you be brought forward by you? Not because I do not have it for myself, but the conviction is easier and surer, that you should have against you what may become for you, if you are corrected.

4. 60. 73. But because it pleased you to repeat empty things against the universality of the Church, here too I answer you. Just as in Africa you are the party of Donatus, from whom it appears that the party of Maximian made a schism, since it is not throughout the whole of Africa where you are, but you are not lacking even in the regions where that one is—for other schisms too were made from you, like the Rogatists in Mauretania Caesariensis, the Urbanenses in a certain little portion of Numidia, and several others, but where they were cut off, there they remained; and from this it stands out that they went out from you, not you from them, because you are even in those lands where they are, but they, wherever you are, are not found except perhaps sojourning—so the Catholic Church, which, as Cyprian says, extends its branches through the whole earth in the abundance of its fertility, everywhere sustains the scandals of those who are cut off from it especially by the fault of pride, some here, others elsewhere and elsewhere, who, showing off their own parties, say: Behold, here is Christ, behold, there (Matt 24:23)—whom, lest belief be placed in them, he himself forewarned. For they do not show the way of which it was prophesied in the Psalms: That we may know your way upon earth, your salvation among all nations (Ps 67:2 (66)), but each shows the regions of his own communion, behold here, behold there. For where they fall, there they remain, and where they are separated, there they wither. Whence she from whom they are cut off is extended even into those lands where those fragments lie, each in its own region; but in those single regions, wherever she herself is stretched out, they are not, although sometimes the wind of pride scatters scarcely a very few leaves from their dryness into foreign parts.

4. 61. 74. This Church, then, which, to use the same words again, extends its branches through the whole earth in the abundance of its fertility, will, by growing, reach even many barbarian nations outside the Roman world. Which I reckon you too inquired and learned, so that you said: "I pass over the proper religions of the barbarian nations, the rites of the Persians, the stars of the Chaldeans, the superstitions of the Egyptians, the gods of the magi—as though all these were not, because by the providence of God into the Christian name the whole world is daily turned." These things you said truly, and so is fulfilled the promise which was made to Abraham: In your seed all nations will be blessed (Gen 22:18). All nations, he says; he did not say: all the men of all nations. Whence it is necessary that not only by the fertility of the growing Church, but even by the admixed multitude of its enemies, through whom its piety can be exercised and proved, the whole world be filled up to the end of the judicial separation. So was this testament mentioned, with the Lord saying to his son Isaac too: And I will establish my oath, which I swore to Abraham your father, and I will enlarge your seed as the stars of heaven, and I will give to you and to your seed the whole earth, and in your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed (See Gen 26:3-4); so too to his grandson Jacob: And your seed will be as the sand of the earth, and it will be spread abroad over the sea and to the south and to the north and to the east, and in you all the tribes of the earth will be blessed (See Gen 28:14). But when Scripture for the most part says "over the sea," one who reads knows that the western part is wont to be signified. If you had wished to consent to this testament when it was brought forward, you would not have remained in the south alone.

4. 61. 75. Not, then, do the "Novatians, Arians, Patripassians, Valentinians, Anthropians, Apellians, Marcionites, Ophites" commune with us, as you say, and the rest, to use your words, "the sacrilegious names of nefarious pests, not sects." Yet wherever these are, there the Catholic Church is, just as in Africa where you too are; but not, wherever the Catholic Church is, are you there or any heresy of those. Whence it appears which is the tree extending its branches through the whole earth in the abundance of its fertility, and which are the broken branches, not having the life of the root, and each lying and withering in its own places. But if they do not remain in unbelief, as the Apostle says of the Israelites, they will be grafted in; for God is able to graft them in again (Rom 11:23)—not so that they again receive the sacrament of baptism, which, once drawn from the tree, they did not change, but so that they may revive from the root of love and unity, from which, separated, they wither by the sterility of animosity; just as you reckoned that Praetextatus and Felicianus must be grafted in again, whom Maximian had cut off with himself, nor did you reprove the baptism of the cut-off. To whom you would truly furnish something, if you restored them not to your fragment, but both yourselves and them to the Catholic root.

4. 62. 76. Now indeed, what should I answer to that which I seemed to you to have said on your behalf, since I said "that baptism does not profit those who depart from unity, yet that it is in them is proved from this, that to those returning it is not restored"? For you affirmed that you too say this, "that to our forebears, not returning to the Church, the baptism which they had received there did not profit." If you said this, nothing else would be sought between us except what is the Church where baptism profits. But you do not say that baptism is in us and does not profit, but you say that what we received from those who had lost it by departing is altogether not there. Whence you could not answer, nor will you be able to answer, to that which was set down by me, "that baptism is in those departing is proved from this, that to those returning it is not restored." For if Felicianus had lost baptism by withdrawing from you, why was he not baptized anew on returning, so that what he had lost might be restored to him? Maximian himself, finally, if he returns to you, is not baptized—which surely he ought to be, if he had lost baptism. For your words are, "that, held by the sentence of condemnation in his schism, they lost at once both baptism and the Church." As, then, to those returning the Church is restored, let baptism be restored; let them be baptized, I say, when they return, if they lost baptism when they withdrew. Because you do not do this, you too confess that baptism is in those withdrawing from the Church, and does not profit. They give, then, as they have it—that is, so that in those too who receive from them outside the Church, baptism is present, and yet does not profit. Whence, just as to those returning what they did not lose is not restored, so to those too what they had received is not to be given, but it is to be dealt with them, that through the Church there may profit both what outside the Church could be present, but not profit. And through this I neither said anything on behalf of your error, and to what I said you did not answer.

4. 63. 77. You add also about the enclosed garden and the sealed fountain, of which you altogether do not understand whence it was said. "If the garden is enclosed," you say, "and the fountain sealed, how can he who is set outside, and separated from the garden—that is, the Church—and from its fountain—that is, baptism—give what he does not have?" Ask Felicianus whether he had been in the enclosed garden, when to him the door of delay, as it were to that same enclosed garden, was opened for return. Or did he perhaps steal the fountain from there, where he might baptize his laymen in the schism of Maximian? But if it is so, where then did your people wash their own? Or did they likewise defer them with that delay, until those thieves should return to the garden with the fountain? Were these men not then pseudo-prophets, when, by lying about the crimes of Primian, they led the deceived over to their own sacrilege; ravening wolves, when they dragged off those seduced from the flock of Primian to the little particles of their own cutting? You deny those tyrannical lordships of your people in the estates of others which I mentioned, and the debaucheries of drunkenness: deny it as much as you can; I do not fear that on that account it should weary you to come into concord with us. I said nothing of the kind against you, such things as the Maximianians condemned by you merited to hear. You deny the fury of the Circumcellions and the sacrilegious and profane cults of those who hurl themselves down of their own accord to death; yet you do not deny that, "when, after the manner of the Egyptians, the shores were full of the corpses of the perishing, for whom in death itself the punishment is greater, in that they did not even find burial," you clung to these unburied corpses. For there lay Praetextatus and Felicianus; or, if among you they came to life again, what do you do about the baptism which they then, dead, handed over?

4. 64. 78. You say that I did not keep the peace and gentleness which I had promised at the beginning of my letter, in that I called Petilian Satan. I compared to Satan not Petilian, nor any man in the party of Donatus, but the very error of the party of Donatus, from whose snares I desire the men whom I love to be freed. For read more considerately, you will find it. Although, even if I said something too harsh, read what you yourselves said—not against the error of the Maximianians, but against the men themselves. Let Petilian, then, imitate Felicianus, and not be angry with me desiring peace.

4. 64. 79. With you, certainly, I myself am not angry, that you thought the Manichees should be obliquely objected to me on account of the error of my youth. Whence I do not so much grieve over my past unhappiness as I rejoice over the perpetual glory of my deliverer. And yet, if it pleases you, I admonish you to seek and read what things, and how great, and in what manner, I have written against the most pestilential heresy of the Manichees. There you will see with what faith I defended the Christian truth against them, and with how great perspicuity I destroyed their fallacies, and do not be incredulous against me, when you believe that Felicianus faithfully clung to Primian, who, on behalf of Maximian, said such great crimes against him in a condemnatory sentence, but against that same Maximian, dissociated from him, perhaps wrote something—upon whom not, as I upon those, a young layman catechumen had fallen, but an old man had, as a bishop, made an old man an adversary to him to whom he is now joined, a bishop against a bishop. Whence, since I read that the letter of our primate—because you had made mention, under the same urbane obliquity, of what he wrote about me in anger, when he was pressed in a council of bishops to prove what he had intended—was condemned by the sentence of that same man correcting himself and asking pardon about this matter: seek whether you can read where Felicianus, corrected, condemned what he said against Primian, not accusing but condemning, or at least where Primian himself voided what he said in condemning Felicianus. But if you find it, not even so will the cause be equal, because that man had instituted an accusation which, perceiving it to be false, he condemned with a petition for pardon—not spurning the humility of amendment by the dignity of the primacy, but rather, prudent, recalling what is written: The greater you are, the more humble yourself in all things, and before God you will find grace (Sir 3:18)—but these men had not accused each other before others, but had sat as judges against each other. Accordingly they condemned each other, and, condemned, came into concord. We do not envy the party of Donatus the peace of the condemned, if they do not also reject the peace of Christ in the whole world.

4. 65. 80. You now discern, I reckon, how emptily you said that you seemed to yourself to have answered all the things that my letter contains. For if you answered for this reason, because you were unwilling to keep silent, you did not indeed answer all things, but nevertheless you answered. But if you answered for this, to void the things said by me, I see indeed that you answered many things, but I see that you refuted nothing. But, all the things said by me being considered, I think that you most easily understand that it is not for the sake of avoiding contention—which is none when truth is sought, or when one does not litigate for empty glory—but from diffidence in a bad cause, that your people are unwilling to confer with us. For, to bring forward into the midst this cause of the Maximianians alone, now at least perhaps you already recognize that nothing can be contradicted. Whence not arrogantly, as you believe or slander, did I wish to commend it as though invincible eloquence, but rather so that those who read might behold that such is the cause, for whose asserting, or rather demonstrating, the patronage of no eloquence is to be sought.

4. 65. 81. Behold, now I do not call your error a three-headed beast, because you are a most sweet emender of words, but I say a threefold calumny; nor do I say that we ought to resist it as with a "trident weapon" from this cause of the Maximianians, but I say with a threefold defense; nor do I say, "Pierce them in the brow," or, "Constrict them in the mouth," but I say: Restrain their shamelessness and repress their discourse. Surely, because the words are changed and from figurative ones made proper, is the cause of the Maximianians on that account changed—by whose shortcut you are so overcome that nothing remains for you, if at some time you are wise, except, with stubborn animosity ended, to be at peace?

4. 66. 82. If it is about communion—not in the sins of others, but in the divine sacraments—communion was held with the condemned, and it was said of other sacrilegious men who communed with the condemned Maximian, that the slips of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute the plantings; if it is about persecution, you persecuted the condemned, you corrected the spirited by persecutions; if it is about baptism, you received the baptism given in a sacrilegious schism: why are unintelligible divine testimonies still emptily brought forward, lest the truth be recognized and error fled? It is written: If anyone thinks himself to be contentious, we have no such custom (1 Cor 11:16). But neither was Restitutus held by you to be contentious, who, on account of little cells and little fields, in order to expel Salvius of Membressa from his places, contended with forensic clamor and controversy; how much less ought he to be thought contentious who, not for usurping or carrying off, but for sharing the inheritance of heavenly things, faithfully disputes with those who think otherwise. "It is written," you say, "In the ears of a foolish man do not say anything, lest he mock your sensible words (See Prov 23:9)." Do not say to us in the ears as though a secret, if you do not think us prudent—just as neither did Christ say in the ears of the Pharisees what he nevertheless brought forward, with them hearing, for refuting them. Show us openly, so that, if we are not corrected, we may be convicted, how the Christian world stains you, if you come to unity—you whom the condemned Felicianus does not stain. It is written: Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you become like him (Prov 26:4). Does there not follow there: But answer him against his folly, lest he seem wise to himself (Prov 26:5)? Do this too; do not by your answer consent to what you think our folly, but answer with that by which it can be refuted. Answer, I say, how you received without any destruction the baptism which the Maximianians ministered in a sacrilegious schism, and destroy the baptism given in the churches which Christ propagated through the apostles.

4. 66. 83. Accordingly, as to the fact that at the end of your letter you thought all the things which were said by you above more broadly should be briefly run through, so that you might refresh the reader's memory, receive them in the same order—so that you ought to deceive neither yourself nor others. For it is not a mark of arrogance either to seek or to assert the truth; and what you think could never be settled, has not only been settled by the prudent and those who fear God, but you yourselves too have ended the whole, which you thought endless, by receiving the Maximianians. And we call you, not to contention, but to a conference—you who struck the Maximianians even with forensic lawsuits, and in those who were baptized in the schism of Maximian, although they ought by no means to have been baptized there, nevertheless recognized the baptism of Christ, and declared that the fountain of the Church—to which none but a good man approaches—is to be understood otherwise, by accepting the baptism which the sacrilegious had given outside. And you are compelled to confess that our forebears, or the holy Church which we hold, could not be polluted by others' crimes of incense-offering and handing over—although they were never proved by you—you who said that the slips of the sacrilegious shoot of that same Maximian did not pollute the plantings, his associates, to whom you were giving a delay for returning; whence we, born so long after, can much less pertain to that same origin of betrayers and incense-offerers, if then it could not stain the fellowship of our forebears living together. And the persecutions—although you are accustomed to object them to us as most savage against the truth—yet in some part you corrected the Maximianians by persecutions, and received them, although the delay had been given not to those already condemned, yet after the term of that delay, and the baptism which they had given outside your communion to those for whom you opened the door of delay for returning, you did not rescind, even after that same delay, when it was recognized and approved. Wherefore, since you see that nothing could be said by you which this one cause of the Maximianians does not refute and convict, grant pardon if perhaps by some word too harshly uttered I have offended you; and if, an African in Africa, you so late inquired, admonished by my letter, into so great a cause of the Maximianians arisen in the chief city of Africa, and, having inquired, could not, as you now discern, find it out from your people who told you false things: fear God, do not bespatter so many Christian nations, stretched through the world in so broad a Christian unity, with the unknown crimes of unknown Africans, and for the peace of Christ return to the Church which did not condemn the unknown, if for the peace of Donatus it pleased to recall the condemned.