To his most beloved brothers belonging to the care of our stewardship, Augustine: greetings in the Lord.

1. 1. You know that we have often wished to bring the sacrilegious error of the Donatist heretics into clear view, and to refute it, not so much from our own mouth as from their own; and so it came about that we sent letters even to some of their leading men—not letters of communion, of which they have by their dissent already in the past made themselves unworthy from the Catholic Church;

yet not insulting letters either, but peaceable ones: that, the question being thrashed out with us which tore them away from the holy communion of the whole world, they might, upon considering the truth, be willing to be corrected; and that they might not with a still more foolish obstinacy defend the spirited perversity of their forebears, but might be restored to the Catholic root for the fruit of love. But since it is written, with those who hated peace I was peaceable (Ps 120:6-7 (119:6-7)), so they spurned my letters, just as they hated the very peace that was being sought for them through those letters.

But just now, when I was in the church of Constantina, in the presence of Absentius and of my colleague Fortunatus its bishop, the brothers brought me a letter which they said the bishop of that same schism had sent to his presbyters, as the heading of the letter itself also indicated. When I had read it, I was so astonished that with its very first words it cut off at the root the whole communion of his own party, that I was unwilling to believe the letter belonged to that man whom rumor is wont to proclaim as excelling among them above all in learning and eloquence.

But because, as I read, there were present some who recognized the polish and ornament of his style, they began to persuade me that the discourse was indeed entirely his. Yet, whosever it was, I thought it should be refuted, lest whoever wrote it should seem to himself to have written something against the Catholic Church before the unskilled.

1. 2. This, then, is what he first put in his letter, saying that we charge those people with administering baptism twice who under the name of baptism pollute our souls with a guilty washing. But what good is it to recount all his insulting words?

For since it is one thing to establish proofs and another to handle abuse by refuting it, let us rather attend to that by which he wished to show that we do not have baptism, and that therefore he is not repeating what already was, but giving what was not. For he says: For the conscience of the giver is what is regarded, the conscience that cleanses that of the receiver.

What if the conscience of the giver is hidden, and is perhaps stained? How will it be able to cleanse the conscience of the receiver, if, as he says, the conscience of the giver is regarded, the conscience that cleanses that of the receiver? For if he says that whatever evil lay hidden in the conscience of the giver does not pertain to the receiver, then that ignorance will perhaps be of avail to this extent, that one who does not know cannot be stained by the conscience of the one who baptizes him. Let it suffice, then, that another's stained conscience does not stain when it is not known: but can it indeed even cleanse?

2. 3. By what, then, is one to be cleansed who receives baptism, when the conscience of the giver is polluted, and the one who is to receive it does not know this? Especially since he adds and says: For he who receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt. See, the faithless man stands ready to baptize, but the one who is to be baptized does not know his faithlessness: what do you think he is going to receive—faith or guilt?

If you say faith, you will grant that it can come about that someone receives faith, not guilt, from one who is faithless; and that statement will be false which was made: He who receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt. For we find that it can come about that someone receives faith even from one who is faithless, if he is unaware of the giver's faithlessness.

For he does not say: He who receives faith from one who is openly or knowingly faithless, but: He who, he says, receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt; which is certainly false, when someone is baptized by a faithless man who is hidden.

But if he says: Even when the one baptizing is faithless and hidden, the receiver does not receive faith from him but guilt: then let them rebaptize those whom it is established were baptized by men who long lay hidden among them as criminals, and who afterward were exposed, convicted, and condemned.

3. 3. For during that time when they lay hidden, whomever they baptized, they could not hand on faith to them but guilt; if anyone who receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt. Therefore let them be baptized by good men, that they may be able to receive faith, not guilt.

3. 4. But how will they be secure even about these men, if the conscience of the giver is what is regarded, the conscience that is hidden from the eyes of the one who is to receive? Thus, according to their view, that spiritual salvation becomes uncertain, while, against the holy Scriptures, which say, It is good to trust in the Lord rather than to trust in man (Ps 118:8 (117:8)), and, Cursed is everyone who places his hope in man (Jer 17:5), they take away the hope of those to be baptized from the Lord God and persuade them that it must be placed in man.

And so it comes about that salvation is not merely uncertain but altogether nonexistent, because: Salvation belongs to the Lord; and: Vain is the salvation of man. And so whoever has placed his hope in man, even in one he knows to be just and innocent, is cursed. Hence the apostle Paul also rebukes those who said they belonged to Paul, and says: Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? (1 Cor 1:13)

4. 5. Therefore, if those who wished to belong to Paul were in error, and unless corrected would perish, what hope at last is there for those who seek to belong to Donatus? For these men are at pains to make the origin, root, and head of the baptized person be none other than the one by whom he is baptized.

So it comes about that, since for the most part it is uncertain what sort of man the baptizer is, with an uncertain origin, an uncertain root, an uncertain head, all hope too is uncertain. And since it can happen that the conscience of the giver is criminal and stained, and the receiver does not know it, it follows accordingly that with a criminal origin, a criminal root, a criminal head, the hope of the baptized person too proves empty and vain.

Indeed, since this man puts it in his letter and says: For everything consists of an origin and a root, and if it has not something for a head, it is nothing. And since he means by the origin and root and head of the baptized person the man by whom he is baptized, what good does it do the wretched baptized person that he does not know how evil his baptizer is? For he does not know that he has an evil head, or that he is altogether without a head. Yet what hope is there for him whose head, whether he knows it or not, is utterly wicked or nonexistent? Does that very ignorance become a head for the one whose baptizer is either an evil head or no head? But whoever thinks this is truly without a head.

5. 6. We therefore ask—since this man said: He who receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt; and at once joined to it, saying: For everything consists of an origin and a root, and if it has not something for a head, it is nothing: we ask, then, when that faithless baptizer is hidden, if then the one whom he baptizes receives faith, not guilt; if then his baptizer is not his origin and root and head, who is the one from whom he receives faith? Where is the origin from which he springs? Where is the root from which he sprouts? Where is the head from which he begins? Or perhaps, when the one who is baptized does not know that the one baptizing is faithless, then Christ gives faith, then Christ is the origin and root and head?

O human rashness and pride! Why do you not rather allow that Christ always gives faith, since it is he who will make a person a Christian by giving it? Why do you not allow that Christ is always the origin of the Christian, that the Christian fixes his root in Christ, that Christ is the head of the Christian? For not even when spiritual grace is imparted to believers through a holy and faithful steward does the steward himself justify, but rather that one of whom it is said that he justifies the ungodly (See Rom 4:5). Or is the apostle Paul really the head and origin of those whom he had planted, or Apollos the root of those whom he had watered, and not he who had given them faith in believing? For the same man says: I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the growth: so neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth (1 Cor 3:6-7). Nor was he their root, but rather he who says: I am the vine; you are the branches (John 15:5). And how could he be their head, when he most plainly proclaims in many places that we, though many, are one body in Christ, and that Christ himself is the head of the whole body?

6. 7. Therefore, whether anyone receives the sacrament of baptism from a faithful steward or from a faithless one, let all his hope be in Christ, lest he be cursed who places his hope in man (Jer 17:5). Otherwise, if each person is reborn in spiritual grace such as the one is by whom he is baptized, and when the one who baptizes is manifestly a good man, that man gives faith, that man is the origin and root and head of the one being born; but when a faithless baptizer is hidden, then each one receives faith from Christ, then he draws his origin from Christ, then he is rooted in Christ, then he glories in Christ as his head: then all who are baptized must take pains to have faithless baptizers and not to know them. For however good the baptizers they have, Christ is in every way incomparably better, who will then be the head of the baptized if a faithless baptizer is hidden.

7. 8. But if it is utterly mad to believe this (for Christ always justifies the ungodly by making a Christian out of the ungodly (See Rom 4:5), faith is always received from Christ (See Gal 3:26), Christ is always the origin of the regenerated (See Titus 3:5) and the head of the Church (See Eph 5:23)), what weight do those words have which empty readers do not attend to as to what they hold within, but only as to how they sound?

But one who takes in the words not with the ear alone, but also gazes with the mind upon their meaning, when he has heard, The conscience of the giver is regarded, the conscience that cleanses that of the receiver, will reply: Often human conscience is unknown to me, but I am certain of Christ's mercy.

When he has heard, He who receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt, he will reply: Christ, from whom I receive faith, not guilt, is not faithless. When he has heard, For everything consists of an origin and a root, and if it has not something for a head, it is nothing, he will reply: My origin is Christ, my root is Christ, my head is Christ. When he has heard, Nor does anything rightly regenerate unless it is regenerated by good seed, he will reply: The seed by which I am regenerated is the word of God, which I have been warned to hear obediently, even if the one through whom I hear it does not himself do what he says to me, since the Lord says, and makes me secure: What they say, do; what they do, do not do: for they say, and do not do (Matt 23:3).

When he has heard, What perversity can there be, that one who is guilty by his own crimes should make another innocent? he will reply: No one makes me innocent except him who died for our offenses and rose again for our justification (See Rom 4:25). For I do not believe in the minister through whom I am baptized, but in him who justifies the ungodly, that my faith may be reckoned to me as righteousness (See Rom 4:5).

8. 9. When he has heard, A good tree bears good fruit; a bad tree bears bad fruit: do they gather grapes from thorns? (Matt 7:16-17) and, Every good man brings forth good things from the treasure of his heart; and the evil man brings forth evil things from the treasure of his heart (Matt 12:35), he will reply: This, then, is the good fruit—that I should be a good tree, that is, a good man, so that I may yield good fruit, that is, good works. But this will be given me not by the one who plants and the one who waters, but by God who gives the growth (See 1 Cor 3:7).

For if the good tree is a good baptizer, so that the fruit he baptizes is good, then whoever has been baptized by an evil man—even one not openly evil—will not be able to be good: for he has sprung from a bad tree. For a good tree is one thing, a hidden but nonetheless bad tree another. Or if, when the bad tree is hidden, whoever has been baptized by it is born not of it but of Christ, then those baptized by hidden evil men are more holily justified than those baptized by manifestly good men.

9. 10. Again, when he has heard, He who is baptized by a dead man—what good does his washing do him? (Sir 34:25 (34:30)), he will reply: Christ lives, he dies now no more, and death shall no longer have dominion over him (Rom 6:9), of whom it is said, It is he who baptizes in the Holy Spirit (John 1:33). But those are baptized by the dead who are baptized in the temples of idols. For not even they suppose that they receive from their own priests the sanctification they imagine, but from their gods:

who, since they were men, and so died that they are neither upon the earth nor in the rest of heaven, are truly themselves baptized by the dead—or in whatever other way these words of holy Scripture can be truthfully examined and wholesomely discussed and understood. For if in this place I should understand the dead man to be a sinful baptizer, that same absurdity will follow, that whoever has been baptized even by a hidden ungodly man, as if baptized by a dead man, has been washed to no purpose. For he does not say: He who is baptized by a manifestly dead man; but says without qualification, by a dead man.

And if they think a man dead when they know him to be a sinner, but alive even if a criminal lies most cunningly hidden in their communion: then, first, by an execrable pride they claim more for themselves than they grant to God, so that when a sinner is known to them, he is called dead, but when he is known to God, he is reckoned alive.

Next, if that sinner is to be called dead who is known to men, what will they reply about Optatus, whom, though a criminal known to them for a long time, they were afraid to condemn? Why are those who were baptized by him not said to be baptized by a dead man? Or was he alive because God was his companion? This was wittily and elegantly said, they say, by some leading colleague of theirs, and they are even wont to boast of it and praise it, not understanding that, by the end that befell the most proud Goliath, the head is taken off by his own sword (See 1 Sam 17:51).

10. 11. Finally, if they are willing to call dead neither the hidden criminal nor the open one who has not yet been condemned by them, but only the one who is both manifest and condemned—so that whoever is baptized by him is himself baptized by a dead man, and his washing does him no good—what will they say about those whom, as they said, they condemned by the truthful mouth of their plenary council together with Maximian and the rest who ordained him? I mean Felicianus of Musti and Praetextatus of Assuras, of whom I speak for the moment, who are named among the twelve who ordained Maximian and set up an altar against their altar, at which Primian presides. These men are certainly reckoned by them among the dead. Witness that, of course, splendid sentence of their council, which once, when it was read out among them to be decreed, they acclaimed with full-throated voice; but now, if perhaps it should be read out to them by us, they fall silent—whereas they ought rather, in the first place, not to have rejoiced in it as eloquent, lest afterward they should bewail it as published abroad.

For there they speak thus about the Maximianists shut out from the fellowship of their communion: That the shipwrecked limbs of some have been cast by the truthful wave upon the rough rocks, and, very much after the example of the Egyptians, the shores are full of the corpses of the perishing; whose punishment in death itself is the greater, in that, after their soul has been wrenched out by the avenging waters, they do not even find burial.

Thus indeed do these men insult their own schismatics, that they call them both dead and unburied: but surely they ought to have wished them buried, lest, from the multitude of corpses lying unburied on the shore, Optatus the Gildonian, advancing with his column of soldiers, like a raging wave leaping forth still further, should afterward suck Felicianus and Praetextatus back inside.

11. 12. Of them I ask: did they come back to life by going over to their sea, or do they still remain dead there? For if they are nonetheless corpses, then the washing does no good either to those who are baptized by these dead men. But if they came back to life, how does the washing do good to those whom, while they lay lifeless, they baptized outside beforehand—if it must be understood in the way they think: He who is baptized by a dead man, what good does his washing do him? (Sir 34:25 (34:30))

For those whom Praetextatus and Felicianus baptized while they were still in communion with Maximian, they now have among themselves, not rebaptized, mingled in their communion together with these same baptizers of theirs, that is, with Felicianus and Praetextatus. If, on the occasion of this deed, they did not foster the primacy of their own obstinacy but considered the so-certain ruin of their spiritual salvation, they certainly ought to wake up, and, recovering soundness of mind, breathe again in Catholic peace—if, laying aside the swelling of pride and overcoming the fury of stubbornness, they were willing to attend to with how monstrous a sacrilege the baptism of the churches across the sea, which we have learned from the holy books to be founded in the earliest times, is execrated, while the baptism of the Maximianists, whom they condemned by their own mouth, is accepted.

12. 13. But our brothers themselves, the children of the churches I have mentioned, neither knew then nor know now what was done so many years ago in Africa; so that the crimes which were charged by their party against the Africans, even if they were true, could not contaminate men who were ignorant of them. These men, however, openly separated and divided, although they are said even to have taken part in Primian's ordination, condemned Primian, ordained another bishop against Primian, baptized apart from Primian, rebaptized after Primian, and returned to Primian together with their own people baptized outside by them and rebaptized inside by no one.

If so great a union with the Maximianists does not stain the Donatists, how could the reputation of the Africans stain people across the sea? If, in the kiss of peace, lips that had condemned one another come together without crime, why is anyone condemned by them in churches far removed by their own judgment, across the sea, blown upon as an ungodly pagan, not kissed as a faithful Catholic?

But if they made peace, for the sake of their own unity, with the Maximianists received back: behold, we find no fault, except that they cut their own throats by their own judgment, when, for the sake of the unity of their own faction, they gather back together what was cut off from them, yet scorn to mend that very cutting-off of theirs for the sake of true unity.

13. 14. If, for the sake of the unity of the party of Donatus, no one rebaptizes those baptized in a wicked schism, and the men guilty of so great a crime—so great that in their own council they compared them to those ancient authors of schism whom the earth swallowed alive (See Num 16:31-35)—are either not punished when separated, or, when condemned, are fully restored;

why is not, for the sake of the unity of Christ, which is spread throughout the whole world—of which it was foretold that he shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth (Ps 72:8 (71:8)); and what was foretold is seen and proved to be fulfilled—why then, for the sake of this true and full unity, is the law of that inheritance not acknowledged, which sounds forth from the books common to us all: I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession (Ps 2:8)?

For the unity of Donatus they are not compelled to recall what they scattered, but are admonished to heed what the Scriptures cry out: why do they not understand that this was done with them by the mercy of God, so that, because they accused the Catholic Church of false crimes, by whose contagion, as it were, they were unwilling to have their excessive holiness contaminated, they should be compelled, through the reign of Optatus the Gildonian, to take back again, and to ally to themselves, the true and very great crimes condemned by the truthful mouth, as they say, of their plenary council?

Now let them at last perceive how they are being filled with the true crimes of their own people, who fabricate false ones against their brothers,

which, even if they had spoken them truly, they ought now at last to perceive how great are the things to be borne for the sake of peace, and, for the peace of Christ, to return to the Church which has not condemned things unknown—if, for the peace of Donatus, it pleased them to recall things condemned.

14. 15. And so, brothers, let this one thing alone, which was done among them in the case of the Maximianists, suffice us for admonishing and correcting them: we do not sift old archives, we do not air out ancient cabinets, we do not send our proof off into distant lands; but we set aside all the documents of our forebears, we put off the testimonies that cry out throughout the whole world.

15. 16. Behold the cities of Musti and Assuras; there still survive in this life and in this province those who separated themselves and those from whom they were separated, those who set up an altar and those against whom they set it up, those who condemned and those who were condemned, those who received and those who were received, those who were baptized outside and were not rebaptized inside:

if these things stain a man, despite the unity, let the stained ones hold their tongue; if these things do not stain a man, despite the unity, let the corrected ones drop the quarrel.

16. 17. Let the very man who wrote it now laugh at the words of his own letter, who, by an unlearned and lying use of the testimony he cites as written, He who is baptized by a dead man, what good does his washing do him? (Sir 34:25 (34:30)), tries to show us that a betrayer is to be regarded as dead in his life.

And he adds, saying: Dead is the one who has not deserved to be born by true baptism; dead likewise is the one who, begotten by just baptism, has been mingled with a betrayer. If, then, the Maximianists are not dead, why do they say in their plenary council that the shores are full of the corpses of those of theirs who perish? But if they are dead, whence comes the living baptism that they gave? Again, if Maximian is not dead, why is there rebaptizing after him? But if he is dead, why is Felicianus of Musti, his ordainer, not dead with him, and how could a man from across the sea die together with some African betrayer as his colleague? Or if he too is dead, how do there live with him among you, inside, not rebaptized, those who were baptized by that dead man outside?

17. 18. Then he added: Both lack the life of baptism, both he who never had it at all and he who had it and lost it. Therefore the one whom the Maximianist Felicianus or Praetextatus baptized outside never had it, while they themselves lost what they had. When, then, these men were received back together with their own people, who gave to those whom they had baptized what they did not have; and who restored to the baptizers themselves what they had lost? But if they carried off with them the form of baptism, while losing the very power of baptism through their evil schism, why do you blow upon that very form, which is always and everywhere holy, in the case of Catholics whom you have not heard, and embrace it in the case of the Maximianists whom you have punished?

17. 19. But whatever he seemed to say accusingly about Judas the betrayer, what does it pertain to us, who are neither proved betrayers by them, nor, if the betrayal of some who died before us in our communion were proved, would that very thing, disapproved and displeasing to us, stain us in any part? For if they themselves are not stained by crimes which they have condemned and then received back, how much less can we be stained by things heard and disapproved?

Therefore, however much he inveighs against betrayers, let him reckon that in just as many words I too accuse them. But I make this clear distinction: that he accuses before me a man whom, already long dead, my knowledge has not judged; while I point to one clinging to his own side, whom, condemned by himself, or at any rate separated by a sacrilegious schism, he took back without any diminishment of his honor.

18. 20. You, he says, a most wicked betrayer, have shown yourself a persecutor and executioner of us who keep the law. If the Maximianists kept the law when they were separated from you, then may you too be a keeper of the law, since you are separated from the Church which is spread throughout the whole world. But if you are dealing with persecutions, I answer quickly: if you have suffered anything unjustly, it does not pertain to those who, though men do such things wickedly, nevertheless bear them praiseworthily for the sake of the peace of unity.

Therefore you have nothing to charge against the Lord's grain, which bears its own chaff until the final winnowing—from which you would never have departed, had you not, as the lighter chaff, flown off by the wind of temptation and before the coming of the winnower.

But that I may not depart from this one example, which the Lord has thrown back into their faces to close the mouths of these men, and to correct them if they are wise, but to confound them if they remain in their perversity: if those who suffer persecution are more righteous than those who inflict it, then those same Maximianists are more righteous—whose basilica too was razed to the ground, who were grievously harried by the military escort of Optatus, and against whom the proconsul's orders, that they all be shut out of the basilicas, obtained by the Primianists, are manifest. Therefore, if, under emperors who detest their communion, they dared so much against the Maximianists in persecuting them, what would they do if they were allowed to accomplish anything through the communion of kings?

But if they did these things in order to correct the wicked, why do they wonder if Catholic emperors decree that those be pressed and corrected with greater power who try to rebaptize the whole Christian world, when they have no cause for dissenting—seeing that even they themselves testify that the wicked, even if they could charge them with true crimes, must nevertheless be borne for the sake of peace, since they received back those whom they had condemned, with their honors and with the baptism given outside?

Let them consider at some time what they deserve to suffer from the Christian powers of the whole world, being enemies of Christian unity spread throughout the whole world. If, then, correction is slow, let there at least be shame; lest these same men, when they begin to read what they write, be overcome by laughter, while they do not recognize in themselves what they wish to seem to see in others, nor recognize in themselves what they charge against others.

19. 21. What, then, does it mean that this man put in his letter that the Lord says to the Jews: Therefore I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes; and some of them you will kill and crucify and scourge (Matt 23:34)? For if they wish themselves to be understood as the wise men and scribes and prophets, and us as the persecutors of the wise men and prophets, why are they unwilling to speak with us, when they have been sent to us?

Indeed, the very man who wrote that letter to which we are now replying, if he were pressed by us to acknowledge it as his own by signing it with his own hand, would perhaps not do so: to such a degree do they fear lest we hold any of their words. For when we wished somehow to obtain the latter part of that same letter—since those by whom it was given to us were unable to copy it whole—no one of whom it was asked was willing to give it, after they learned that we were replying to the part which had reached us. And so, although they read how the Lord says to the prophet, Cry aloud, spare not, and write down their sins with my pen (Isa 58:1): these true prophets who have been sent to us fear and guard against nothing so much as that their cry should be heard by us—which surely, if they were saying true things about us, they would not fear.

Not without reason, as it is written in the Psalm: The mouth of those who speak iniquity has been stopped (Ps 63:11 (62:12)). For if they do not accept our baptism on the ground that we are a brood of vipers (Matt 23:33; 3:7), as this man put it in his letter, why did they accept that of the Maximianists, about whom their council speaks thus: That the hollow of a poisoned womb has long concealed the harmful offspring of a viperous seed, and the moist curds of conceived crime have, with slow heat, swollen into the limbs of asps? Was it not consequently said about these same men, in the same council, that the venom of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known (Ps 14:3 (13:3))? And yet they now have these same men in full honor, inside, together with those baptized outside by them.

20. 22. Therefore all these things about the brood of vipers, and about the venom of asps under their lips, and the other things that were said against those who have not known the way of peace—if these men truly wished to speak them, they themselves are rather the ones to whom they apply; since they received the baptism of those against whom they said these things by the sentence of their council, for the sake of the peace of Donatus, and they repudiate the baptism of the Church of Christ spread throughout the whole world, whence that very peace came into Africa, to the sacrilegious injury of the peace of Christ.

Who, then, are rather the false prophets, who come in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly are ravening wolves (See Matt 7:15):

whether those who either do not know the wicked in the Catholic Church and innocently communicate with them, or cannot separate from the Lord's threshing floor those whom they cannot remove before the winnower comes, and bear them for the sake of the peace of unity—or those who, in a schism, do the very things they blame in the Catholic Church, and who pretend to flee in unity the things, uncertain at that, which are to be borne, yet take back, in their own open and self-condemned cutting-off, those very things?

21. 23. In fine, it was thus said, and he too cited this: By their fruits you shall know them (Matt 7:16). Let us, then, consider the fruits. You charge us with betrayal: this very thing we charge against you far more credibly. And, not to run through many points, in this same city of Constantina your forebears, at the very outset of their schism, ordained Silvanus as bishop. When he was still a subdeacon, he was shown by the municipal records to be a most manifest betrayer. If you too bring forward some documents against our forebears, an equal condition is demanded: that we believe either both to be true or both false. If both are true, you are without doubt guilty of schism, who pretended to flee in the communion of the whole world crimes which you had in that very fragment of your cutting-off. But if both are false, you are without doubt guilty of schism, who are stained by the monstrous crime of separation on account of false crimes of betrayal. And if some are brought forward by us and none by you, or true ones by us and false ones by you, there is no need to discuss how utterly your mouths are stopped.

22. 24. What if the holy and true Church of Christ should convict and overcome you, even though we held no documents of betrayal, or false ones, while you held some that were true—what would then remain for you except to love peace, if you are willing; or, if you are not willing, at least to fall silent? For whatever you might now bring forward, I would say most easily and most truly that you ought then to have proved it to the plenary and Catholic unity of the Church, already spread through so many nations and established, so that you might be inside, while those whom you convicted were driven outside.

But if you tried to do this, beyond doubt you could not prove it, and, defeated or enraged, by a monstrous sacrilege you separated yourselves from innocent people who could not condemn things uncertain. But if you did not even try to do it, then by a too execrable and impious blindness, offended by a few weeds in Africa, you cut yourselves off from the grain of Christ, which grows throughout the whole field, that is, the whole world, until the end.

23. 25. Finally, a testament is said to have been handed over to the flames by certain men in the time of persecution: now let it, from whatever source it has been produced, be read out. Certainly, at the outset of the testator's promises, this is found said to Abraham: In your seed all the nations shall be blessed (Gen 22:18): and what this means the truthful Apostle interprets: In your seed, he says, which is Christ (Gal 3:16). No one's betrayal has made void the faithfulness of God. Be in communion with all the nations: and then boast that you have preserved the testament from the destruction of the flames. But if you are unwilling, which party is rather to be believed to have insisted on burning the testament, except the one that is unwilling to consent to it when it is produced? For how much more certainly, without any sacrilegious rashness, is the man judged to have succeeded the betrayers who now persecutes with his tongue the testament which those men are said to have persecuted with the flame?

You charge persecution: the Lord's grain answers you: Either it was done justly, or our chaff did it. What do you say to this?

You charge that we do not have baptism: the same grain of the Lord answers you, that the form of the sacrament does no good even to certain people inside, as it did no good to Simon Magus who was baptized (See Acts 8:13-14); and much more does it do no good to those who are outside: yet that it is present in them when they depart hence is proved from the fact that it is not restored when they return. Will you, then—unless most shamelessly—be able to cry out against this grain and call them false prophets clothed in the skins of sheep, but inwardly ravening wolves, seeing that they either do not know the wicked in Catholic unity, or, for the sake of unity, bear those whom they do know?

24. 26. But if we consider your fruits: I pass over the tyrannical dominations in the cities and especially on others' estates, I pass over the fury of the Circumcellions, and the sacrilegious and profane cults of corpses of those who hurled themselves to death of their own accord, the drunken revels, and, under the one Optatus the Gildonian, the ten-year groaning of all Africa:

I pass over these things, because there are some among you who proclaim that these things displease them and have always displeased them; but they say that, because they cannot suppress them, they bear them for the sake of peace: in which they condemn themselves by their own judgment; for if they loved peace, they would not tear unity apart.

For what madness is so great as to wish to abandon peace within peace itself, and to wish to retain it in dissension? And so, on account of those who pretend not to see the evils of that same party of Donatus, which all see and blame—so much so that even about Optatus himself they say: What did he do? Who accused him? Who convicted him?

I do not know, I have not seen, I have not heard. On account of these, then, who pretend to be ignorant of things manifest, the Maximianists arose, in whom their eyes may be opened and their mouths stopped: openly they separate themselves, openly they set up an altar against an altar, openly in council they are called sacrilegious men and vipers, and swift to shed blood, and to be compared to Dathan and Abiram and Korah, and, detested in harsh words, are condemned, and openly they are received back again in their own honors together with those baptized by them.

These are their fruits, of men who do such things for the peace of Donatus, so as to cover themselves with the sheep's skin, and who refuse the peace of Christ throughout the whole world, so as to be ravening wolves inside.

25. 27. I think I have passed over none of the things which this man put in his letter, at least such as I could find in the part which reached us: let them produce the remaining part too, lest perhaps there be in it something that cannot be refuted. But these things which, with the Lord's help, we have answered, I urge upon your Charity, that you not only give them to those who ask, but also press them upon those who do not ask.

Let them answer if they wish anything: and if they are unwilling to answer us, let them at least send letters to their own people, which, however, they must not order to be hidden from us; and if they do this, they most plainly betray their own fruits, by which the ravening wolves clothed in the skins of sheep (Matt 7:15) may be shown, who secretly lie in wait for our sheep, and openly dread to answer the shepherds.

We charge against them only the crime of schism, in which all of them are utterly entangled: not the crimes of certain of them, which some of them may reply displease them. But they themselves, if they do not charge against us crimes belonging to others, have nothing to charge: and therefore they cannot in any way defend themselves from the crime of schism; because, whether on account of crimes false and fabricated by themselves, or even on account of true ones—yet crimes of the chaff—they have separated themselves by a wicked sundering from the Lord's threshing floor and from the innocence of the grain growing throughout the whole world.

26. 28. Unless perhaps you expect me also to refute what he interposed about the Manichee. In which matter nothing displeases us, except that he blamed a most pestilent and most pernicious error, that is, the heresy of the Manichees, with an altogether very slight and almost no reproof; an error which the Catholic Church overthrows with the strongest proofs of truth. For the inheritance of Christ, established among all the nations, is safe against all the disinherited heresies: but, as the Lord says, How can Satan cast out Satan? (Mark 3:23), so how can the error of the Donatists overthrow the error of the Manichees?

27. 29. Therefore, most beloved, although this error, convicted in many ways, is overcome, and dares to resist the truth by no assertions of any sort of reasoning, but by stubborn shamelessness alone: nevertheless, lest a multitude of documents burden your memory, hold fast this one deed of the Maximianists, fix it on their forehead, press it into their mouths to suppress their deceitful tongues, with it, as with a three-pronged weapon, slaughter their calumny like a three-headed beast. They charge betrayal, they charge persecution, they charge false baptism: from the Maximianists alone, answer all of it. For that their forebears handed over the holy books to the flames, they think to be hidden: but since the sacrilege of schism surpasses the crime of betrayal, they received back into their honors the Maximianists defiled by the sacrilege of schism—this, certainly, they cannot hide. Likewise the most violent persecutions, which they inflict on whomever they can wherever they can, they think to be hidden: but since spiritual persecution surpasses bodily persecution, they received back into their honors the Maximianists whom they themselves persecuted bodily, and about whom they themselves said: Their feet are swift to shed blood (Ps 14:3 (13:3))—this, certainly, they cannot hide.

28. 29. Finally, the question of baptism, by which they deceive the wretched, they think to be hidden: but since they say that all who are baptized apart from the communion of the one Church do not have baptism, they received back into their honors the Maximianists together with those whom they had baptized outside the communion of these men in schism—this, certainly, they cannot hide.

28. 30. But these things, they say, do not stain a man, for the sake of peace, and it is good to bend the rigor of severity toward mercy, so that branches once broken may be grafted in again. So, then, the whole case is concluded, defeated in them, undefeated for us: because if the name of peace is taken up as a kind of shadow of defense for bearing the wicked in schism, then beyond doubt, with a horrible crime and without any defense, true peace itself is violated by the unity of the whole world.

29. 31. These things, brothers, hold fast, to be done and preached with untiring gentleness: love the people, kill the errors; presume upon the truth without pride, contend for the truth without savagery. Pray for those whom you refute and convict. For the prophet beseeches God for such people, saying: Fill their faces with shame, and they shall seek your name, O Lord (Ps 83:16 (82:17)). And this indeed the Lord has already done, in filling their faces most plainly with the shame of the Maximianists: it remains that they learn to blush wholesomely. For thus they will be able to seek the name of the Lord, from which they have most perniciously turned away, while for its sake they exalt their own name.

May you live and persevere in Christ, and may you be multiplied, and abound in the love of God, toward one another and toward all, most beloved brothers.

1. 1. Those who were able to read or hear them remember that we replied sufficiently to the first parts of Petilian's letter, which alone we had found.

But because afterward the whole of it was found and copied by the brothers, and sent to us so that we might reply to all of it, this duty of our pen was not to be shirked: not because he says anything new, to which a reply has not already been made in many ways and often; but on account of the slower brothers, who cannot relate what they have read somewhere to all like cases, I will so accommodate those who altogether compel me to reply point by point, that we may, as it were, discourse in alternating speeches in the present text.

I will set down the words from his letter under his name, and give my reply under mine, as though, while we were debating, they had been taken down by stenographers. Thus there will be no one to complain that I have passed over anything, or that, because the speakers were not distinguished, he could not understand: and at the same time, that those same Donatists, who are unwilling to debate with us face to face, may not, through the letters which they have issued to their own people, so escape the truth replying to them point by point, as if they were conversing with us face to face.

1. 2. From the very beginning of his letter Petilian said: Petilian the bishop, to his most beloved brothers, fellow presbyters and deacons, ministers established with us throughout the diocese in the holy Gospel: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

2. 3. Augustine replied: I recognize the apostolic salutation: see to what you say, yet note from whom you have learned what you say. So Paul salutes the Romans, so the Corinthians, so the Galatians, so the Ephesians, the Colossians, the Philippians, the Thessalonians. What madness, then, is it to be unwilling to share the salutation of peace with these churches, in whose letters you learned the salutation of peace?

2. 4. Petilian said: Those people charge us with administering baptism twice who under the name of baptism have polluted their own souls with a guilty washing—men beside whose foulness all filth is cleaner, whom by a perverse purity it has befallen to be defiled by their own water.

2. 5. Augustine replied: We are neither defiled by our water nor cleansed by yours: but the water of baptism, when it is given to someone in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, is neither ours nor yours, but his of whom it was said to John: He upon whom you see the Spirit descending like a dove and remaining upon him, this is he who baptizes in the Holy Spirit (John 1:33).

3. 6. Petilian said: For the conscience of the giver is what is regarded, the conscience that cleanses that of the receiver.

3. 7. Augustine replied: Of the conscience of Christ, then, we are secure. For if you set down any human being, the cleansing of the receiver will be uncertain, because the conscience of the one who cleanses is uncertain.

4. 8. Petilian said: For he who receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt.

4. 9. Augustine replied: Christ is not faithless; from him the faithful man receives faith, not guilt. For he believes in him who justifies the ungodly, that his faith may be reckoned to him as righteousness (See Rom 4:5).

5. 10. Petilian said: For everything consists of an origin and a root; and if it has not something for a head, it is nothing: nor does anything rightly regenerate unless it is regenerated by good seed.

5. 11. Augustine replied: Why do you wish to set yourself up in place of Christ, under whom you are unwilling to place yourself? He is the origin and root and head of the one being born, of whom we have no fear, as we do of any human being, lest perhaps he be a pretender and utterly evil, and we spring from an utterly evil origin, rise from an utterly evil root, be conformed to an utterly evil head. For what man can be secure about a man, when it is written: Cursed is everyone who places his hope in man (Jer 17:5)? But the seed by which we are regenerated is the word of God, that is, the Gospel. Hence the Apostle says: For in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel (1 Cor 4:15).

Yet he permits even those who do not chastely proclaim the Gospel to proclaim it, and rejoices in this (See Phil 1:16, 18), because, although they proclaimed it unchastely, seeking their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ (See Phil 2:21), nevertheless what they proclaimed was chaste. And the Lord had said about certain such men: What they say, do; but what they do, do not do: for they say, and do not do (Matt 23:3). If, then, what is chaste is chastely proclaimed, the proclaimer himself, because he is joined to the word, begets the believer along with it: but if he himself is not regenerated, yet what he proclaims is chaste, the believer is born not from the barrenness of the minister but from the fruitfulness of the truth.

6. 12. Petilian said: Since these things are so, brothers, what perversity can there be, that one who is guilty by his own crimes should make another innocent, since the Lord Jesus Christ says: 'A good tree bears good fruit, a bad tree bears bad fruit: do they gather grapes from thorns?' (Matt 7:16-17) And again: 'Every good man brings forth good things from the treasure of his heart; and every evil man brings forth evil things from the treasure of his heart' (Matt 12:35)?

6. 13. Augustine replied: No man, even if he is not guilty by his own crimes, makes another innocent, because he is not God: otherwise, if the innocence of the baptized is expected to come from the innocence of the one baptizing, each person will be the more innocent the more innocent the one he has found to baptize him; and he himself will be the less innocent the less innocent is the one by whom he is baptized. And if perhaps the one who baptizes holds a hatred against someone, this too will be imputed to the one who is baptized. Why, then, does the wretch run to baptism?

That his own sins may be forgiven him, or that others' may be laid on him? Or, like a merchant's ship, does he set down some things and take up others? But by a good tree and its good fruit, and a bad tree and its bad fruit, we are accustomed to understand people, and their works, as is consequently shown in the words which you too cited: A good man brings forth good things from the good treasure of his heart; and an evil man brings forth evil things from the evil treasure of his heart (Matt 12:35). But when a man preaches the word of God, or ministers the sacrament of God, he does not, if he is evil, preach or minister from what is his own: rather, he will be counted among those of whom it was said: What they say, do; but what they do, do not do (Matt 23:3): for they say the things that are God's, but do the things that are their own. For if it is as you say, that is, that the baptized themselves are reckoned the fruits of those who baptize them, you announce a great evil for Africa, if as many Optatuses have sprung up as Optatus baptized.

7. 14. Petilian said: And again: 'He who is baptized by a dead man, his washing does him no good' (Sir 34:25 (34:30)). He did not assert the baptizer to be a dead man, a lifeless body, or a man's corpse stiffly laid out; but one not having the Spirit of God, who is compared to a dead man, as in another place he makes plain to a disciple, the Gospel attesting it. His disciple said: 'Lord, allow me to bury my father.' Jesus said to him: 'Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead' (Matt 8:21-22).

Dead is the one who has not deserved to be born by true baptism; dead likewise is the one who, begotten by just baptism, has been mingled with a betrayer: both lack the life of baptism, both he who never had it at all and he who had it and lost it. For the Lord Jesus Christ says: 'There shall come into him seven spirits more wicked, and that man's last state shall be worse than the first' (Matt 12:45).

7. 15. Augustine replied: Inquire more carefully how the testimony you cited from Scripture was said, and how it is to be understood. For that all the wicked are wont to be called dead in a mystical sense is manifest: but Christ, whose true baptism it is—which on account of a man's vices you call false—lives, seated at the right hand of the Father, and will not die now even by that weakness of the flesh, and death shall no longer have dominion over him (See Rom 6:9): and whoever is baptized with his baptism is not baptized by a dead man;

and even if perhaps the ministers, deceitful workers seeking their own interests (See 2 Cor 11:13), not those of Jesus Christ (See Phil 2:21), and not chastely proclaiming the Gospel, and preaching Christ out of contention and envy (See Phil 1:15-17), are to be called dead on account of their iniquities, nevertheless the sacrament of the living God does not die even in a dead man. For that Simon was dead who was baptized by Philip in Samaria, who wished to buy the gift of God with money (See Acts 8:13, 18-19): but the baptism he had was alive, to his punishment.

7. 16. But how false is what you say: Both lack the life of baptism, both he who never had it at all and he who had it and lost it: you may notice this from the fact that those who, having been baptized, apostatize and return through penance, are not given baptism again, which, if they had lost it, would be given again.

But how do your dead men baptize, according to your view? Or are drunkards not dead (to be silent about the rest, and to say only what is known to all and is a daily matter), when the Apostle says about the widow: But she who lives in pleasures is dead while she lives (1 Tim 5:6)? Then, in that council of yours in which you condemned Maximian together with his sponsors or his ministers, did it slip your mind how eloquently you said: Very much after the example of the Egyptians, the shores are full of the corpses of the perishing; whose punishment in death itself is the greater, in that, after their soul has been wrenched out by the avenging waters, they do not even find burial?

And yet whether one of them, Felicianus, has come back to life, you must see to that: nevertheless he has among you, inside, together with himself, those whom, while dead, he baptized outside.

As, therefore, one is baptized by a living man who is clothed with the baptism of the living Christ; so one is baptized by a dead man who is wrapped in the baptism of the dead Saturn, or of any other—so that we may say briefly, for the moment, how the words you set down can be understood without distress to any of us. For as they are taken by you, you are striving not to extricate yourselves, but to entangle us along with you.

8. 17. Petilian said: We must act, I say, and speak so as to show how a faithless betrayer is held to be dead in his life. Judas was an apostle when he betrayed Christ; and the same man, having lost the honor of an apostle, died spiritually, destined afterward to die by his own noose, as it is written: 'I repent,' he said, 'that I have betrayed innocent blood; and he went away and hanged himself with a noose' (Matt 27:4-5). The betrayer perished by a noose, and left a noose to such men: of whom the Lord Christ cried out to the Father: 'Father, those whom you gave me, I have kept them all; and of them none perished, except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled' (John 17:12).

For long ago David had pronounced this sentence against him who would betray Christ to the faithless: 'Let another receive his bishopric; let his wife be a widow, and his children orphans' (Ps 109:8-9 (108:8-9)). See how great is the spirit of the prophets, that it saw all things to come as present, so that a betrayer not to be born for many ages was condemned beforehand. Finally, that the sentence pronounced might be fulfilled, holy Matthias received the bishopric of the apostle who had perished (See Acts 1:25).

one of whom, namely of the brothers, answered the sacrilegious tyrant with this voice of faith: 'You indeed, wicked and impious man, destroy us from the present life; but the King of the world, who reigns forever and of whose kingdom there shall be no end, will raise us up, who die for his holy laws, into the way of life eternal' (2 Macc 7:9). If you burned the testament of a dead man with flames, would you not be punished as a forger? What, then, will become of you, who have burned the most holy law of God the judge? Judas at least repented of his deed in death: you not only do not repent, but, a most wicked betrayer, have shown yourself a persecutor and executioner of us who keep the law.

8. 18. Augustine replied: See what difference there is between your slanderous words and our truthful assertions. Attend a little. Behold, you have magnified the crime of betrayal, and in the most odious words, like a copious inventor, you have compared us to the lost Judas.

When I have answered you to this most briefly: I have not done what you say, I have not betrayed, you charge me falsely, you will never prove it—does not all this smoke of huge words suddenly dissolve? Or will you perhaps try to prove it?

This, then, you ought to do first, and then rise up against us, as against the convicted, with whatever heap of invective you wished. Behold one piece of emptiness; hear another.

8. 19. You yourself, when you were speaking about the aforesaid condemnation of Judas (See Ps 109:8-9 (108:8-9)), said: See how great is the spirit of the prophets, that it saw all things to come as present, so that a betrayer not to be born for many ages was condemned beforehand, and you did not see that by the same prophecy, with steadfast and certain and unshaken truth by which it was foretold that one disciple would betray Christ, it was also foretold that the whole world would believe in Christ. Why did you attend, in the prophecy, to the man who betrayed Christ, and did not attend there to the world for which Christ was betrayed? Who betrayed Christ? Judas. To whom did he betray him? To the Jews. What did the Jews do to him? They pierced, he says, my hands and my feet, they numbered all my bones: they indeed looked and stared upon me; they divided my garments among them, and upon my clothing they cast lots (Ps 22:16-18 (21:17-19)).

How great, then, is that which was bought at so great a price, read in the same Psalm a little later: All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship in his sight: for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he shall have dominion over the nations (Ps 22:27-28 (21:28-29)). But who can suffice to recount the innumerable other prophetic proofs about the world that would believe? But you praise the prophecy because you see in it the man who sold Christ; and you do not see in it the possession which Christ, having been sold, bought. Behold another piece of emptiness; hear a third.

8. 20. Among the many words of your invective, you said: If you burned the testament of a dead man with flames, would you not be punished as a forger? What, then, will become of you, who have burned the most holy law of God the judge? In saying this you did not attend to what surely ought to move you: how it could come about that we burned the testament, and yet stand fast in that inheritance which is written down in that testament; whereas it is a marvel that you preserved the testament and lost the inheritance. Is it not written in that testament: Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession (Ps 2:8)?

Share in this inheritance, and charge against me about the testament whatever you wish. For what madness is it, to have refused to hand the testament over to the flames, so that you may quarrel against the words of the testator?

But we, since we have in our hands the ecclesiastical and municipal records, in which we read that those who ordained another bishop against Caecilian were rather the betrayers of the divine books, do not, however, insult you, do not inveigh against you, nor bewail in your hands the ashes of the holy pages, nor set the blazing torments of the Maccabees against the sacrilege of your swelling, saying: You would rather hand over your own limbs to the fires than the oracles of God. For we do not wish to be empty, so as to stir up an idle din for you over the misdeeds of others, which you either do not know or disapprove.

But that we see you separated from the communion of the whole world (which is a crime both very great, and manifest, and belonging to all of you)—if I should wish to magnify it, time would fail me sooner than words. And if you should wish to defend this, you will charge against the whole world things which, if they are to be charged, warn you whence you may the more be accused; if they are not to be charged, you are not defended.

Why, then, are you puffed up against me about betrayal, which is neither mine nor yours, if that pact holds, that we not charge against one another the deeds of others; but if it does not hold, it is yours rather than mine? And yet, even with that pact holding, I think I most justly say that he is to be judged the associate of the one who betrayed Christ, who, together with the whole world, has not given himself over to Christ. Therefore, says the Apostle, you are Abraham's seed, heirs according to the promise (Gal 3:29). And again he says: Heirs indeed of God, and joint heirs with Christ (Rom 8:17). And he shows that the same seed of Abraham pertains to all the nations from that which was said to Abraham: In your seed all the nations shall be blessed (Gen 22:18; see Gal 3:8). Therefore I think that what I ask is just: that we attend a little to the testament of God, which has long since been opened, and that whomever we do not find a joint heir of the betrayed one, him we judge the heir of the betrayer; let him belong to the seller of Christ, who denies that Christ is the buyer of the world.

Indeed, when after the resurrection he showed himself to the disciples, and offered his limbs to be touched by those who doubted, he said this to them: Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise on the third day, and that penance and the remission of sins should be preached in his name among all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:46-47).

Behold the inheritance from which you estrange yourselves: behold the heir whom you resist. Would he then really spare Christ walking on earth, who contradicts him seated in heaven? Do you not yet understand that whatever you charge against us, you charge against his word? The Christian world is promised, and is believed; it is fulfilled, and is contradicted.

Consider, I beseech you, what you ought to have suffered for so great an impiety; and yet if you have suffered anything, I do not know, I have not seen, I have not done it; you today, who do not suffer the force of my persecution, render me the account of your separation. But again and often you are going to say things which, if you do not prove them, pertain to no one: but if you do prove them, do not pertain to me.

9. 21. Petilian said: Hedged about, then, by these crimes, you cannot be a true bishop.

9. 22. Augustine replied: By what crimes? What have you taught? What have you shown? And even if you had shown the crimes of some people or other, what is this to the seed of Abraham, in which all the nations are blessed (See Gen 22:18)?

10. 23. Petilian said: Did the apostles persecute anyone, or did Christ betray anyone?

10. 24. Augustine replied: I could indeed say that Satan himself is worse than all evil men, to whom nevertheless the Apostle handed over a man for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus (1 Cor 5:5). And likewise others, of whom he says: Whom I have handed over to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme (1 Tim 1:20). And the Lord Christ scourged and drove out of the temple the wicked merchants, where the testimony of Scripture is also joined, which says: Zeal for your house has consumed me (John 2:17).

Behold, we find an apostle a betrayer, and Christ a persecutor. I could say these things, and throw you into no small turmoil, so that you would be compelled to seek not the complaints of those who suffer, but the mind of those who act. But do not trouble yourself over this; I do not say these things; but I do say that, if anything has been done to you not rightly, it does not pertain to the seed of Abraham, which is in all the nations—perhaps it was done by the chaff of the Lord's harvest, which is nonetheless in all the nations.

You, then, render the account of your separation. But first consider what sort of men you have, whom you do not wish to be charged against you; and see how unjustly you act, when you charge the deeds of others against us, even if you could prove the things you say. Thus there will be no account of your separation.

11. 25. Petilian said: But some will say: We are not the sons of a betrayer. A man is the son of him whose deeds he follows. For these are the most certain sons, and the ones most like their parents, whom not this flesh and blood, but morals and deeds resembling their parents have begotten.

11. 26. Augustine replied: A little before you said nothing against us; now you have even begun to say something for us too. For this proposition of yours holds you to this: that if you do not today convict us, with whom you are dealing, of being betrayers and murderers, and of whatever else you charge, then whatever such thing you show in those who preceded us in time can in no way harm us. For we cannot be the sons of those whose deeds we do not share.

And see where you have committed yourself: if perhaps you should even convict some man of our own age, living with us, of some such guilt, it in no way prejudges all the nations, which are blessed in the seed of Abraham (See Gen 22:18), from which you, by separating yourself, are found to be sacrilegious. Thus—what cannot be done—unless you know all who are everywhere, and have not only learned the morals and deeds of all but have even demonstrated them to be as evil as you say, you have no reason to charge against the world, which is in the holy ones, some parents or other, to whom you may prove them to be alike.

Nor will it help you at all, even if you could demonstrate that those who are not such men receive the common sacraments together with those who are such. First, because you ought to look to yourselves, with whom you celebrate them, to whom you give them, from whom you receive them, and you do not wish those men to be charged against you. Next, if those are sons of Judas, who was a devil among the apostles, whoever imitate his deeds: why should we not call those sons of the apostles who share with such men not their own deeds, but the sacraments of the Lord, just as the apostles took the Lord's supper together with that betrayer? Therefore you are far unlike them, in that you charge against men who keep unity the very thing which you do by tearing unity apart.

12. 27. Petilian said: About himself the Lord Christ says to the Jews: 'If I do not do the deeds of my Father, do not believe me' (John 10:37).

12. 28. Augustine replied: I have already answered above: This too is both true, and is for us against you.

13. 29. Petilian said: Thus repeatedly does he rebuke the false-speaking and lying: 'You are sons of the devil, for he was an accuser from the beginning, and did not stand in the truth' (John 8:44).

13. 30. Augustine replied: We are not accustomed to read: He was an accuser; but: He was a murderer. And we ask whence the devil was a murderer from the beginning; and we find that he killed the first man, not by drawing a sword or by bodily inflicting some violence, but by persuading him to sin and casting him down from the happiness of paradise. What paradise was then, the Church is now. They, therefore, are sons of the devil who kill men by seducing them away from the Church. But as through the words of God we have come to know where paradise was planted, so through the words of Christ we have learned where the Church is: Among all the nations, he says, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:47).

Whoever separates a man from this whole to some party, that man is convicted of being a son of the devil and a murderer. But also the word which you yourself set down, to say of the devil, He was an accuser, and did not stand in the truth, see whom it fits. For you accuse the whole world with the crimes of others, whom even you yourselves were able rather to accuse than to convict; and you did not stand in the truth of Christ. For he says that the Church is among all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem; but you say it is in the party of Donatus.

14. 31. Petilian said: In a third place likewise he calls the madness of persecutors by this name: 'Brood of vipers, how will you flee the judgment of hell? Therefore I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes; and some of them you will kill and crucify and scourge in your synagogues, until there come upon you all the righteous blood which you have shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar' (Matt 23:33-35). Are they truly, in a carnal sense, sons of vipers, and not rather serpents in mind, scourging with three-tongued malice and deadly touch and a spirit of venom? Truly they have become vipers, who have vomited deaths by their bites upon innocent peoples.

14. 32. Augustine replied: If I should say that these things were said about men such as you are, you will reply: Prove it. For what? Have you proved it? Or if you think it is proved because it is said, there is no need to repeat the same things. Read those very words back to yourself, from us against you.

Behold, I too have proved it, if this is to prove. And yet learn what it is to prove. For I do not seek documents from outside in order to prove you vipers.

Behold, this very thing is viperous: not to have in the mouth the firmness of truth, but the venom of cursing, as it is written: The venom of asps is under their lips. And because this can be said anywhere by anyone against anyone, as though it were asked, Whose? he immediately added: Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness (Ps 14:3 (13:3)). When, therefore, you say such things against men scattered throughout the whole world, and whom you altogether do not know, many of whom have not even heard the name of Caecilian or of Donatus—men who, not having heard you, reply in silence: Whatever you say does not pertain to us, we have not seen it, we have not done it, we are utterly ignorant of what you are talking about—you who wish for nothing else than to say what you altogether cannot prove, what else is your mouth than full of cursing and bitterness?

Now see whether you can show that you are not vipers, unless you show that all the Christians of all the nations are betrayers and murderers, and are not Christians. Nay rather, even if you can know and show the lives and deeds of individual men spread throughout the whole world: nevertheless, before you do that, when you rashly hurl these things about, your mouth is viperous, your mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.

Show now, if you can, what prophet, what wise man, what scribe we have killed and crucified and scourged in our synagogues. Consider how much labor must be expended—and you will in no way prove that Donatus and Marculus were prophets, or wise men, or scribes, because they were not. And even if you could, what would you do to show that men were killed by us whom not even we ourselves know? How much less the whole world, which you curse with your venomous mouth?

Or whence can you show that we have a mind like that of the killers of those whom you cannot even show to have been killed by anyone at all? Consider all these things, see whether you can prove any of them, whether of the world or against the world: yet because you do not cease to curse it, you show to be true in yourselves the things which you falsely hurl about concerning it.

14. 33. Moreover, if we wished to prove that you are killers of the prophets, we do not go further afield to gather, place by place, the slaughters which your frenzied leaders of the Circumcellions and the very bands of the drunken and the insane not only produced from the beginning of your schism, but do not at all cease to produce. I deal with what is at hand: let the divine oracles be brought forward, which are handled in our hands and in yours; let us hold those to be killers of the prophets whom we find contradictors of the tongues of the prophets. What can be said more quickly? What can be shown more readily? You would act more gently by thrusting a sword through the bowels of the prophets, than in that you try with the tongue to kill the words of the prophets. The prophet says: All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord (Ps 22:27 (21:28)).

Behold, it is being done; behold, it is being fulfilled. But you not only close your unbelieving ears against what is said; you even thrust forth your frenzied tongues against what is now being done. Abraham heard it said: In your seed all the nations shall be blessed (Gen 22:18): and he believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness (Rom 4:3). You see the deed done, and you cry out against it; and you do not wish to have reckoned to you as unrighteousness what would rightly be reckoned even if you did not believe it when it was not yet done, but only said.

Nay, you not only do not wish it to be reckoned to you as unrighteousness: but even if you suffer anything for this impiety, you wish it to be reckoned to you as righteousness. Or if these are not persecutions of the prophets, because they are done not with the sword but with the word, what was the reason that it was said by God: Sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword (Ps 57:4 (56:5))?

But when shall I gather from all the prophets all the testimonies of the Church spread throughout the whole world, all of which you try by contradicting to kill and extinguish? But you are bound: because their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world (Ps 19:4 (18:5)). Nevertheless I will recall that one thing from the mouth of the Lord, who is the witness of witnesses: It behooved, he says, that all things should be fulfilled which were written in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms about me. What these are, let him himself indicate: Then he opened their understanding, he says, that they might understand the Scriptures, and said to them: Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead, and that penance and the remission of sins should be preached in his name among all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:44-47).

Behold what is written in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms about the Lord. Behold what the Lord himself has opened up about himself and about the Church, showing himself, promising her. But you, resisting these so manifest testimonies, and trying to corrupt them because you cannot delete them, what would you do if you found the limbs of the prophets, you who so rage against the oracles of the prophets that you do not even hear the Lord, the fulfiller, the revealer, the expounder of the prophets? For as much as you can, you strike him too, when you yourselves do not yield.

15. 34. Petilian said: About you too David says these things against persecutors: 'Their throat is an open grave, with their tongues they acted deceitfully, the venom of asps is under their lips. Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known; there is no fear of God before their eyes. Will not all those know who work iniquity, who devour my people like a morsel of bread?' (Ps 14:3-4 (13:3-4)).

15. 35. Augustine replied: Their throat is an open grave, whence they breathe out the deaths of lies. For the mouth that lies kills the soul (Wis 1:11). But if nothing is truer than what Christ said, that his Church is among all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem (See Luke 24:47); nothing is more lying than what you say, that it is in the party of Donatus. But the tongues are deceitful of those who, although they know their own deeds, not only say that they are righteous men, but even justifiers of men: which was said of the one: who justifies the ungodly (Rom 4:5): and that he is righteous and justifying (Rom 3:26). Now about the venom of asps, and the mouth full of cursing and bitterness, we have said enough.

But feet swift to shed blood you said even the Maximianists have: witness the sentence of your plenary council, so often cited in the proconsular and municipal records. Yet those men, so far as we hear, killed no one bodily. You understood, therefore, that blood is shed even by the spiritual slaughter of souls, by the sword of schism, which you condemned in Maximian. See, then, whether your feet are not swift to shed blood, when you cut men off from the unity of the whole world, if you rightly said this of the Maximianists, because they cut some off from the party of Donatus.

Have we then not known the way of peace (See Ps 14:3 (13:3); Isa 59:7-8), who strive to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (See Eph 4:3); and do you know it, who so resist the discourse that Christ had with his disciples after the resurrection—so peaceable that he began from it, saying, Peace be with you (John 20:19)—that you are convicted of saying nothing else to him than this: What you said about the unity of all the nations is false, what we say about the crime of all the nations is true? Who would say these things, if there were the fear of God before their eyes? See, therefore, whether by saying these things daily you are not trying to finish off, like a morsel of bread, with your teeth, the people of God spread throughout the whole world.

16. 36. Petilian said: The Lord Christ also warns: 'Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly are ravening wolves: by their fruits you shall know them' (Matt 7:15-16).

16. 37. Augustine replied: If I should ask you by what fruits you know us to be ravening wolves, you are going to say the crimes of others, never even proved in those whose crimes they are said to be. But if you should ask me by what fruits we know that you rather are ravening wolves, I charge the crime of schism, which you will deny, but which I will at once prove: for you are not in communion with all the nations and with those churches founded by apostolic labor. Here you are going to say: I am not in communion with betrayers and murderers.

The seed of Abraham answers you: These are those crimes, either not true, or not mine. But these I set aside for the moment; you, show me the Church. Now that voice will sound to me which the Lord warned must be avoided in false prophets who point to parties and try to estrange men from the whole: Behold, here is Christ, behold, there he is (Matt 24:23).

But do you so suppose that the true sheep of Christ, to whom it was said, Do not believe, have no heart—that they would hear the wolf saying, Behold, here is Christ; and not hear the shepherd saying, Among all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:47)?

17. 38. Petilian said: Thus, thus, wicked persecutor, with whatever veil of goodness you cover yourself, under whatever name of peace you wage war with kisses, with whatever word of unity you entice the human race; you who hitherto deceive and beguile, you are truly a son of the devil, since by your morals you point to your father.

17. 39. Augustine replied: Reckon these things to have been said by us against you: and that you may know whom they rather fit, recall what I said above.

18. 40. Petilian said: Nor is it so great a wonder that you unlawfully take to yourself the name of bishop. This is the true custom of the devil, to deceive only when he claims for himself the title of holiness, as the Apostle proclaims: 'Nor is it a wonder,' he says, 'if Satan himself transforms himself as an angel of light, and his ministers as ministers of righteousness' (2 Cor 11:14-15).

Nor is it a wonder, then, that you falsely call yourself a bishop. For those lost angels too, lovers of worldly maidens, who by corrupting the flesh were corrupted, although, stripped of their divine powers, they ceased to be angels, nevertheless retain the name of angels, and always think themselves angels—they who, released from the divine service, passed over, made like, into the army of the devil, while the great God cried out: 'My spirit shall not remain in these men forever, for they are flesh' (Gen 6:3).

To which guilty ones, and to you, the Lord Christ will say, 'Go into the eternal fire, which my Father has prepared for the devil and his angels' (Matt 25:41). If there were no evil angels, the devil would not have angels; whom the holy Apostle too says are to be condemned, in that judgment of rising again, by holy men: 'Do you not know that we shall judge angels?' (1 Cor 6:3). If they were true angels, men would not have judgment over the angels of God.

For surely the lost Manichaeus, if indeed he existed, is to be placed among those sixty, if the name of his apostle is not contained among the twelve; but, Matthias having been substituted into the place of Judas the betrayer, Paul was ordained by the voice of Christ as a thirteenth, who recalls himself to be the last of the apostles, lest anyone be believed to be a later apostle. For he said thus: 'For I am the last of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God' (1 Cor 15:9).

18. 41. Augustine replied: See how you have set down the testimonies of the Scriptures, or how you have understood them; it is nothing to the matter now at issue. For surely you said all these things to this end, to prove that there are false bishops, just as there are false angels and false apostles.

We too know that there are false angels and false apostles and false bishops, and, as the true apostle says, false brothers (See 2 Cor 11:26); but since these things can be hurled by both sides against each other, one must prove something, not speak emptily. Yet whom the charge of deceit fits, recall what we said above, and you will find—lest we be a weariness to our readers by repeating the same things too often.

And yet what is this to the Church spread throughout the whole world—whether what you could say about her chaff, which is with her throughout the whole world, or what you said about the Manichee, or about the other diabolical sects? For if whatever is also said about the chaff which is still with it does not pertain to the wheat, how much less do these monstrosities, so long ago and so openly separated, pertain to the members of Christ spread throughout the whole world!

19. 42. Petilian said: The Lord Christ commands us: 'When men persecute you in this city, flee to another: and if they persecute you in it, flee to another. For truly I say to you, you will not finish the cities of Israel until the Son of man comes' (Matt 10:23). If he forewarns us about Jews and pagans, you who recall yourself a Christian ought not to imitate the dread deeds of the Gentiles. Or do you so serve God that we should be killed by your hands? You err, you err, wretches, if you believe this. For God does not have executioner-priests.

19. 43. Augustine replied: To flee from city to city before the face of persecution was commanded or permitted not to heretics or schismatics, which you are, but to the preachers of the Gospel, which you resist. And, that we may easily prove it: you are now certainly in your cities, and no one persecutes you. You ought, then, to come forth, and render the account of your separation. For it is not the case that, just as the weakness of the flesh is excused when it yields to the violence of persecution, so too the truth ought to yield to falsehood.

Accordingly, if you suffer persecution, why do you not leave the cities in which you are, that you may fulfill what you recall from the Gospel? But if you do not suffer persecution, why are you unwilling to answer us? Or if you fear, perhaps, that when you have answered you will suffer persecution; how then do you imitate those preachers to whom it was said: Behold, I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves (Matt 10:16)? To whom likewise it was said: Do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul (Matt 10:28)? And how do you not act against the command of the apostle Peter, who says: Always ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason for your faith and hope (1 Pet 3:15)?

Finally, why are you, through most violent mobs, wicked even of your own accord toward the Catholic churches, wherever you can, as the matter itself shows by innumerable examples? But you say that you defend your own places, and resist with clubs and slaughter, by whatever means you can. Why have you not there heard the voice of the Lord, saying: But I say to you, do not resist evil (Matt 5:39)? Or if it can come about that sometimes the violent are rightly resisted by bodily force, and yet the command we hear from the Lord is not thereby violated, But I say to you, do not resist evil; why can this too not come about, that, through ordained and lawful powers, the godly should expel the ungodly, and the just the unjust, from seats which are unlawfully usurped or held to the injury of God? For the false prophets did not suffer persecution from Elijah in the same way that Elijah himself suffered it from a most wicked king (See 1 Kgs 18). Or, because the Lord was scourged by persecutors, are those therefore to be compared to his sufferings whom he himself scourged and drove out of the temple.

It remains, then, that you confess that nothing else need be inquired into, except whether you separated yourselves justly or impiously from the communion of the whole world. For if it is found that you did this impiously, do not wonder if there are not lacking ministers of God by whom you are scourged: because you suffer persecution not from us, but, as it is written, from your own deeds (See Wis 11:20).

20. 44. Petilian said: Again the Lord Christ cries out from heaven to Paul: 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad' (Acts 9:4-5). He was then called Saul, that baptism might afterward compose a name for him. Is it not, then, hard for you so often to persecute Christ in his priests, when the Lord himself cries out: 'Touch not my anointed' (Ps 105:15 (104:15))? Count up so many funerals of the saints, and you have so often killed the living Christ. Finally, if you are not a sacrilegious man, you cannot be holy, being a murderer.

20. 45. Augustine replied: Defend yourselves from the persecution which those who, together with Maximian, separated themselves from you suffered at the hands of your own people; and there you will find our defense. For if you say that you did not do it, we read out the proconsular and municipal records. If you say that you did rightly to them, why are you unwilling to suffer such things yourselves? If you say: But we did not make a schism; then let this be inquired into, and before it is established whether it is so, let no one accuse persecutors.

If you say that schismatics too ought not to suffer persecution: I ask whether they ought not also to be expelled, through ordained powers, from the basilicas in which they lie in wait to seduce the weak? If you say that this too ought not to be: first restore the basilicas to the Maximianists, and then deal with us. If you say it ought to be: now inquire what they ought to suffer from the ordained powers, who by resisting them resist the ordinance of God (See Rom 13:2).

Whence the Apostle plainly says: For not without cause does he bear the sword; for he is an avenger in wrath upon him who does evil (Rom 13:4). But if, the truth being carefully handled, it should altogether be found that schismatics ought neither to suffer anything through public judgments, nor to be expelled from the places of their ambushes and deceits; and you should say that it displeases you that the Maximianists suffered these things from certain of your people: why do the Lord's grain not cry out, more freely, throughout the whole field of the Lord, that is, throughout the whole world: What the weeds or our chaff commit does not pertain to us, because it displeases us?

If you confess that it suffices for your cleansing, that whatever evil is done by your people displeases you: why, then, did you separate yourselves? For your very defense accuses you on this point. For if you do not separate yourselves from the wicked of the party of Donatus, because each one bears his own burden (Gal 6:5); why did you separate yourselves from the wicked of the whole world, whom you suppose or pretend to exist? Was it so that you might all alike bear the burden of schism?

20. 46. And yet we ask of you, whom of your people you can prove to have been killed by ours. I recall no law given by the emperors that you should be killed. But those over whom you are wont to stir up the greatest odium, Marculus and Donatus—to put it more moderately—it is uncertain whether they threw themselves down, as your teaching does not cease to do by daily examples; or whether they were thrown down at the command of some authority.

For if it is incredible that the masters of the Circumcellions inflicted on themselves their accustomed deaths, how much more incredible that the Roman powers could have ordered unaccustomed punishments? And so about this matter, which you think too odious, if what you say is true, what does this pertain to the Lord's wheat? Let the chaff that flew outside accuse the chaff that remained inside: for the whole cannot be separated except by the final winnowing fan. But if it is false, what wonder is it if the chaff, carried off as by the light breath of dissension, even pursues the Lord's wheat with false accusations?

Therefore, about all such odious crimes, this grain of Christ, which was commanded to grow with the weeds throughout the field, that is, throughout the whole world, answers you with a free and secure voice: If you do not prove what you say, it pertains to no one; but if you prove it, it does not pertain to me. From which it comes about that whoever has separated himself from this unity of the grain on account of the crimes of the weeds or of the chaff, on account of that very evil of dissension and schism cannot defend himself even from the very crime of murder, since the Scripture says: He who hates his brother is a murderer (1 John 3:15).

21. 47. Petilian said: Therefore, as we said, the Lord Christ cried out to Paul: 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad.' But Paul said: 'Who are you, Lord?' And it was answered him: 'I am Christ the Nazarene, whom you persecute.' And he, trembling and astonished, said: 'Lord, what do you wish me to do?' And the Lord to him: 'Rise, and enter the city, and you will be told what you must do.' And, after some words: 'Saul rose from the ground, and when his eyes were opened he saw nothing.' O avenging blindness of frenzy, you cloud over the light of the eyes of the persecutor, destined to depart by baptism alone!

Let us see, then, what he did in the city. 'Ananias entered,' it says, 'to Saul, and when he had laid his hands on him, he said: Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus has sent me, who appeared to you on the way by which you were coming, that you may see and be filled with the Holy Spirit. At once there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight, and rising he was baptized' (Acts 9:4-6, 8, 17-18). Since, therefore, Paul, freed by baptism from the crime of persecuting, received innocent eyes; why are you, a persecutor and betrayer, blind by a false baptism, unwilling to be baptized by those whom you pursue?

21. 48. Augustine replied: You prove neither a persecutor nor a betrayer, the man whom you wish to baptize again. And even if you prove someone such, nevertheless a persecutor and betrayer is not to be baptized again, if he has already been baptized with the baptism of Christ. For Paul had to be baptized for this reason, that he had never been washed with such a baptism. And so what you wished to interpose about Paul has nothing like the case you are pleading with us.

But if you had not interposed this, you would have found no place for your childish declamation, where you said: O avenging blindness of frenzy, destined to depart by baptism alone! For how much more strongly must one cry out against you: O avenging blindness of frenzy, which, likened not to Paul but to Simon, does not depart from you even when baptism has been received (See Acts 8:9-19)? For if persecutors are to be baptized by those whom they persecute, let Primian be baptized by the Maximianists, whom he most insistently persecuted.

22. 49. Petilian said: But indeed you steadily object that Christ said to the apostles: 'He who has once been washed has no need except to wash his feet, but is wholly clean.' If you discuss these words fully, you are bound by what follows. For he spoke thus, saying: 'He who has once been washed has no need except to wash his feet, but is wholly clean. And you are clean, but not all' (John 13:10). But he said this on account of Judas, who was going to betray him. Whoever, then, you became a betrayer, you have lost baptism. Finally, after the betrayer, the apostle of Christ, was himself condemned, he confirmed the eleven thus more fully: 'Now you are clean, on account of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you' (John 15:3-4). And again he said to these eleven: 'My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you' (John 14:27). Since, then, these things were said to the eleven apostles, the betrayer being condemned, as we said, you betrayers likewise do not have peace and baptism.

22. 50. Augustine replied: If, then, a betrayer has lost baptism, whoever, baptized by you, afterward became a betrayer, if he should wish to return to you, let him be baptized again. But if you do not do this, you yourselves sufficiently indicate that what was said is false: If, then, you became a betrayer, you have lost baptism. For if he lost it, let him return and receive it: but if he returns and does not receive it, he had not lost it. Next, if it was said to the apostles, Now you are clean (John 15:3); and, My peace I give to you (John 14:27), because the betrayer had already departed thence: then that supper of so great a sacrament, which he gave to all before that man went out, was not clean and peaceable.

But if you dare to say this with closed eyes, what shall we do but rather cry out: O avenging blindness of frenzy of those who wish to be teachers of the law, as the Apostle says, understanding neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertions (1 Tim 1:7)? Yet, unless the blindness of obstinacy hindered, the understanding was not difficult, that you might see that the Lord did not say, with Judas present: You are not yet clean; but: Now you are clean.

But he added, not all; because there was there one who was not clean: who, however, if by his presence he polluted the rest, it would not be said to them: Now you are clean: but it would be said, as I said: You are not yet clean. But after that man departed, he said to them: Now you are clean; nor did he add: But not all; because he had now departed, even with whom present, as was said to them, they were clean, but not all, because there was there one unclean man. Therefore by these words the Lord rather declared that, in one assembly of men receiving the same sacraments, the uncleanness of some cannot harm the clean.

Certainly, if you think there are among us men like Judas, say these words to us: You are clean, but not all. But you do not say this: rather, on account of certain unclean men, you say: You are all unclean. The Lord did not say this to the disciples with Judas present: and therefore he who says this has not learned what he says from the good Master (See Luke 18:18).

23. 51. Petilian said: But if you say that we administer baptism twice, nay rather it is you who do so, who kill the baptized: we say this not because you baptize, but because, while you kill each one, you make him be baptized in his own blood. For the baptism of water or of the Spirit has, as it were, been doubled by the blood of the martyr wrung out.

So too the Savior himself, baptized first by John, professed himself to be baptized again, not now with water or the Spirit (See John 3:5), but with the baptism of blood, the cross of the passion: as it is written: 'Two disciples, the sons of Zebedee, came to him, saying: Lord, when you come into your kingdom, make us sit, one at your right hand and the other at your left. Jesus answered them: You ask a difficult thing. Can you drink the cup that I am to drink, and be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? They said to him: We can. And he said to them: The cup indeed that I am to drink, you can drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized' (Mark 10:35-39) and the rest.

23. 52. Augustine replied: First, we answer briefly, that we do not kill you, but you yourselves kill yourselves with a true death, when you cut yourselves off from the living root of unity. Next, if all who are killed are baptized in their own blood, then all robbers, the wicked, the impious, the criminal, who, condemned, are struck down, must be held martyrs, because they are baptized in their own blood. But if none are baptized in their own blood except those who are killed for the sake of righteousness; because theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:10): see that one must first inquire for what you suffer, and afterward what you suffer. Why, then, are the cheeks puffed out before the deeds are defended? Why does the tongue make a din before the life is proved? If you have made a schism, you are impious: if you are impious, you die as a sacrilegious man, when you are punished for impiety: if you die as a sacrilegious man, how are you baptized in your own blood? Or do you say: I did not make a schism? Then let us inquire into this: why do you cry out before you prove it?

23. 53. Or do you say: Even if I am a sacrilegious man, I ought not to be killed by you? It is one question about the atrocity of my deed, which you never truthfully demonstrate; another about the baptism of your blood, of which you lyingly boast. For I neither kill you, nor do you prove yourself to have been killed by anyone: nor, even if you proved it, does it pertain to me, whoever may have killed you—whether he acted justly according to a power lawfully given him by the Lord, or, like the chaff of the Lord's harvest, committed a crime out of some evil desire:

just as there does not pertain to you the man who in recent times, with an intolerable power and even with soldiers escorting him, not because he feared anyone, but that he might be feared by all, oppressed widows, overturned orphans, gave away the patrimonies of others, separated the marriages of others, procured the goods of the innocent to be sold, and divided the prices of what was sold with the owners lamenting.

I might seem to be saying these things on my own, if the one of whom I speak were not recognized though his name is unspoken. And if these things are true; just as these do not pertain to you, so neither does whatever you say pertain to us, even if you spoke the truth.

But if false rumor has lied about that just and innocent colleague of yours; in no way is even rumor to be believed, which has been sown about the innocent as though about betrayers of the books, or as though about killers of men.

To this is added that I recall a man who lived with you, whose anniversaries you frequented with so great a celebration, to whom you joined the kiss of peace amid the sacraments, into whose hands you placed the Eucharist, to whom in turn, as he gave it, you stretched out your hands, whose ears, amid such great groanings of Africa, you were afraid to offend with a free voice: a man who, because someone of you, even obliquely and most wittily, touched upon him, so as to say to him that he had God for his Companion, was extolled with enormous praise.

But you charge against us those men with whom we have not lived, whose faces we have not seen, in whose age we were either boys or perhaps not yet born. What is this so great injustice and perversity, to wish to lay on us the burdens of men unknown to us, when you are unwilling to bear those of your friends? The divine Scripture cries out: You saw a thief, and you ran along with him (Ps 50:18 (49:18)). If the man whom you saw did not contaminate you, why do you charge against me one whom I could not see? Or do you say: I did not run along with him, because his deeds displeased me? But surely you approached the altar with him.

Come now, that you may defend yourself, distinguish these things, and say that it is one thing to run together into sin, as the two elders ran together in lying in wait for the chastity of Susanna; another to receive the sacrament of the Lord with a thief, as the apostles received even that first supper with Judas. I favor the defense: but why do you not attend to how much more easily, by this defense of yours, the nations and the ends of the earth, throughout which the inheritance of Christ is spread, are absolved?

For if you could see a thief, and, with the thief seen, share the sacraments, yet not share the sin: how much less could the most remote nations, even if you spoke the truth and showed it, have misdeeds in common with African betrayers or persecutors, although they held the sacraments in common with them? Or do you say: I saw that bishop, but that thief I did not see.

Say what you wish, I favor this defense too, and by it the whole world is absolved from your accusations. For if it was permitted to you to be ignorant of the life of a man you knew, why is the whole world not allowed to be ignorant of men unknown to it? Unless perhaps it is permitted to the Donatists not to know what they are unwilling to know, but not permitted to the nations not to know what they cannot know.

...just as Optatus did not make you a thief.

23. 54. Or do you say: Theft is one thing, betrayal or persecution another? I grant that it is another; nor need I now labor to show what the difference is. Attend to the short cut. If that man did not make you a thief, because theft does not please you: who can make those men betrayers or murderers to whom either betrayal or murder is displeasing? First, then, confess that you are whatever evil Optatus was, whom you knew: and only so charge against me whatever evil those men were whom I did not know.

Do not say to me: But those are great things, these small. For first you must confess those small things about yourself—not that I too may confess, but that I may at least allow you to say whatever great things about me. Did Optatus, whom you knew, make you a thief, because he was your colleague, or did he not?

Answer one of two things. If you say: He did not; I ask why he did not: because he himself was not a thief? or because you do not know? or because it displeased you? If because he himself was not: then much more ought we not to believe that those men of whom you accused us were such as you say. For if about Optatus one must not believe what Christians and pagans and Jews, and finally both our people and yours, say; how much less must one believe what you say about anyone?

If because you do not know: all the nations answer you: Much more do we not know whatever you charge against us about those men. If because it displeased you: they answer you with the same voice: Although you have never proved it, nevertheless such things displease us. But if you say: Behold, that Optatus whom I knew made me a thief, because he was my colleague, and I used to approach the altar with him while he was committing these things; but I do not care, because the sin is slight: yet those men made you a betrayer and a murderer to him.

I answer that I do not grant that I too have been made a betrayer and murderer by the sins of others, just because you have confessed that you have been made a thief by another's sin: for you have been made a thief not by our judgment, but by your own mouth.

For we say that each one bears his own burden, as the Apostle attests (See Gal 6:5); but you, not because you committed theft or consented to theft, but because you considered that what another did pertained to you, of your own accord put your shoulders under the burden of Optatus. For as the Apostle says, when he was speaking about foods: I know and am confident in the Lord Jesus that nothing is common through him, but to him who considers anything to be common, to him it is common (Rom 14:14); by the same rule it can be said that the sins of others do not pertain to those to whom they are displeasing; but if anyone considers that they pertain to him, they do pertain to him.

Therefore you do not hold us to be betrayers or murderers, even if you prove something of the sort about those who share the sacraments with us: but you, even if whatever Optatus did displeases you, we nevertheless hold to be a thief—not by our calumny, but by your own sentence. And lest you think this slight; read the Apostle saying: Nor shall thieves possess the kingdom of God (1 Cor 6:10).

But those who shall not possess the kingdom of God will certainly not be at the right hand, among those to whom it will be said: Come, blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom which has been prepared for you from the foundation of the world (Matt 25:34). If they will not be there, where will they be, except at the left? Among those, then, to whom it will be said: Go into the eternal fire, which has been prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt 25:41).

In vain, then, do you make yourself secure, thinking slight a sin which separates from the kingdom of God and sends into the eternal fire. How much better will you flee to a true confession, and say: Each one of us will bear his own load, and the final winnowing fan will separate the chaff from the wheat (See Gal 6:5; Matt 3:12)?

23. 55. But of course you fear lest it be said to you at once: Why, then, while you try to lay others' burdens on others, did you dare, before the final winnowing fan, to separate yourselves from the Lord's harvest of the whole world? And so you, to whom the deeds of your own people are displeasing, while you take care lest the schism which you all made be charged against you, entangle yourselves even in sins which you did not commit: and while the eloquent Petilian fears lest I be allowed to say that I am not such as he thinks Caecilian was, he himself is compelled to say that he is such as he knows Optatus was.

Or are you not such as all Africa cries out that he was? Then neither are we such as those men whom you charge against us—men whom either your error suspects, or your fury defames, or the truth proves: much less are the Lord's grain throughout all the nations, who have not even heard the name of these men. There is, therefore, no cause why you should perish by so great a crime of separation and the sacrilege of schism. And yet, if you suffer anything by the divine judgment for this so great impiety, you say that you are even baptized in your own blood: so that it is not enough that, being divided, you are not pricked to remorse, unless, being punished, you even glory in it.

24. 56. Petilian said: But you persist in the same: 'He who has once been washed has no need except to wash his feet' (John 13:10). That is once which has an author, that is once which the truth confirms.

24. 57. Augustine replied: Baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit has Christ as its author (See Matt 28:19), not any man whatever: and Christ is the truth (See 1 John 5:6), not any man whatever.

25. 58. Petilian said: For since, being guilty, you commit false things, I do not administer baptism twice, which you yourself do not administer even once.

25. 59. Augustine replied: You do not prove us guilty; and if a guilty man baptizes with a false baptism, then all who are baptized by those who among you are not only manifestly but even secretly guilty do not have true baptism. For if he who gives baptism gives a thing of God; since he is already guilty before God, how does he give a thing of God, if a guilty man does not give true baptism? For you so expect that he be guilty even to you, as though what he is going to give were yours.

26. 60. Petilian said: For if you mingle false things with true, falsehood often imitates the truth in the very same footprints. Thus, thus the painting of nature simulates a man and expresses the true with colors—false faces of the truth.

26. 61. Augustine replied: Are you then not ashamed to call the baptism of Christ a falsehood, even if it should be in a most deceitful man? Far be it indeed that the Lord's grain, which was commanded to grow among the weeds throughout the whole field, that is, this world, until the harvest, that is, until the end of the age (See Matt 13:24-30, 36-43), should be believed to have perished by your curses. Nevertheless, even in the weeds themselves, which were commanded not to be gathered but borne until the end, and in the chaff itself, which will not be wholly separated except by the final winnowing fan (See Matt 3:12); does anyone dare to say that the baptism is false which is given and received in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit?

Those whom, convicted by the testimony of pregnant women, you depose from honor, whether your colleagues or your presbyters (since such examples are nowhere lacking), I ask: before they were convicted, were they deceitful or truthful? You will certainly reply: Deceitful. Why, then, did they both have and give true baptism? Why did human deceit not corrupt the divine truth in them? Is it not most truly written: For the Holy Spirit of discipline will flee what is feigned (Wis 1:5)? Since, then, the Holy Spirit fled these feigners, why was the truth of baptism among them, unless because the Holy Spirit was fleeing the man's deceit, not the truth of the sacrament?

Moreover, if even deceitful men have true baptism, he who has this—although received from a most deceitful baptizer—has the same thing that the truthful have. Whence you ought to notice that your discourse is rather painted with childish pigments: and therefore one who, neglecting the living word, delights in such dyes, himself loves a painting in place of the truth.

27. 62. Petilian said: But the apostle Paul says: 'One God, one faith, one baptism' (Eph 4:5). We profess one; for it is certain that those who reckon two are insane.

27. 63. Augustine replied: You say these things against yourselves, but by your insanity you do not know it. For those reckon two baptisms who consider that the just have one and the wicked another; whereas it is neither these men's nor those men's, but is the one baptism of Christ in both; although they themselves are not one, but that which is one the former have unto salvation, the latter unto ruin.

28. 64. Petilian said: But, to make some comparison, a double sun seems to appear to madmen, although a dark-blue cloud often comes together, and its discolored face, struck by the splendor, while the sun's rays return from it, seems to emit its own rays: thus, thus in the faith of baptism it is one thing to seek images, another to recognize the truth.

28. 65. Augustine replied: What are you saying, I ask? When a dark-blue cloud, struck by the sun's rays, reflects them back, do two suns, as it were, appear to madmen, and not to all who look? But when it so appears to madmen, it appears to them alone.

But if it is not troublesome that I admonish you, see rather lest perhaps to say such things and to speak so be the act of a madman. Yet surely you meant to say this, that the just have the truth of baptism, but the unjust an image; if it is so, I dare to say that there was an image in that man of yours, for whom not God, but a certain Companion, was God; but the truth either in you, or in the man who elegantly cast this against him, when he said to him: To whom God is a Companion. And distinguish those whom each of them baptized, and in some approve the true baptism, but from others exclude the image, and bring in the truth.

29. 66. Petilian said: But, to run over these lesser matters; does he pronounce the law who is not a magistrate of the court, or is what he has said law, when a private person disturbs public rights? Or is not the guilty man, rather, not only of no profit; but, together with that which he produces, is held a forger?

29. 67. Augustine replied: What if this private person and forger should give someone an emperor's law? Will not that person, when he has compared it with those who have it, and found that it is the very same, not attend to from whom he received it, but what he received? For a forger, when he gives something out of his own falsehood, it is false: but when something true belonging to another is given by someone, even if it is given by a forger, although that man is not truthful, nevertheless what is given is true.

30. 68. Petilian said: Or if anyone should hold by memory the songs of a priest, is he therefore a priest, because with a sacrilegious mouth he publishes the song of a priest?

30. 69. Augustine replied: You say this as though we were now inquiring who is a true priest, and not what is true baptism. For that anyone may be a true priest, he must be clothed not with the sacrament alone, but with righteousness as well, as it is written: Let your priests be clothed with righteousness (Ps 132:9 (131:9)). But one who is a priest by the sacrament alone, as was the high priest Caiaphas, the persecutor of the one and most true priest; although he himself is not truthful, nevertheless what he gives is true, if he gives not his own but God's: as it was said of Caiaphas himself: But this he said not of himself, but, being high priest, he prophesied (John 11:51).

And yet, to use also that comparison which you yourself set down, if you should hear from someone, even a profane man, a prayer of a priest formed according to the words and mysteries of the Gospel; can you say to him: It is not true, although he himself is not only not a true priest, but not even any priest at all? Since the apostle Paul said that a certain testimony of some Cretan prophet or other, who was not counted among the prophets of God, was true; for he says: One of themselves, their own prophet, said, The Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies: this testimony is true (Titus 1:12-13). If, then, the Apostle, by the testimony of some foreigner or other, because he found it true, even himself attested it; why, when we have found in anyone whatever what is Christ's, and is true even if the one in whom it is found is perverse and deceitful, do we not distinguish the fault which the man has, and the truth which he has not as his own but as God's; and say: This sacrament is true; as that man said: This testimony is true?

Do we therefore say: This man too is truthful; because we say: This sacrament is true? Just as the Apostle, did he therefore count that prophet among the prophets of God, because he confirmed that what he found true in him was true? Likewise the same Apostle, when he was at Athens among the altars of demons, noticed a certain altar on which was written: To the unknown God. And he took up this testimony for building them up in Christ, so that he recalled it in his discourse, and added: Whom you, not knowing, worship, him we announce to you (Acts 17:23). Was it that, because he found that altar either among the altars of idols or set up by sacrilegious men, he therefore condemned or spurned what was true on it; or that, on account of the truth which he had read on it, he persuaded that the sacrileges of the pagans too were to be followed?

But consequently, when he wished to commend to their knowledge as well—as he judged fitting—the very Lord, unknown to them but known to himself, he said among other things: And indeed not placed far from each one of us; for in him we live, and move, and are, as also certain of your own have said (Acts 17:27-28). Was it that here too, because he found among sacrilegious men testimonies of the truth, he either approved them on account of these things, or condemned these things on account of them? But you must always err, as long as on account of the vices of men you violate the sacraments of God, or suppose that we, on account of the sacraments of God, which we are unwilling to violate in you, must take up also the sacrilege of your schism.

30. 70. Petilian said: For all power is from God (Rom 13:1), not in the man of power: as the Lord Jesus Christ answered Pontius Pilate: 'You would have no power over me, unless it were given you from above' (John 19:11). And again, when John says: 'A man can do nothing, unless it be given him from heaven' (John 3:27). Teach, then, betrayer, when you received the power of simulating the mysteries.

31. 71. Augustine replied: You teach rather—you, the whole world, throughout which the inheritance of Christ is spread, and that multitude of so many nations, where the apostles founded churches—when it lost the power to baptize. You will never teach it: not only because you slander them, you do not prove them betrayers; but because, even if you proved it, the crime of any wicked men whatever—whether unknown, or deceitful, or to be borne like weeds or chaff—cannot overturn the promises of God, so that all the nations should not be blessed in the seed of Abraham (See Gen 22:18); from which promises you make yourselves strangers, who are unwilling to have the communion of unity with all the nations.

32. 72. Petilian said: For although baptism is one, it is nevertheless consecrated in three degrees. John gave water without the name of the Trinity, as he himself professed, saying: 'I baptize you in the water of penance: another will come who is stronger than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire' (Matt 3:11). Christ gave the Holy Spirit, as it is written: 'He breathed on their faces, and said: Receive the Holy Spirit' (John 20:22). And the fire itself, the Paraclete, blazing with crackling flames, came upon the apostles.

O true divinity, which seemed to kindle, not to burn, as it is written: 'There came suddenly from heaven a sound as if the spirit were borne with great force, and it filled the whole house where the apostles were sitting. And there appeared distributed tongues as of fire, and it settled upon each one of them; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in various tongues, as the Holy Spirit gave them utterance' (Acts 2:2-4). But you, persecutor, do not have even the water of penance, you who retain the power not of John who was slain, but of Herod the slayer. You, then, betrayer, do not have the Holy Spirit of Christ: for Christ was handed over to death, Christ did not hand anyone over to death. For you there is a fire, lively in the spirit among the dead, which, burning with hungry points, may have power to breathe upon your limbs throughout the age, not to finish them; as it is written about the punishment of the guilty in hell, 'Their fire shall not be extinguished' (Isa 66:24).

32. 73. Augustine replied: You are that slanderous reviler, not a truthful disputant. Will you not at some time cease to say such things, which, if you do not prove them, pertain to no one; but if you prove them, do not at all pertain to the unity of the whole world, which is in the holy ones as in the grain? If it should please us too to repay curses for curses, perhaps we too can revile eloquently. We too can say: With crackling flames: but what is said ineptly in no way sounds to me eloquent. We too can say: Burning with hungry points: but we do not wish the points of our writings, when they are read by anyone sound, to be judged starved of the sap of seriousness, and the reader himself, while he is fed by no useful sentences, to labor under a superfluous fast.

Behold, I say that your Circumcellions burn not with crackling but with headlong flames of fury. If you reply: What is that to us? why, when you have charged whomever you wished, will you not in turn hear: And we do not know them? If you reply: You do not prove it; why should not the whole world reply to you in turn: Neither do you prove it? Let us make a pact, then, if it please you, that neither you charge against us the wicked you suppose to be ours, nor I against you yours. Thus you will see that, by this pact, so just an agreement being settled and confirmed, you have nothing to charge against the seed of Abraham in all the nations. And yet I plainly find something great to charge against you: Why, then, did you impiously separate yourselves from the seed of Abraham, which is in all the nations? This, certainly, you have no way to defend. For we each clear ourselves of the crimes of others: but this, that you are not in communion with all the nations which are blessed in the seed of Abraham, is a great crime, not of certain of you, but of all.

32. 74. And yet you know, and recall, that the Holy Spirit so came that those whom he then filled spoke in all tongues: what did that sign and prodigy mean? Why is the Holy Spirit now given in such a way that no one to whom he is given can speak in all tongues, unless because that miracle then portended that all the nations would believe, and that thus the Gospel would be in all tongues? This too was foretold so long before in the Psalm: There are no speeches nor words whose voices are not heard (Ps 19:3 (18:4)).

This was said on account of those who, having received the Holy Spirit, were going to speak in all tongues. But because this very thing signified that the Gospel would be in all the tongues of the nations, and that the body of Christ would resound throughout the whole world in all tongues, he went on to say: Their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world (Ps 19:4 (18:5)). Hence it comes about that the true Church is hidden from no one. Whence is that which he himself says in the Gospel: A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden (Matt 5:14).

And therefore in the same psalm it is added: In the sun he has set his tabernacle, that is, in manifestation: as we read it said in the books of Kingdoms: What you did in secret, you shall suffer in the sun (2 Sam 12:12). And he himself, like a bridegroom coming forth from his chamber: he exulted like a giant to run the way; his going forth is from the height of heaven: behold, you have the coming of the Lord in the flesh. And his meeting even to his height: behold, you have the resurrection and ascension. Nor is there one who can hide himself from his heat (Ps 19:5-6 (18:6-7)): behold, you have the coming of the Holy Spirit, whom he sent in tongues of fire, that he might show the fervor of love, which surely he does not have who does not keep, with the Church which is in all tongues, the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (See Eph 4:3).

32. 75. But now, as for your saying that there is indeed one baptism, but nevertheless consecrated in three degrees, and dividing these three among individual persons in such a way that you assigned the water to John, the Holy Spirit to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the third, the fire, to the Paraclete sent from above—consider for a moment how great the error is.

For you were led to think this because John says: I indeed baptize in water: but he who comes after me is greater than I; he will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire (Matt 3:11). And you were unwilling to consider that the three were not fitted singly to the three—the water to John, the Spirit to Christ, the fire to the Paraclete; but that these three pertain rather to two, one to John, and the other two to the Lord. For it was not said: I indeed baptize you in water; but he who comes after me is greater than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to carry, he will baptize you in the Holy Spirit; but the Paraclete who is to come after him, he will baptize you in fire; rather: I indeed, he says, in water; but he who comes after me, in the Holy Spirit and fire. He assigns one to himself, those two to the other. You see, then, how the number deceived you.

Attend further: you said that the one baptism is consecrated in three degrees, water, the Holy Spirit, and fire; and you set the three persons one to each, John to the water, Christ to the Spirit, the Paraclete to the fire.

If, then, John's water pertains to the same one whose unity is commended, those whom Paul the apostle had found baptized by John ought not to have been baptized at his command (See Acts 19:1-6): for they already had the water pertaining, as you say, to the same baptism: it remained that they should receive the Spirit and the fire, because these had been lacking to John, that the baptism consecrated, as you assert, in three degrees, might be completed. But since by apostolic authority they were ordered to be baptized, it was sufficiently declared that that water of John does not pertain to the baptism of Christ, but belonged, for the necessary time, to another dispensation.

32. 76. Finally, what did it seem good to you, that, when you wished to prove that the Holy Spirit was given by Christ, and had brought forward the testimony from the Gospel that, rising from the dead, he breathed on the face of the disciples, saying: Receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22); and wished to show that last fire which was named together with baptism in the tongues of fire which were shown when the Paraclete came—for you said: And the fire itself, the Paraclete, blazing with crackling flames, came upon the apostles—as though one were the Holy Spirit whom he gave by breathing on the face of the disciples, and another he who came upon the apostles after his ascension. Are there, then, two Holy Spirits? What most demented person would say this? And so Christ himself gave the same Holy Spirit, whether by breathing on the face of the disciples, or by sending him from above on the day of Pentecost with a fixed commendation of the sacrament.

Accordingly, it was not that Christ gave the Holy Spirit and the Paraclete the fire, as though to fulfill what had been said: In the Holy Spirit and fire (Matt 3:11): but the same Christ himself gave the Holy Spirit, whom, while set on earth, he showed by his breath, but, while set in heaven, by the tongues of fire (See Acts 2:3). For, that you may know that what was said was not then fulfilled, He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit (Matt 3:11), when he breathed on their face—so that they seemed now to be baptized not in the Spirit, but in fire, when the Paraclete should come—recall the most plain Scripture, and see what he said to them when the Lord himself ascended into heaven: John indeed baptized with water; but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit, whom you will receive not after these many days, at Pentecost (Acts 1:5). What is clearer than this testimony?

But according to your view he ought to have said: John indeed baptized with water; but you were baptized with the Holy Spirit when I breathed on your face, and hereafter you shall be baptized in fire, which you will receive not after these many days; so that, namely, those three degrees might be completed, by which you say the one baptism is consecrated. So it comes about that you still do not know what is meant by what was said: He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire (Matt 3:11), and you rashly wish to teach what you do not know.

33. 77. Petilian said: But that I may fully discuss the baptism of the Trinity, the Lord Christ said to his apostles: 'Go, baptize the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all things whatsoever I command you' (Matt 28:19-20).

Whom do you teach, betrayer? whom do you condemn? Whom do you teach, betrayer? whom do you kill? Finally, whom do you teach? or whom have you made a murderer? How, then, do you baptize in the name of the Trinity? You cannot call God Father. For since the Lord Christ said: 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God' (Matt 5:9); you who do not have peace of soul, do not have God for a father.

33. 78. Augustine replied: You had certainly proposed to discuss fully the baptism of the Trinity, and you had made us very attentive: but—what is, of course, easiest for you—how quickly you turned to your usual curses. This indeed you do copiously. For you set before yourself whomever you wish, against whom you may inveigh as much as you wish: in which great breadth of speech, by one most brief word that is said, Prove it, you are pressed into the narrowest straits. For this the seed of Abraham says to you, in which, while all the nations are blessed (See Gen 22:18), they do not care when they are cursed by you.

But nevertheless, since you deal with baptism, which you think to be true when it is in a just man, but false when it is in an unjust man; behold, I too, according to your rule, if I should discuss the baptism of the Trinity, can say, more copiously, I think, that he does not have God for a Father for whom God is a Companion; nor does he believe in his own Christ, except the one for whom he has suffered; nor does he have the Holy Spirit, who in a far different manner has burned wretched Africa with tongues of fire. How, then, does he have baptism, or how does he give it in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit?

Surely you now notice that there can be in an unjust man, or be given by an unjust man, a baptism that is not unjust, but just and true; not because it is his, but because it is God's. And I bring no calumny against you about this; which you do not cease to do about some men or other against the whole world, and—what is more intolerable—you do not even prove anything about those very men.

But this I do not know how it can be borne, that you bring calumny not only against holy men concerning unjust men; but you even procure a crime, from the contagion of sinful men, for holy baptism itself, which in any unjust man whatever must necessarily be holy, so that you say that baptism is such as is the one by whom it is had, or given, or received.

Moreover, if a man becomes such as the one with whom he approaches the holy things, and the sacraments themselves become such as the men in whom they are; it suffices for holy men, as a consolation, to hear from you a false charge in common with holy baptism: only see how you are condemned by your own mouth, if your sober men too are drunkards from the contagion of your drunkards, and your merciful men are robbers from the contagion of robbers, and whatever is found among you in evil men, this men who are not such are compelled to be; and baptism itself is unclean in all your unclean men, and, according to the diversity of that uncleanness, is diverse, if it is compelled to be such as is the one by whom it is had and given. These things are certainly false, and therefore they do us no harm when you say them against us and do not look to yourselves; but they harm you, because, when you say them falsely, they do not fall upon us, but, because you think them true, they recoil upon you.

34. 79. Petilian said: For if those apostles were permitted to baptize whom John had washed with the baptism of penance, will it not be permitted to me to baptize you sacrilegious men?

34. 80. Augustine replied: Where, then, is what you said above, that the baptism of John was not one thing and that of Christ another, but one baptism consecrated in three degrees, of which three degrees John gave the water, Christ the Spirit, the Paraclete the fire? Why, then, did the apostles repeat the water in those to whom John had already given the water pertaining to one baptism consecrated in three degrees? You see clearly how necessary it is that each one know what he is saying.

35. 81. Petilian said: For the Holy Spirit cannot be implanted in anyone by the laying on of the bishop's hand, unless the begetting water of a pure conscience has gone before.

35. 82. Augustine replied: In these few words of yours there are two errors. And the one indeed does not greatly pertain to the question being discussed between us, but convicts you of inexperience. For upon the hundred and twenty men the Holy Spirit came without anyone's laying on of hands, but upon Cornelius the centurion and those who were with him he came even before they were baptized (See Acts 1:15; 2:4; 10:44). But the other error in these words of yours utterly destroys your whole case. For you say that the begetting water of a pure conscience must go before, that the Holy Spirit may follow. Accordingly, either all water consecrated in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is of a pure conscience, not on account of those by whom it is ministered, or by whom it is received, but on account of him who, immaculate, instituted this baptism; or, if water of a pure conscience is made only by the pure conscience both of the man ministering and of the one receiving; what do you do about those whom you find to have been baptized by men who, not yet exposed, bore a stained conscience; especially if among the baptized themselves there exist someone who confesses that he had an evil conscience when he was baptized, in that by that occasion perhaps he had wished to arrive at some disgraceful act?

When, then, it has been made manifest to you that neither the one who ministered nor the one who received baptism had a pure conscience, will you judge that he must be baptized again? You will by no means say this, you will by no means do it. The purity of baptism, then, is altogether distinct from the purity or uncleanness of conscience, whether of the giver or of the receiver. Dare, then, now to say that the defrauder, the robber, the oppressor of orphans and widows, the separator of marriages, the betrayer, seller, and divider of others' patrimonies was of a pure conscience. Dare also to say that those were of a pure conscience whom, in such times, it is hard to think were lacking: if perhaps some, not for the sake of Christ, nor for the sake of eternal life, but for the sake of winning earthly friendships and satisfying earthly desires, courted being baptized by him. Moreover, if you do not dare to say that these were of a pure conscience; if you find any of that number baptized, give them the water of a pure conscience which they did not receive; but if you do not do this, cease to hurl against us what you do not know, lest you be compelled to answer against yourselves what you do know.

36. 83. Petilian said: Which Holy Spirit certainly could not come into you, whom not even the baptism of penance washes; but the water of a betrayer, which is to be repented of, pollutes—which is true.

36. 84. Augustine replied: Betrayers indeed you not only do not prove us to be, but not even could your fathers prove our fathers to be; who, if they had been proved such, would certainly not be our fathers, according to your earlier assertion, since we would not have followed their deeds; nor yet, on their account, would we be torn from the fellowship of unity, and from the seed of Abraham in which all the nations are blessed (See Gen 22:18). Nevertheless, if the water of Christ is one thing and the water of a betrayer another, because Christ was not a betrayer; why should not the water of Christ be one thing and the water of a robber another, because Christ certainly was not a robber either?

Baptize, then, after your robber, and I will baptize after a betrayer neither mine nor yours; or, if the produced papers are to be believed, both mine and yours; but if the communion of the whole world is to be believed rather than the party of Donatus, not mine, but yours. But by a better and sounder judgment, because, according to the apostolic voice, each one of us shall bear his own load (Gal 6:5); neither is that robber yours, as many of you as are not robbers, nor is any betrayer either ours or yours, as many of us as are not betrayers. And therefore we are Catholics, who according to this judgment do not desert unity: but you are heretics, who, on account of the crimes—whether true or false—of certain men, are unwilling to keep love with the seed of Abraham.

37. 85. Petilian said: But that these things done by the apostles may shine before us, we are taught by their Acts, as it is written: 'Now it came to pass, while Apollos was at Corinth, that Paul, having passed through the upper parts, came to Ephesus. And when he had found certain disciples, he said to them: Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed? But they said: But we have not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit. And Paul said: In what, then, were you baptized? And they answered, saying: In the baptism of John. But Paul said: John baptized with the baptism of penance, telling the people to believe in him who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus Christ our Lord. On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. And when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them. And they spoke in various tongues, and prophesied. And they were all about twelve men' (Acts 19:2-7). If, then, those men were baptized that they might receive the Holy Spirit, why do you not, if you wish to receive the Holy Spirit, after your lies receive the true renewal? But if we do this wrongly, why do you seek us? Or, certainly, if it is a crime, condemn Paul first; who indeed washed what already was, but we baptize in you what is not yet. For you do not, as we have often already said, dip with true baptism, but defame it with the empty name of a false baptism.

37. 86. Augustine replied: We do not accuse Paul, who gave men the baptism of Christ, because they did not have the baptism of Christ, but the baptism of John, according to their own answer; who, asked in what they had been baptized, answered: In the baptism of John, which does not pertain to the baptism of Christ, nor is any part or degree of it; otherwise either the water of the baptism of Christ was then repeated, or, if the baptism of Christ was then completed by two waters, it is now less complete, because that which was given through John is not given; but to suppose either of these is impious and sacrilegious. Paul, then, gave the baptism of Christ to those who did not have the baptism of Christ, but of John.

37. 87. But why the baptism of John was necessary at that time, which is now no longer necessary, we have both said elsewhere, and it does not now pertain to the matter at issue between us; except only that it may be seen that the baptism of John was one thing, but that of Christ another; just as that baptism was another in which the Apostle says our fathers were baptized in the cloud and in the sea, when they crossed the Red Sea through Moses (See 1 Cor 10:1-2).

For the Law and the Prophets, until John the Baptist, had sacraments foretelling the thing to come (See Luke 16:16); but the sacraments of our time attest that what those foretold as to come has come. John, therefore, of all who preceded the nearest, was the announcer of Christ. And because all the just and prophets of former times longed to see fulfilled what, by the revealing Spirit, they discerned would come to be; whence the Lord himself also says: For many just men and prophets longed to see what you see, and did not see it; and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it (Matt 13:17); therefore John was called more than a prophet, and among those born of women there was no greater (See Luke 7:26-28); because to the former just men it was granted only to foretell Christ, but to him both to foretell him absent and to see him present, so that to him is found to have lain open what they longed for.

And therefore the sacrament of his baptism still pertains to the foretelling of Christ, but plainly the last foretelling: since up to him there were foretellings of the first coming of the Lord, of which coming there are now announcements, no longer foretellings. But the Lord, teaching the way of humility, deigned to receive the sacraments of his own foretelling which he found here, not as a help to his own purification, but as an example of our piety: that is, that he might show us with how great devotion we ought to receive those things which attest that he has now come, since he himself did not disdain to receive the things which were figures of him as about to come.

And John, therefore, although the nearest, and within one year a contemporary, nevertheless, when he baptized, went before Christ as he came; on this account it was said about him: Behold, I send my angel before your face, who will prepare your way (Mal 3:1; Mark 1:2). And he himself preached, saying: One stronger than I comes after me (Mark 1:7). So, then, the circumcision of the eighth day which was given to the fathers foretold our justification, in the stripping off of carnal desires (See Col 2:11) through the resurrection of the Lord, which was done after the seventh, that is, the Sabbath day, on the eighth day, that is, the Lord's day, which is the third day after his burial: yet the infant Christ received that same circumcision of the flesh which foretold it.

And just as the Pasch which was celebrated by the Jews in the slaying of a lamb foretold the passion of the Lord and his passage from this world to the Father, yet the same Lord celebrated with his disciples that very Pasch which was in that same foretelling, when they suggested to him, saying: Where do you wish us to prepare the Pasch for you? (Matt 26:17) so too he himself received the baptism of John, which was in his nearest foretelling.

But just as the circumcision of the flesh of the Jews is one thing, and another that which we celebrate of those baptized on the eighth day; and the Pasch which they still celebrate from a sheep is one thing, and another that which we receive in the body and blood of the Lord; so the baptism of John was one thing, and the baptism of Christ another. For to them these things were foretold as to come, to us those things are proclaimed as fulfilled.

And although Christ received those things; nevertheless they are not necessary for us, because we have received the very one who was announced through them. But at the recent coming of the Lord, whoever had received those things, it was needful for him to be imbued with these as well; but whoever had been imbued with these, it was not needful that he be forced back into those.

37. 88. Therefore do not make a fog about the baptism of John, whose cause and reason, whether it be the one I have set forth, or some other better and more certain one be given, this nevertheless is manifest, that the baptism of John was one thing, that of Christ another; and that the former was called the baptism of John, as both the answer of those whom you mentioned declares, and the discourse of the Lord himself, where he says to the Jews: Is the baptism of John from heaven, or from men? (Matt 21:25) But this baptism is not called the baptism of Caecilian, nor of Donatus, nor of Augustine, nor of Petilian, but the baptism of Christ. For if you think us shameless, because we wish no one to be baptized after us, when we see that there were men baptized after John, who is certainly incomparably greater than we; are John and Optatus perhaps equals? It seems ridiculous: and yet I think that you believe Optatus not equal, but greater.

For after John the Apostle baptized, but you dare to baptize no one after Optatus. Is it because Optatus was in your unity? Now with what feelings this can be endured I do not know, if the friend of the Companion, for whom God was a Companion, is said to have been in unity, and the friend of the bridegroom (See John 3:29) outside unity. But if John was most of all in unity, and was far more excellent and greater not only than Optatus, but than all of us and all of you, and yet after him Paul the apostle baptized; why do you not baptize after Optatus?

Unless perhaps your blindness presses you into these straits, that you say Optatus could give the Holy Spirit, John could not. But if you do not say this, lest your insanity be laughed at even by the insane themselves; what will you reply, why men had to be baptized after John, but no one is to be baptized after Optatus, except because those men had been baptized with the baptism of John; but whoever are baptized with the baptism of Christ, whether they be baptized through Paul or through Optatus, there is no difference between the baptism of the former and of the latter, although there is so great a difference between Paul and Optatus?

Return, then, transgressors, to your heart (See Isa 46:8), and do not weigh the divine sacraments by the morals and deeds of men. For those sacraments are holy through him whose they are: but, worthily handled, they bring a reward; unworthily handled, a judgment.

And although those who have handled the sacrament of God worthily and those who have handled it unworthily are not one (See 1 Cor 11:29): nevertheless it is one, whether handled worthily or unworthily; not so that it becomes better or worse, but unto the life or death of those who handle it. As for what you said, that in those whom Paul baptized after John he washed what already was; surely you would not say it, if you considered a little what you were saying.

For if the baptism of John had to be washed, beyond doubt it was filthy. Why, then, should I press you further? Recall or read, and see whence John received this: you will find against whom you have poured out this blasphemy; and when you have found it, let at least the breast be beaten, if the tongue is not bridled.

37. 89. But now, as for what you think you say so elegantly: If we do this wrongly, why do you seek us? do you not at some time recall that none are sought except those who have perished? Or does not to fail to see even this belong to that very perdition? For that sheep too could so absurdly say to the shepherd: If I do wrong in straying from the flock, why do you seek me? not understanding that the very reason why it thinks it ought not to be sought is the one reason why it is sought.

But who seeks you—whether through his Scriptures, or through Catholic and peaceable tongues, or through the scourges of temporal tribulations—except he who dispenses this mercy to you in all things? We seek you, then, that we may find you: for we love you, that you may live, as much as we hate your error, that it may perish which destroys you, so long as it itself does not perish. And would that we might so seek you as even to find you, and joyfully say of each one of you: He was dead, and has come to life again; he had perished, and is found (Luke 15:32).

38. 90. Petilian said: If you say that you hold the Catholic Church, "Catholic" is what in Greek is called "single" or "whole." Behold, you are not in the whole, because you have withdrawn into a part.

38. 91. Augustine replied: I indeed have grasped very little of the Greek language, and almost nothing; yet I do not say shamelessly that I know "holon" to mean not "one," but "whole"; and "kath holon," "according to the whole"; whence the Catholic Church received its name, the Lord himself saying: It is not yours to know the times which the Father has set in his own power, but you shall receive the power of the Holy Spirit coming upon you, and you shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and unto the whole earth (Acts 1:7-8). Behold whence she is called Catholic.

But you so, with closed eyes, stumble against the mountain, which, from a small stone, according to the prophecy of Daniel, grew and filled the whole earth (See Dan 2:35), that you say to us, who have withdrawn into a part and are not in the whole—we whose communion is spread throughout the whole world. But just as, if you should say to me that I am Petilian, I would not find how to refute you, except either to laugh at you as joking or to grieve over you as raving; this I see I must now do; but because I do not believe you are joking, you see what remains.

39. 92. Petilian said: But there is no part of darkness with light (See 2 Cor 6:14), nor part of bitterness with honey: there is no part of life with death, no part of innocence with guilt, no part of water with blood; nor part of dregs with oil, although there be a feculent kinship; but all the reprobate things will flow away. It is the very bilge of vices, as John says: 'They went out from us, but they are not of us; for if they had been of us, they would surely have remained with us' (1 John 2:19). There is no gold with its dross: all precious things are purified. For it is written: 'As the furnace tests gold, so the affliction of tribulation tests the just' (Wis 3:6). Cruelty is no part of meekness, nor sacrilege of religion, nor can the party of Macarius be in any way ours, because it stains by the likeness of our rite. For a hostile battle line is no part, which fulfills the name of an enemy; which, if it is truly called a part, will incur the fitting sentence of Solomon: 'Let their part perish from the earth' (Prov 2:22).

39. 93. Augustine replied: To hurl these words about and prove nothing, what is it but to rave? You attend to the weeds throughout the world, and do not attend to the wheat; although both were commanded to grow throughout the whole. You attend to the seed of the evil one, which at the time of harvest will be separated (See Matt 13:24-30, 36, 43); and you do not attend to the seed of Abraham, in which all the nations are blessed (See Gen 22:18).

As though, indeed, you were already a purified lump, and pure honey, and clarified oil, and pure gold, or the very appearance of a whitewashed wall. For, to be silent about the rest of the vices, do drunkards make a part of the sober, or are the greedy reckoned in the part of the wise? If meek men hold the name of light; where, except in the darkness, will the fury of the Circumcellions be reckoned? Why, then, does baptism given through such men avail among you, and the same baptism of Christ, given through anyone whatever in the whole world, not avail? You see, surely, that you have been separated from the communion of the whole world to this end, that you are not indeed all drunkards, nor all greedy, nor all violent, but all heretics, and through this all impious and all sacrilegious.

39. 94. But that you call the whole world, rejoicing in Christian fellowship, the party of Macarius; who in his right mind would say this? But because we say that you are of the party of Donatus, you look for a man of whose party you may say that we are; and in great straits you name someone or other, perhaps known in Africa, but unknown in the other parts of the world.

Therefore, behold, the whole seed of Abraham answers you from the whole earth: this Macarius, of whose party you say we are, we do not know at all. Answer in turn that you do not know Donatus. But even if we should say that you are of the party of Optatus, who of you can say that he does not know Optatus, except perhaps by face, as neither Donatus? But you rejoice, of course, in the name of Donatus; do you also rejoice in the name of Optatus? What good, then, does Donatus do you, when Optatus has defiled you all? What good does the sobriety of Donatus do you, when you are polluted by the drunkenness of the Circumcellions? What good does the innocence of Donatus, according to your opinion, do you, when you are stained by the rapacity of Optatus?

For this is your error, that you think the iniquity of a man avails more to contaminate another than the righteousness of a man to purify another. And so, if two alike share the divine sacraments, one just, the other unjust; but in such a way that neither does this one imitate that one's iniquity, nor that one this one's righteousness; you do not say that from this both become just, but both unjust, so that even that holy thing which they take alike becomes unclean, and loses its own holiness.

Where did iniquity find for itself such advocates, by whose raving it is thought thus victorious? Why, then, do you applaud yourselves over the name of Donatus, in so great an error of perversity, where Petilian does not deserve to be what Donatus was, but Donatus himself is compelled to be what Optatus was?

But let the house of Israel say: The Lord is my part (Ps 73:26 (72:26)), let the seed of Abraham in all the nations say: The Lord is the part of my inheritance (Ps 16:5 (15:5)). For it knows how to say it, as Caiaphas in the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God (See 1 Tim 1:11). For you too, through the sacrament which is in you, like Caiaphas the persecutor of the Lord, prophesy unknowingly (See John 11:51-52). For what in Greek is 'makarios' is in Latin 'blessed.' So we are plainly of the party of Macarius. For what is more blessed than Christ, whose we are, to whom all the ends of the earth are recalled and turn, and in whose sight all the families of the nations worship (See Ps 22:27 (21:28))?

And so the party of this Macarius, that is, of this blessed one, does not fear your last malediction, perversely usurped from Solomon, that it should perish from the earth. For what was said about the impious, this you try to turn to the inheritance of Christ, and you contend with unspeakable impiety that this has come to pass. For when he was speaking about the impious, he said: Let their part perish from the earth (Prov 2:22). But when you say that what is written, I will give you the nations for your inheritance (Ps 2:8); and, All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord (Ps 22:27 (21:28)), has now perished from the earth; you wish to twist back to the inheritance of Christ what was foretold about the lot of the impious: but, the inheritance of Christ remaining and growing, when you say these things, you perish. For you do not everywhere prophesy through the sacrament of God, since here, by your insanity, you curse evilly. But the prediction of the prophets avails more than the malediction of false prophets.

40. 95. Petilian said: Paul the apostle also cries out: 'Do not bear the yoke with unbelievers. For what participation has righteousness with iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Belial? Or what part has the believer with the unbeliever?' (2 Cor 6:14-15).

40. 96. Augustine replied: I recognize the words of the Apostle, but how they help you I do not see at all. For which of us says that there is participation of righteousness with iniquity, even if the just and the unjust, like Judas and Peter, alike share the sacraments? For from one holy thing Judas took for himself judgment, Peter salvation; as you, if you were unlike, took the sacrament with Optatus, and were not a robber like him. Or is robbery not iniquity? Who would be so insane as to say this? What participation, then, had your righteousness with his iniquity, when you approached one altar?

41. 97. Petilian said: And again he taught, lest schisms should arise: 'But I say to you, that each one of you says: I indeed am of Paul; but I of Apollos, but I of Cephas; but I of Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?' (1 Cor 1:12-13).

41. 98. Augustine replied: Remember, you who read these things: Petilian cites these words from the Apostle. For when would you have believed that he would so speak for us against himself?

42. 99. Petilian said: If Paul said these things to the unformed, to the just; I say these things to you, the unjust: Is Christ divided, that you should cut yourselves off from the Church?

42. 100. Augustine replied: I fear lest anyone in this work of mine think that the scribe erred, and put there, Petilian said; where he ought to have put, Augustine replied. But I see what you did: you wished, as it were, to forestall us, lest we should say these things. But what did you accomplish, except that they are said twice? If, then, it so delights you to hear the things that are against you, that they be said; hear them, I pray, from me, Petilian: Is Christ divided, that you should cut yourselves off from the Church?

43. 101. Petilian said: Did Judas the betrayer die by his noose for you, or are you dipped in the morals of him whose deeds you follow, when, having seized the treasures of the Church, you sell us, the heirs of Christ, to the powers of the age?

43. 102. Augustine replied: Not Judas, but Christ died for us, to whom the Church spread throughout the whole world says: I will answer a word to those who reproach me, for I have hoped in your words (Ps 119:42 (118:42)). When, therefore, I hear the words of the Lord saying: You shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and unto the whole earth (Acts 1:8); and, through the prophet: Their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world (Ps 19:4 (18:5)); no bodily mixture with the wicked disturbs me, if I know how to say: Receive your servant unto good; let not the proud slander me (Ps 119:122 (118:122)). I do not, then, care about an empty slanderer, because I hold a suitable promiser.

But if you complain about the ecclesiastical goods or places which you used to hold and do not hold, the Jews too can call themselves just and charge us with iniquity, because the place in which they impiously reigned the Christians now possess. What, then, is unworthy, if what the heretics held, the Catholics hold according to the equal will of the Lord? For against all such, that is, against all the impious and unjust, that voice of the Lord avails: The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and shall be given to a nation doing righteousness (Matt 21:43). Or is it written in vain: The just shall eat the labors of the impious (Ps 105:44 (104:44))? Therefore you ought rather to wonder that you still hold anything, than that you have lost something. But do not wonder at this either: for the whitewashed wall falls little by little.

Yet look to the Maximianists, what places they held; and by whose acting and assaulting they were driven thence. And if to suffer these things is righteousness, and to do them iniquity, dare to speak if you can. First, because you did it, they suffered it. Next, because, according to the rule of this righteousness, you are found the lower. For they were expelled from their ancient places through judges, by Catholic emperors; but you are not even by the commands of those same emperors expelled from the basilicas of unity. Whence, except because you are of less merit, not only than your other colleagues, but even than these very men, whom you certainly condemned as sacrilegious by the mouth of your plenary council?

44. 103. Petilian said: For we, as it is written, by our baptism have put on Christ who was betrayed (See Gal 3:27), but you by your contagion put on Judas the betrayer.

44. 104. Augustine replied: I too could say: You by your contagion put on Optatus the betrayer, robber, oppressor, separator; but far be it that the desire of repaying a curse should provoke me to any falsehood; for you do not put on that man, nor we this one. And so, if anyone coming to us should answer that he was baptized in the name of Optatus, he will also be baptized in the name of Christ; and as for all those whom, coming from us, you baptized, if they had said that they were baptized in the name of Judas the betrayer, we do not blame what you did; but if they had been baptized in the name of Christ, do you not see with how great an error you suppose that the divine sacraments are varied by the variety of human vices, or polluted by the filth of anyone's life?

45. 105. Petilian said: But if these are parts, the names of a fellow part prejudge nothing against us. For there are two ways: one narrow, by which we go; the other is for the impious, by which they will perish (See Matt 7:13-14); and yet the equality of the term is far distinguished, lest the way of righteousness be stained by the fellowship of a name.

45. 106. Augustine replied: You feared the multitude of the whole world compared to your multitude, and you wished to betake yourself to the praise of the fewness that walks by the narrow way. Would that you had betaken yourself not to its praise, but to the way itself! you would surely perceive that this same fewness is in the Church of all the nations, but that the just are called few in comparison with the many unjust, just as, in comparison with the chaff, the few grains of a most abundant harvest can be called few, which nevertheless, gathered by themselves into a heap, fill the barn. For just as in the tribulations of lost places, so also in fewness, if you think there is righteousness in these things, the Maximianists themselves will surpass you.

46. 107. Petilian said: In the first psalm David separates the blessed and the impious, not, of course, making parts, but separating holiness from all the impious. 'Blessed is the man who has not gone in the counsel of the impious, and has not stood in the way of sinners.'

It fills the eyes, that it may blind. 'Therefore the impious shall not rise in the judgment, nor sinners in the counsel of the just. For the Lord knows the ways of the just, and the way of the impious shall perish' (Ps 1).

46. 108. Augustine replied: Who would not distinguish in the Scriptures these two kinds of men? But you, slanderers, charge the crimes of the chaff even against the wheat; and although you are chaff alone, you boast that you alone are the wheat. But the truthful prophets say that both these kinds are mingled, before the winnowing which will come on the day of judgment, throughout the whole world, that is, throughout the whole field of the Lord.

Nevertheless I advise you to read this first psalm in Greek: so you will not dare to charge against the world, as a crime, the party of Macarius; because perhaps you will understand of which Macarius the party is, in all the holy ones, who throughout all the nations are blessed in the seed of Abraham (See Gen 22:18). For what is written in Latin, Blessed is the man; has in Greek: 'makarios aner.' But that Macarius who displeases you, if he was evil, is neither in this lot, nor does he harm this lot. But if he was good, let him prove his own work, that he may have glory in himself, and not in another (See Gal 6:4).

47. 109. Petilian said: But the praises of our baptism the same psalmist sang: 'The Lord feeds me, and nothing shall be lacking to me; in a place of pasture there he has set me. By the water of refreshment he has brought me up, he has converted my soul. He has led me upon the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. For even if I walk in the midst of the shadow of death,' if a persecutor, he says, should kill me: 'I will not fear evils; for you are with me, Lord. Your rod and your staff, they have consoled me.' Thence David, armored with the oil of chrism, conquered Goliath. 'You have prepared a table in my sight, against those who afflict me. You have anointed my head with oil, and your inebriating cup, how excellent it is. And your mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord, unto length of days' (Ps 23 (22)).

47. 110. Augustine replied: This psalm speaks of those who receive baptism well, and use the holy thing in a holy way. For these words do not pertain also to Simon Magus, who nevertheless received the same holy baptism; and because he was unwilling to use it in a holy way, he did not therefore defile it, nor teach that it must be repeated for such men.

But because you made mention of Goliath, attend to that psalm about Goliath himself, and see that he was conquered in a new song; for there it is said: God, I will sing a new song to you; on the psaltery of ten strings I will play to you (Ps 144:9 (143:9)). And see whether he belongs to this song who is not in communion with the world. For elsewhere it is said: Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth (Ps 96:1 (95:1)). All the earth, then, in whose unity you are not, sings a new song. And of all the earth are these words too: The Lord feeds me, and nothing shall be lacking to me (Ps 23:1 (22:1)), and the rest. These are not the words of the weeds, although they are borne in one harvest until the harvesting; they are not the words of the chaff, but of the wheat; although they are nourished by the same rain and at the same time, threshed on the same floor and at the same time, until by the final winnowing fan they are separated from one another—the two which certainly have in common one baptism, although they are not one. But even if your party were the Church of God, you would surely confess that this psalm there does not pertain to the frenzied bands of the Circumcellions.

Or if they too are led upon the paths of righteousness, why do you deny that they are your companions, when they are charged against you, although for the most part the fewness of your cutting-off is consoled not by the rod and staff of God, but by the clubs of those men, by whom you think yourselves safe even against the Roman laws; and to run upon these, what is it else than to walk in the midst of the shadow of death? But he with whom the Lord is fears no evils. Certainly, nevertheless, you will not dare to say that the words sung in this psalm are also the words of those frenzied men, and yet you not only confess but even profess that they have baptism.

They do not say these things, then, except those who are refreshed by the holy water, like all the just of God; not those who are overthrown by using it ill, like that magician baptized by Philip; and yet that water itself in both is one and holy. They do not say these things except those who will belong to the right hand; but nevertheless on the same pasture, under one shepherd, both sheep and goats are fed, until, that they may receive their due, they are separated.

They do not say these things except those who take from the table of the Lord life, like Peter; not judgment, like Judas; and yet it was one for both, but did not avail for both unto the one end, because they themselves were not one. They do not say these things except those who are blessed by the holy oil even in the spirit, like David; not those who are consecrated in the body alone, like Saul; and yet, when both had received one thing, the sacrament was not unequal for them, but the merit was unequal.

They do not say these things except those who, with mind changed, sigh for the cup of the Lord unto eternal life; not those who eat and drink judgment to themselves, as the Apostle says (See 1 Cor 11:29); and yet that one cup is one for both, not as belonging to them as one, inebriating the martyrs to lay hold of heavenly things (Ps 23:5 (22:5)), not the Circumcellions to deal death by headlong leaps.

Remember, then, that the morals of evil men do no harm to the sacraments of God, so that these either are not at all, or are less holy; but they harm the evil men themselves, so that they have these unto the testimony of damnation, not unto the help of health.

For you ought at least to have considered the very last words of this psalm, and, on account of those who, having received baptism, apostatize, to understand that it cannot be said by all who receive holy baptism: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord unto length of days; and yet, whether for those who persevere or for those who have lapsed, although they themselves are not one, baptism is one; and although they are not both holy, baptism in both is holy; because apostates too, if they return, are not baptized as though they had lost it, but are humbled because they did an injury to what remained in them.

48. 111. Petilian said: But lest you say that you are holy; first I assert this, that he who has not been innocent does not have holiness.

48. 112. Augustine replied: Show us the tribunal where you sat, that the whole world might stand before you; and with what eyes you inspected and examined—I do not say the consciences of all—but even the acts of all, so as to judge that it had lost innocence. He who was caught up to the third heaven (2 Cor 12:2) says: But neither do I judge myself (1 Cor 4:3); and you dare to pass sentence about the whole earth, throughout which the inheritance of Christ is spread!

Next, if what you said seems to you sufficiently settled: He who has not been innocent does not have holiness; I ask, if Saul did not have the holiness of the sacrament, what did David venerate in him? But if he had innocence, why did he persecute the innocent? For on account of the sacrosanct anointing he both honored him living and avenged him slain: and because he cut off even a little piece from his garment, his heart, struck, trembled. Behold, Saul did not have innocence, and yet he had holiness—not of his own life (for no one can have this without innocence), but of the sacrament of God, which is holy even in evil men.

49. 113. Petilian said: For if, faithless men, you know the Law; without injury to the Law itself I would say this, the devil too knows it. For to the Lord God, in the cause of the just Job, he answered about the Law as though he were just, as it is written: 'The Lord said to the devil: Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on earth, a man without malice, a true worshiper of God, abstaining from all evil, persevering in simplicity; but you have asked to destroy all his substance without cause. And the devil answered and said to the Lord: Skin for skin, and all that a man has he will give for his soul' (Job 2:3-4).

Behold, he speaks lawfully who strives against the Law. And again he dared to tempt the Lord Christ with his words, as it is written: 'The devil took Jesus into the holy city, and set him upon the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him: Cast yourself down; for it is written: He has given his angels charge concerning you, that they bear you up in their hands, lest perhaps you dash your foot against a stone. Jesus said: Again it is written: You shall not tempt the Lord your God' (Matt 4:5-7). You know the Law, I say, like the devil, who is conquered in his attempts, and blushes in his acts.

49. 114. Augustine replied: I could indeed ask you in what Law the words are written which the devil spoke when he accused the holy man Job before God; if it were my purpose to demonstrate that the Law which you say the devil knows, you yourself do not know; but because the question between us is not from there, I pass this over. But you tried to show that the devil was skilled in the Law, as though we said that all who know the words of the Law are just. What, then, what you wished to mention about the devil helps you, I do not see; unless perhaps it should come to our mind how you imitate the devil himself. For just as he brought forth the words of the Law against the giver of the Law, so you too accuse, from the words of the Law, men whom you do not know, that you may resist the promises of God which are written in that very Law.

Next, I would have you tell me: those confessors of yours, when they throw themselves down, to whom do they conduct their martyrdom? To Christ, who repelled the devil suggesting such things, or rather to the devil himself, who suggested such things to be done to Christ? There are two especially base and common deaths of those who kill themselves, the noose and the headlong leap. You yourself certainly said in the first parts of this letter: The betrayer perished by a noose, and left a noose to such men; this does not pertain to us at all. For we do not venerate with the name of martyrs those who have tied a rope to their own neck.

But how much more credibly do we say against you: The master of the betrayer, the devil, wished to persuade Christ to a headlong leap, and was repelled? What, then, must those be called to whom he persuaded this and was heeded? What, except enemies of Christ, but friends of the devil; disciples of the seducer, fellow disciples of the betrayer? For both learned voluntary deaths from one master; he the noose, these the headlong leap.

50. 115. Petilian said: But that we may destroy your several points, if you say that you are priests, thus was it said by the Lord God through the prophet: 'The vengeance of the Lord is upon false priests.'

50. 116. Augustine replied: Look rather for what truth you may say, not for whence you may curse; and for what you may teach, not for what you may charge.

51. 117. Petilian said: If you claim a chair for yourselves, wretches, as we said above; you certainly have that which David the psalmist prophet pronounced the seat of pestilence (See Ps 1:1); for it has justly been left to you, because the holy cannot sit in it.

51. 118. Augustine replied: And do you not see that these are not any proofs, but empty insults? For this is what I said a little before: You speak the words of the Law, but you do not attend to whom you speak them against; just as the devil spoke the words of the Law, but did not recognize to whom he spoke them. He wished to cast down headlong our head, which was to ascend on high; but you wish to reduce the body of that same head, which is spread throughout the whole earth, to a tiny part.

Certainly you yourself said a little before that we know the Law and speak lawfully, but blush in our acts. You say these things, proving nothing; but even if you proved them about some, you would not thereby prejudge about all the rest. Nevertheless, even if all throughout the whole world were such as you most emptily charge, what has the Chair of the Roman Church done to you, in which Peter sat, and in which today Anastasius sits, or the Chair of the Church of Jerusalem, in which James sat, and in which today John sits, to whom we are joined in Catholic unity, and from whom you have separated yourselves by a wicked fury?

Why do you call the apostolic Chair the seat of pestilence? If on account of the men whom you think speak the Law and do not do it, did the Lord Jesus Christ, on account of the Pharisees, of whom he says: For they say and do not do, do any injury to the chair in which they sat? Did he not commend that chair of Moses, and rebuke them while the honor of the chair was preserved? For he says: They sit in the chair of Moses. What they say, do; but what they do, do not do: for they say, and do not do (Matt 23:3). If you considered these things, you would not, on account of the men you defame, blaspheme the apostolic Chair, with which you are not in communion. But what is this else than not to know what to say, and yet to be able to do nothing but curse?

52. 119. Petilian said: If you judge that you offer sacrifices, indeed about you most wicked men God himself says thus: 'The criminal,' he says, 'who sacrifices a calf to me, is as one who would kill a dog; and he who offers fine flour, as one who would pour out swine's blood' (Isa 66:3). Know your sacrifice, you who have already shed human blood. And again: 'Their sacrifices are like the bread of mourning; everyone who shall eat of it shall be defiled' (Hos 9:4).

52. 120. Augustine replied: We say that the sacrifice becomes for each such as is the one who approaches to offer it, and such as is the one who approaches to receive it; and that those eat of the sacrifices of such men who approach them being such as those men also are; and so, if an evil man offers to God, and a good man receives from it, it becomes for each such as each one has been; because this too is written: All things are clean to the clean (Tit 1:15).

By this truthful and Catholic judgment, you too are not polluted by the sacrifice of Optatus, if his deeds were displeasing to you. For surely his bread was the bread of mourning, under whose iniquities all Africa mourned; but the bread of mourning, common to all of you, the evil of the schism of you all makes. For according to the sentence of your council, Felicianus of Musti shed human blood.

For you said, when you condemned them: Their feet are swift to shed blood (Ps 14:3 (13:3); Rom 3:15). See, then, what sort of sacrifice he offers whom you have for a priest, since you condemned him as sacrilegious; and if you think this does you no harm, I ask you, what harm will the emptiness of your calumnies do to the world?

53. 121. Petilian said: If you make a prayer to the Lord, or pour out a petition, it does you no good at all. For your bloody conscience empties your feeble prayers; because the Lord God hears a pure conscience rather than prayers, the Lord Christ saying: 'Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven' (Matt 7:21). The will of God is surely good; for therefore in the sacred Prayer we ask thus: 'Your will be done in heaven and on earth' (Matt 6:10); that, because his will is good, he may bestow on us the things that are good. You, then, do not do the will of God, because you perpetrate evils daily.

53. 122. Augustine replied: If we too should say all these things against you, will not he who hears us, if he himself is sound, judge us insane wranglers rather than Christian disputants? We do not, then, render curse for curse. For the servant of the Lord ought not to wrangle, but to be gentle toward all, teachable, in modesty rebuking those who hold different views (See 2 Tim 2:24-25).

If, then, we charge against you those who daily perpetrate evils among you, we wrangle ineptly, accusing some by means of others. But if we admonish you that, just as you do not wish those things to be charged against you, so you should not charge against us the deeds of others, we rebuke you in modesty, in case you should at some time come to your senses.

54. 123. Petilian said: But if perhaps—which I do not know—you cast out demons, this too will do you no good; because the demons themselves yield neither to your faith nor to your merits, but are cast out in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

54. 124. Augustine replied: Thanks be to God, that you have at last confessed that the invoked name of Christ can avail for the salvation of others, even if it be invoked by sinners. Hence, then, understand that, when the name of Christ is invoked, the sins of others do no harm to the salvation of others. But how we invoke the name of Christ, we have no need of your judgment, but of his who is invoked by us. For he alone can know with what heart he is invoked. Yet from his words we are certain that he is wholesomely invoked by all the nations, which are blessed in the seed of Abraham (See Gen 22:18).

55. 125. Petilian said: Even if you should perform powers and wonders outright, on account of your wickedness not even so does the Lord know you, the Lord himself saying: 'Many will say to me on that day: Lord, Lord, in your name we prophesied, and in your name we cast out demons, and in your name we did many powers. Then I will say to them, I never knew you; depart from me, workers of iniquity' (Matt 7:22-23).

55. 126. Augustine replied: We recognize the words of the Lord. Hence the Apostle too says: If I should have faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing (1 Cor 13:2). Here, then, it must be asked who has love; you will find that there are none except those who love unity. For about the casting out of demons, and the power of miracles, since very many do not do such things and yet belong to the kingdom of God, while very many do them and do not belong, neither our people nor yours ought to boast, if any perhaps can do these things; since the Lord did not wish even the apostles, who truly could do these things wholesomely and usefully, to rejoice in such things, when he said to them: Do not rejoice in this, that the demons are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven (Luke 10:20). Therefore these things which you set down from the Gospel, I too could say to you, if I saw you working the powers of signs; and you to me, if you saw me doing such things.

Let us not, then, say to one another the things which can be said from the other side as well; and, putting aside circumlocutions, since we are inquiring where the Church of Christ is, let us hear him who redeemed her with his own blood, saying: You shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and unto the whole earth (Acts 1:8). Whoever is not in communion with this Church, which is spread throughout the whole earth, you see with whom he is not in communion, if you hear whose these words are. But what is more demented than to be in communion with the sacraments of the Lord, and not to be in communion with the words of the Lord? These men will certainly say: In your name we ate and drank; and will hear: I never knew you (Matt 7:22); who eat and drink his body and blood in the sacrament, and do not recognize his members spread throughout the whole world in the Gospel, and therefore are not counted among them in the judgment.

56. 127. PETILIAN SAID: But even granting that you follow the Lord's law purely, as you yourselves suppose, let us argue lawfully from that most holy law itself. The apostle Paul says: The law is good, if one uses it lawfully (1 Tim 1:8). What then does the law say? You shall not kill (Exod 20:13). What Cain the murderer did once, you have done to your brothers again and again.

56. 128. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: We do not want to be like you, for there is no shortage of things that can be said, as you too say these things, nor of things that can be known, for these things you do not know, nor of things that can be shown, for these things you do not show.

57. 129. PETILIAN SAID: It is said: You shall not commit adultery (Exod 20:14). Each one of you, even if he is chaste in the flesh, is an adulterer in the spirit, because he commits adultery against holiness.

57. 130. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: These things can be said truly against certain people, both ours and yours; and if they displease both of us, they belong neither to us nor to you. But you want what you say against certain people, and do not even prove against those very people, to be taken as if you had proved it, not against some who degenerate from the seed of Abraham, but against all the nations that are blessed in the seed of Abraham (See Gen 22:18).

58. 131. PETILIAN SAID: It is said: You shall not bear false witness (Exod 20:16). When you falsely claim that we hold your possessions with the kings of this world, are you not fabricating falsehoods?

58. 132. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: If what you hold is not ours, neither was what you received from the Maximianists yours. But if it was yours because they made a sacrilegious schism by not communicating with the party of Donatus, then consider what places you hold, and whose inheritance you do not communicate with; and reflect on what answer you can give, not to the kings of this world, but to Christ the King. Of him it was said: He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth (Ps 72:8 (71:8)). From what river indeed, except where he was baptized, and where the dove descended upon him, a great sign of love and unity? But you do not communicate with this unity, and you still hold the places of unity; and you stir up resentment against us over the kings of this world, when through the orders of proconsuls you have driven your own schismatics out of the places of the party of Donatus.

These words are not flying through empty air: people are living, cities bear witness, the proconsular and municipal records are read aloud. Let the slanderous voice at last fall silent, charging the kings of this world against the whole earth, through whose proconsuls the divided one could not spare the divided one. When, therefore, we say that you hold what is ours, we are not shown to be giving false witness, unless you show that we are not in the Church of Christ; which you indeed never cease to say, but will never be able to show. Rather, when you say this, you no longer charge us, but Christ himself, with the crime of false witness. For we are in the Church that was foretold by his own testimony, and to which he bore witness through his own witnesses, saying: You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the whole earth (Acts 1:8).

But we show you to be false witnesses not only from this, that you resist this truth, but also in the very trial in which you clashed with the schism of Maximian. For if you were acting according to the law of Christ, how much more fittingly do Christian emperors establish something according to it, if pagan proconsuls can judge according to it? But if you thought that even the laws of the earthly empire were to be invoked in aid, we do not find fault with that. Paul did this when, against those who wronged him, he testified that he was a Roman citizen (See Acts 22:25).

But I ask by what earthly laws it was decreed that the Maximianists should be driven from their places. You will find none at all; rather, it was evidently by the laws that were enacted against heretics, and among them against you yourselves as well, that you wished to expel them: you prevailed against the weak as though you were the more powerful. Hence, because they could do nothing, they call themselves innocent, like the wolf under the lion. Yet by laws enacted against you, you would surely not use them against others except through false witness.

For if those laws are truthful, then you too yield the places that you hold; but if they are false, why did you use them to shut others out? What if they are both truthful, and yet you could not have expelled others by them except deceitfully? For in order that the judges might serve them, they wished to expel heretics; and so they ought to have expelled you first; but you said that you were Catholics, so that the laws by which you were pressing others might spare you.

You may see what you seem to be in your own eyes; yet by those laws you are not Catholics. Why then have you either falsely deceived those laws as truthful by false witness, or usurped them as false to oppress others?

59. 133. PETILIAN SAID: It is said: You shall not covet your neighbor's goods (Exod 20:17). You plunder what is ours, in order to have it as your own.

59. 134. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Whatever unity possessed is nothing but ours, who stand fast in unity not according to the slanders of men, but according to the words of Christ, in whom all the nations of the whole earth are blessed; nor do we separate ourselves from the fellowship of the wheat on account of the wicked, whom we cannot separate from the Lord's grain before the winnowing of the judgment; and if you, now cut off, have begun to possess anything, then, because the Lord gave to us what was taken from you, we do not therefore covet what belongs to others, since by the command of him to whom all things belong, they have become ours; and they are justly ours: for you were using them for division, we for unity.

Otherwise, even the first people of God could be charged with coveting another's property, who by divine power were driven from the face of those who were misusing that land; and the Jews themselves, from whom the kingdom was taken away (Matt 21:43), according to the words of the Lord, and given to a nation that does righteousness, could be charged with coveting another's property, because the Church of Christ possesses the place where the persecutors of Christ once reigned. And after all this, when it has been said to you yourselves, You covet the property of others, because you cast the Maximianists out of the basilicas, you find no answer to give.

60. 135. PETILIAN SAID: By what law, then, do you show yourselves to be Christians, when you do things contrary to the law?

60. 136. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: You want to quarrel, not to debate.

61. 137. PETILIAN SAID: But the Lord Christ says: Whoever does and so teaches shall be called greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And thus he condemns you wretches: Whoever breaks one of these commandments shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.

61. 138. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Where perhaps you state the testimonies of the Scriptures otherwise than they stand, and it does not bear on the matter at issue between us, I do not much mind; but where, unless they are quoted truthfully, they hinder what we are treating, I do not think you ought to be angry if I remind you how it is written. See, what you have just put forward is not written so, but rather thus: Whoever breaks one of these least commandments and so teaches shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does and so teaches shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. And he goes on at once to say: For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:19-20). For elsewhere he points out and reproves the Pharisees, because they say and do not do.

These, then, he meant here too, when he said: Whoever breaks and so teaches, that is, teaches by words what he breaks by deeds. Above these he commanded our righteousness to abound, so that we may do and so teach. And yet, not even on account of those Pharisees, to whom you compare us not through good judgment but through ill will, did the Lord command that the chair of Moses be abandoned, in which indeed he was prefiguring his own; for though he said that they sit in the chair of Moses and say but do not do, he nevertheless admonishes the people to do what they say and not to do what they do (See Matt 23:2-3), lest the holiness of the chair be abandoned, and the unity of the flock be divided on account of bad shepherds.

62. 139. PETILIAN SAID: And again: Every sin that a man commits is outside the body (1 Cor 6:18); but whoever sins against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come (Matt 12:31-32).

62. 140. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: This too is not written so, and see how much it has deceived you. The Apostle, writing to the Corinthians, says: Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but whoever fornicates sins against his own body (1 Cor 6:18). But this is one thing, and that which the Lord said in the Gospel is another: Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men; but whoever sins against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come (Matt 12:31-32). But you began a sentence from the Apostle, and ended it as though it were one from the Gospel; which I do not believe you did by fraud, but by error.

For neither bears on the matter, and I do not at all see why you said these things, or in what way you said them; unless perhaps, because you had said above that those who break one of the commandments are condemned by the Lord, you considered how many you have who break, not one, but many commandments; and lest this be charged against you, you wished in passing to introduce a distinction among sins: that it is one thing to break some commandment, for which easy pardon may be obtained, and another to sin against the Holy Spirit, which will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

And so, fearing the contagion of sins, you did not want to keep silent about this; and again, fearing the depth of a question beyond your powers, you wished to touch on it hurriedly, in such trepidation that, as those who hurry in some agitation often dress or shoe themselves wrong way round, you did not care to attend either to what bears on what, or where and how it is written. But what that sin is which will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come, you so little understand that, although you believe us to be in it, you nevertheless promise us its remission through your baptism. How can this be, if it is such a sin that it is not forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come?

63. 141. PETILIAN SAID: By what means do you fulfill the divine commandments? The Lord Christ says: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:3). By the malice of your persecuting fury you breathe out riches.

63. 142. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Say these things rather to your own Circumcellions.

64. 143. PETILIAN SAID: Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth (Matt 5:4). You, then, being unmeek, have lost earth and heaven alike.

64. 144. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Again and again hear the Lord saying: You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the whole earth (Acts 1:8). Why then have they not lost earth and heaven, who, that they may not communicate with the whole earth, despise the words of him who sits in heaven? For about your meekness, let not your words, but the clubs of the Circumcellions be questioned. You will say: What does that have to do with us? As if we said these things for any reason but that you might give this answer. For your schism has to do with you precisely because you refuse to have another's sin have anything to do with you: yet you separated yourselves from us for no other reason than that you charge us with another's crime.

65. 145. PETILIAN SAID: Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted (Matt 5:5). You, our executioners, make others mourn; you do not mourn.

65. 146. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Consider for a moment to how many, and how great a mourning, the Praises to God of your armed men have brought. Say again: What does that have to do with us? And I will say again, and you say what you say: What does it have to do with us? What does it have to do with the whole world? What does it have to do with those who praise the name of the Lord from the rising of the sun to its setting (See Ps 113:3 (112:3))? What does it have to do with the whole earth that sings a new song (See Ps 96:1 (95:1))? What does it have to do with the seed of Abraham, in which all the nations are blessed (See Gen 22:18)? Therefore the sacrilege of the schism has to do with you precisely because the evil deeds of your own people have nothing to do with you, and from this you understand that the deeds of those on whose account you separated yourselves from there have nothing to do with the whole world either, even if you could prove them.

66. 147. PETILIAN SAID: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied (Matt 5:6). For you this is righteousness, to thirst for our blood.

66. 148. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: What shall I say to you, man, except that you are a slanderer? Indeed the unity of Christ hungers and thirsts for you: would that it might swallow you up; you would not be heretics.

67. 149. PETILIAN SAID: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy (Matt 5:7). When could I call you merciful, since you inflict punishments on the righteous? Or your most wicked communion, since you defile souls?

67. 150. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Neither do you prove yourselves righteous, nor that we inflict punishments even on the unrighteous. And yet, just as deceitful flattery is for the most part cruel, so just rebuke is always merciful. For from this comes that which you do not understand: The righteous man shall correct me in mercy, and shall reprove me. For when he had said this about the harshness of merciful rebuke, he at once added about the gentleness of harmful flattery, and said: But let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head (Ps 141:5 (140:5)). You, then, attend to where you are called, and from where you are called back. For how do you know with what disposition toward you he is whom you think savage?

But however he may be, each one bears his own burden (See Gal 6:5), both among us and among you; but cast off the burden of schism, which you all bear, so that you may bear your good burdens in unity; and those who bear bad ones, if you can, mercifully correct; if you cannot, peacefully bear with them.

68. 151. PETILIAN SAID: Blessed are those who are pure in heart, for they shall see God (Matt 5:8). When will you see God, you who carry the blindness of an unclean malice of heart?

68. 152. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Why do you say this? Is it perhaps that we charge against all the nations things said by men that we do not know, and refuse to understand the plain things that God has foretold about all the nations? This is great blindness of heart; and if you do not even recognize it in yourselves, this is greater blindness of heart.

68. 153. PETILIAN SAID: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God (Matt 5:9). You feign peace by crime, and seek unity by war.

68. 154. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: We do not feign peace by crime: rather, we preach the peace that comes from the Gospel; and if you have peace with that Gospel, you will have it with us too. The Lord, rising again and offering himself to the disciples not only to be seen with their eyes but even to be touched with their hands, began from this: Peace be with you (Luke 24:36), he said. And how that peace was to be kept, he disclosed in the words that follow. For there he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them: Thus it is written, and thus it was fitting that Christ should suffer and rise on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:45-47). Have peace with these words, and you will not disagree with us.

For if we seek unity by war, no war could be praised more splendidly than ours; since it is written: You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31; Rom 13:9). And again it is written: No one ever hated his own flesh (See Lev 19:19; Eph 5:29). And yet the flesh desires against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh (Gal 5:17). But if no one hates his own flesh, and yet desires against his own flesh, see, unity is sought by war, so that the body may be chastised and brought into subjection (See 1 Cor 9:27). And what the spirit does against the flesh, making war not out of hatred but out of love, this the spiritual do against the carnal, so that what they do toward themselves they may do toward them also, because they love their neighbors as themselves (See Mark 12:31); but the war of the spiritual is that rebuke in love, and their sword is the word of God. To such a war the apostolic trumpet rouses, sounding with great force: Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season; reprove, exhort, rebuke, in all patience and teaching (2 Tim 4:2). See, we act not with the sword, but with the word.

But you neither answer with truths, nor accuse with anything but falsehoods; you do not correct your own, you charge another's. Christ gives true witness about the whole earth; you give false witness against Christ, against the whole earth. But if we believed you rather than Christ, we would be peacemakers: because we believe Christ rather than you, we feign peace by crime. And while you say and do these things, you dare besides to recall: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God (Matt 5:9).

69. 155. PETILIAN SAID: Since the apostle Paul says: I beg you, brothers, I a prisoner in the Lord, that you walk worthily of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and meekness, with patience bearing with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace (Eph 4:1-3).

69. 156. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: If you not only said these things but also heard them, you would bear even known evils for the sake of peace, and would not feign unknown ones for the sake of dissension; or rather, since you later learned for the sake of the unity of Donatus to bear the most notorious and infamous evils of Optatus. What madness is this? Known men are tolerated, lest the divided one be divided again; and unknown men are defamed, lest one remain in that very integrity.

70. 157. PETILIAN SAID: The prophet says to you: Peace, peace, and where is peace? (Jer 8:11).

70. 158. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: It is you who say this to us, not the prophet. To you, then, we reply: If you ask where peace is, open your eyes, and see of whom it was said: Putting away wars to the ends of the earth (Ps 46:9 (45:10)). If you ask where peace is, open your eyes to that city which cannot be hidden, set upon a mountain (See Matt 5:14); open your eyes also to the mountain itself, and let Daniel show it to you growing from a small stone, and filling the whole earth (See Dan 2:34-35). But when the prophet says to you: Peace, peace, and where is peace? (Jer 8:11), what will you show? The party of Donatus, unknown to the countless nations to whom Christ is known? It is not the one that cannot be hidden: and why, except that it is not set upon that mountain? For he himself is our peace, who made the two one (Eph 2:14); not Donatus, who made two out of one.

71. 159. PETILIAN SAID: Blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:10). You are not blessed, but you make the martyrs blessed, with whose souls indeed the heavens are filled, and at the memory of whose bodies the earth has blossomed. You, therefore, do not give us worship, but you make those whom we worship.

71. 160. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Clearly, if it had not been said: Blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness (Matt 5:10); but had been said: Blessed are those who hurl themselves down, then your martyrs would fill heaven. To be sure, we see many flowers of the earth from their bodies, but, as the saying goes, the flower is ash.

72. 161. PETILIAN SAID: Since, then, by falsifying the commandments you are not blessed, Christ the Lord condemns you by the divine pronouncements: But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven before men; for you do not enter, and you do not allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte; and when he has been made, you make him a child of hell twice as much as yourselves. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith.

These things you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful to men, but within are full of dead men's bones and all filth: so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity (Matt 23:13-15, 23-24, 27-28).

72. 162. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Tell me whether you have said anything that could not likewise be said in turn against you by a slanderous and abusive mouth. But from the things I have said above, anyone who wishes will find that these things can be said against you not through empty insults, but through true testimonies.

Nevertheless, since the occasion arises, this must not be passed over: surely the ancient people of God had circumcision in place of baptism. I ask, then, if those Pharisees, against whom such things are said, had made a proselyte, who, if he imitated them, would, as it is said, have been a child of hell twice as much as they; whether, if he were corrected and wished to imitate Simeon, Zechariah, Nathanael, he would be judged as needing to be circumcised again by them.

But if it is absurd to say so, although in manner and in empty-talking speech you compare us to such people, why do you baptize after us? But if you are such people, how much more truly and rightly do we not baptize after you; just as those whom I named ought not to be circumcised after the worst Pharisees? Then, since such men sat in the chair of Moses, to which the Lord preserved honor (See Matt 23:2-3); why, on account of those to whom you compare them, whether justly or unjustly, do you blaspheme the apostolic chair?

73. 163. PETILIAN SAID: But these things do not frighten us Christians. For we have beforehand from Christ the Lord a command about the evil you are going to do: I send you, he says, as sheep in the midst of wolves (Matt 10:16). You fulfill the rage of wolves, you who lay or prepare ambushes for the churches in no other way than wolves gaping at the sheepfolds, who, with ruin and onslaught ever in their breath, with jaws steeped in blood, pant out their breath of fury.

73. 164. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: I would like to say this sentence against you, but I would not like to say it in these words: they are too foolish, or rather insane. But what was needed was that you should show, by some sure proofs and not by most empty curses, that we are wolves and you are sheep. For when I too have said: We are the sheep, but you are the wolves; do you therefore think it makes any difference, because you say those things in swollen words? But attend to how I prove what I say. Surely the Lord, as you know whether you will or not, says in the Gospel: My sheep hear my voice, and follow me (John 10:27).

There are many voices of the Lord about various matters: but, for example, if someone doubted whether the same Lord rose in the body, and his words were read out, saying: Handle me, and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see me have (Luke 24:39); if, even after hearing these words, he would not consent to believe that his body had been raised up, he would surely not be reckoned among the sheep of the Lord, because he did not follow the voice he had heard; so now too, since there is a question between us where the Church is, when we read out, from that very passage of the Gospel where after the resurrection he offered his body to be handled even by the doubting, the words that follow, where he showed the future breadth of the Church, saying: Thus it is written, and thus it was fitting that Christ should suffer and rise on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:46-47); and you refuse to communicate with all the nations, in which these things have been fulfilled, how are you the sheep of this shepherd, whose voices you not only do not follow when you hear them, but even oppose?

And indeed that you are not sheep, we teach from this; but that you are wolves, hear from what we teach it. For now, since where the Church is appears from his own words, it is plain where the sheepfold of Christ is.

From this sheepfold, then, shown and set forth by the most certain words of the Lord, whoever, I do not say by false charges, but by what is plain, by uncertain charges of men, separate the sheep, and kill them when they have been snatched away and estranged from the life of unity and love, are they not themselves ravening wolves?

But they too praise and proclaim the Lord Christ. These, then, are they of whom he himself says: Clothed in sheep's skins, but within they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them (Matt 7:15-16). The sheep's skin is in the praises of Christ, the wolf's fruit in the slanderous teeth.

74. 165. PETILIAN SAID: O wretched traitors! Indeed it was fitting that Scripture be fulfilled thus; but in you I grieve at this, that you have deserved to fulfill the role of malice.

74. 166. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: I could rather say: O wretched traitors! if it pleased me, or rather if justice persuaded me, to charge all of you with the deeds of certain of your own. What, then, applies to all of you: O wretched heretics! the rest of your words I might now say; for it is written: There must be heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you (1 Cor 11:19). It was fitting, then, that Scripture be fulfilled thus; but in you I grieve at this, that you have deserved to fulfill the role of malice.

75. 167. PETILIAN SAID: But to us the Lord Christ has commanded, against your savagery, a simple patience and innocence. For what does he say? A new commandment I give you, that you love one another, as I have loved you; and: By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34-35).

75. 168. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Unless you brought these words, so far removed from your conduct, to the surface of your speech, how would you cover yourselves with the sheep's skin?

76. 169. PETILIAN SAID: The apostle Paul too, though he suffered immense persecutions from all the nations, endured graver ones from false brothers, as he himself testifies, often afflicted: In dangers from the nations, in dangers from my own people, in dangers from false brothers (2 Cor 11:26). He who again says: Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Cor 4:16). Since, then, you assail us as false brothers, we imitate the patience of our master Paul under your dangers.

76. 170. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Surely these are the false brothers about whom, in another place, the same apostle complains thus, while proclaiming the genuine sincerity of Timothy: I have no one, he says, of like mind, who is genuinely concerned for you; for all seek their own, not the things of Jesus Christ (Phil 2:20-21). He was certainly speaking of those who, at the time when he was writing that letter, were with him. For not all who were Christians anywhere sought their own, not the things of Jesus Christ.

About these, then, as I said, he groaned, whom he had with him at the time when he was writing this. For whom else does he touch on, when elsewhere he says: Fightings without, fears within (2 Cor 7:5); except those whom he feared the more vehemently, the more inwardly they were? If, then, you wished to imitate Paul, you would be within a bearer-with of false brothers, not without a slanderer of the innocent.

77. 171. PETILIAN SAID: For what kind of faith is in you, which has no love? As Paul himself says: If I speak with the tongues of men, and have the knowledge of angels, but have not love, I am like sounding brass or a clashing cymbal. Or if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I distribute all my goods to the poor, and hand over my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing (1 Cor 13:1-3).

77. 172. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: This is what I said a little before, that you want to cover yourself with the sheep's skin, so that, if it can be done, the sheep may feel you biting before it perceives you coming. Is not this the praise of love, which is wont to refute your slander by the clearest truth? Will these therefore not be our weapons, because you try to seize them first? Indeed these are living darts: from wherever they are thrown, they recognize whom they slay. If they are launched by us, they will lodge in you: if they are launched by you, they are turned back against you.

For with these apostolic words, which commend the eminence of love, we are accustomed to show you how it does not profit men, although there be in them either the sacraments or faith, where love is not; so that when you come to Catholic unity, you may understand what is conferred on you, and how great is what you had less of: for Christian love cannot be kept except in the unity of the Church; and thus you may see that without it you are nothing, even if you hold baptism and faith, and through it could even move mountains. But if this is also your view, let us not, in our own case, detest and blow away either the sacraments of God which we acknowledge, or faith itself; but let us hold love, without which, even with the sacraments and with faith, we are nothing. And we hold love if we embrace unity; and we embrace unity if we do not, by our own words, fabricate it in a part, but, by the words of Christ, recognize it in the whole.

78. 173. PETILIAN SAID: And again: Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous, does not act perversely, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, does not seek what is its own. But you seek what belongs to others. It is not provoked, it does not think evil, it does not rejoice over iniquity, but rejoices with the truth: it bears all things, endures all things: love never fails (1 Cor 13:4-8). This is to say briefly: Love does not persecute, does not inflame emperors against other souls, does not plunder what belongs to others, does not even kill the men it has despoiled.

78. 174. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: How often shall I have to say to you: these things, if you do not prove them, apply to no one; but if you do prove them, they do not apply to us, just as the things your own people commit daily do not apply to you—through the crimes of the frenzied, through the debaucheries of the drunken, through the blindness of those who hurl themselves down, through the tyranny of plunderers? Who would not see that what I cry out is true? But now, if there were love in you, it would rejoice with the truth. For how elegantly it is said, under the sheep's skin: Love bears all things, endures all things (1 Cor 13:7)! But when it comes to the test, the wolf's teeth cannot be hidden.

For when love—because of what was said: Bearing with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace (Eph 4:2-3)—would compel you, even if you knew of some evils within, not indeed to consent to them, but nevertheless, if you could not prevent them, to bear with them, lest on account of the wicked, who are to be separated by the final winnowing, you now break the bond of peace from the fellowship of the good;

shaken outside by the wind of fickleness, you charge the wheat with the crime of the chaff, and you assert that what you fabricate about the wicked holds, through contagion, even in the good. And though the Lord said: The field is this world, and the harvest is the end of the age (Matt 13:38-39); and when he had spoken of the grain and the weeds, said: Let both grow until the harvest (Matt 13:30); you labor with your words to make it believed that the grain has now failed throughout the whole field, and has remained in your scanty little part; while you would have Christ held a liar, but yourself truthful.

And indeed you speak against your own conscience; for no one truly, looking in any way at the Gospel, dares to say in his heart that, throughout so many nations in which with almost one voice Amen is answered, and Alleluia is sung (See Tob 13:22), there are no Christians. And yet, lest the party of Donatus, which does not communicate with the whole world, seem to be in error, if some angel from heaven, who could behold the whole world, were to tell you that outside your communion there are nowhere any innocent and good people, you would without doubt rejoice over the iniquity of the human race, and would boast that you had spoken the truth before you knew it. How then is there love in you, which does not rejoice over iniquity? But do not be deceived: there are throughout the field, that is, throughout the world, the Lord's grain growing until the end of the age. Christ said this: Christ is the truth (See John 14:6). Let there be love in you, and let it rejoice with the truth. Against the Gospel, even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel, let him be anathema (See Gal 1:8).

79. 175. PETILIAN SAID: Finally, what is the rationale for persecuting? I ask you, wretches; if perhaps you suppose that you sin by some authority of the law.

79. 176. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Whoever sins does not sin by the authority of the law, but against the authority of the law. But since you ask what the rationale for persecuting is, I ask you in turn whose voice it is in the Psalm that says: Him who secretly slandered his neighbor, this man I persecuted (Ps 101:5 (100:5)). Seek, therefore, either the cause or the manner of persecution, and do not, with such ignorance, reproach the persecutors of the wicked in general.

80. 177. PETILIAN SAID: But I, on the contrary, reply: that Jesus Christ persecuted no one; and when certain sects displeased the apostles, who suggested it to him (for he had come to make faith such that he did not compel men, but rather invited them), those apostles say, Many lay on hands in your name, and are not with us. Jesus said: Let them be; if they are not against you, they are for you (Luke 9:49-50).

80. 178. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Why do you not say that you will bring forward many things more freely from your own invention, which are not found in the Scriptures? For if you wish to bring forward testimonies from the holy Scriptures, will you bring forward what you have not found there? But how many your falsehoods are is in your own power. For where is it written what you have set down, or when was that ever suggested to the Lord, or that answer given by the Lord? Many lay on hands in your name, and are not with us, no disciple ever said to the Son of God; hence neither could that be answered by him: Let them be; if they are not against you, they are for you. But there is something similar, which we really do read in the Gospel, suggested to the Lord about a certain man who was casting out demons in his name, and did not follow him with the disciples, where the Lord says: Do not forbid him: he who is not against you is for you (Luke 9:50). But this has nothing at all to do with demonstrating sects which the Lord might seem to have spared. But if some resemblance of the saying deceived you, it is not a lie, it is human error.

But if you wished to cast clouds of falsehood over those ignorant of the holy Scriptures, may you be pricked and confounded and corrected. There is, nevertheless, something for us to treat about this very man about whom it was suggested to the Lord. For just as then, apart from the communion of the disciples, the holiness of the name of Christ was nonetheless of great avail; so apart from the communion of the Church the holiness of the sacrament is of avail. For baptism is consecrated only in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

But who would be so utterly insane as to say that even apart from the communion of the Church the name of the Son is of avail, but that of the Father and of the Holy Spirit is not? Or that it is of avail in healing a man, but not of avail in consecrating baptism? But plainly, apart from the communion of the Church and the most holy bond of unity and the most surpassing gift of love, neither the one from whom a demon is cast out, nor the one who is baptized, attains eternal life; just as neither do those who through the communion of the sacraments are seen within, and through the iniquity of their conduct are understood to be without. But that Christ even bodily persecuted those whom he drove from the temple by scourging, we have already said above.

81. 179. PETILIAN SAID: But the holy apostle Paul says this: In whatever way, he says, Christ is proclaimed (Phil 1:18).

81. 180. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: You speak against yourself, but nevertheless, because you speak for the truth, if you love it, what you speak becomes for you. For I ask you, about whom did the apostle Paul say this? Let us recall it briefly, if you please. Some, he says, proclaim Christ out of envy and rivalry, but some out of good will; some out of love, knowing that I am set for the defense of the Gospel; but some proclaim Christ even out of contentiousness, not purely, supposing to stir up affliction for my chains. What then? As long as Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether by pretext or in truth, in this I rejoice, and I will rejoice (Phil 1:15-18). We see that these men proclaimed something indeed holy and pure and true, yet not purely, but out of envy and rivalry, without love, without purity.

Surely a little before you seemed to be speaking the praises of love against us from the Apostle's testimony, that where love is not, whatever there may be profits nothing: see, in these men love is not, and yet there was the preaching of Christ, about which the Apostle says he rejoices. For he rejoices not in their evil, but in the good of the name of Christ. For in him was love, which does not rejoice over iniquity, but rejoices with the truth (1 Cor 13:6). Envy, moreover, which was in them, is a diabolical evil; for by this the devil both fell and cast down. These men, then, so wicked, whom the Apostle thus reproves, in whom was so great a good in which the Apostle rejoices, where were they? Within, or without?

Choose whichever you wish. If within, see, Paul knew them, and yet they did not pollute him; so neither would those, about whom you say I know not what, whether you speak truths or fabricate falsehoods, pollute you in the unity of the whole earth. Why then did you separate yourselves? Why did you destroy by the sacrilege of a wicked schism?

But if they were without, see, even in those who are without, and who certainly cannot belong to eternal life, because they have not love and do not hold unity, there is nonetheless the holiness of the name of Christ, whose preaching the Apostle, on account of the holiness of the name itself, although he detests those men, confirms by rejoicing.

Rightly, then, we do no injury to the name itself, when those who were without come to us; but we correct them, and honor that name. See, therefore, how wickedly, in those whose deeds you reprove as it seems, you blow away even the sacrament of the name of Christ, which in them is holy. And you indeed, as your words indicate, judge that those men whom the Apostle mentioned were without, outside the Church. So, while you fear to suffer persecution from the Catholics, about which you stir up resentment against us by your speaking, you have confirmed the name of Christ in heretics, to which you do injury by rebaptizing.

82. 181. PETILIAN SAID: If, then, so great a power of faith has been opposed by no one, by what rationale do you persecute, so as to compel men to be defiled?

82. 182. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: We do not persecute you, except as truth persecutes falsehood; nor does it apply to us if someone has persecuted you otherwise, just as neither does it apply to you whatever your own people do likewise; nor do we compel you to be defiled, but we persuade you to be healed.

83. 183. PETILIAN SAID: But if it were permitted to compel anyone by law even to good things, you yourselves, wretches, ought to have been compelled by us to the purest faith. But far be it, far be it from our conscience, that we should drive anyone to our faith.

83. 184. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: No one indeed is to be compelled to faith against his will, but through the severity, indeed even through the mercy of God, faithlessness is wont to be chastised by the scourges of tribulations. Is it that, because the best conduct is chosen by freedom of the will, therefore the worst conduct is not punished by the integrity of the law? And yet the avenging discipline of evil living is out of order, except when the preceding teaching of good living is despised.

If, then, any laws have been established against you, you are not compelled by them to do good, but you are prevented from doing evil. For no one can do good unless he has chosen, unless he has loved what is in the free will; but the fear of punishments, even if it does not yet have the delight of a good conscience, at least restrains evil desire within the enclosure of thought. Yet those who established laws against you, by which your boldness may be checked, are they not those of whom the Apostle says that they do not bear the sword without cause; for they are ministers of God, avengers to execute wrath on him who does evil (See Rom 13:4)?

The whole question, then, is whether you are not doing evil, you against whom the whole earth charges the sacrilege of so great a schism: and, neglecting the discussion of this question, you speak superfluously; and though you live as robbers, you boast that you die as martyrs. And because you dread either the laws themselves, or the resentment, or you are unequal to resisting—I do not say so many men, but so many Catholic nations—you even boast of your meekness, that you compel no one to your party. In this way even the kite, when frightened it could not seize the chicks, might call itself a dove. For where have you had the power, and not done it? From which you show how much more you would do, if you could.

When Julian, envying the peace of Christ, gave back to you the basilicas of unity, what slaughters were made by you, when along with you the very demons exulted at their temples thrown open, who could suffice to recount? In the Firmian war, what Rogatus the Moor suffered from you, let Caesarean Mauretania itself be questioned. In the time of Gildo, since one of your colleagues was his most intimate friend, let the Maximianists consider what they felt. For Felician himself, who is now with you, if it were permitted to call him to take an oath whether Optatus compelled him, not unwilling, to return to your communion, would not dare to move his lips, especially if the people of Musti were looking on his face, with whom as witnesses those things were then done. But these men, as I said, let them consider what they suffered from those with whom they had done such things to Rogatus.

The Catholic Church itself, made firm with Catholic princes ruling by land and sea, was savagely and hostilely assailed by Optatus with armed mobs. This matter then for the first time forced that law about ten pounds of gold to be invoked against you before the vicar Seranus—which none of you has yet paid, and you charge us with cruelty! But what could be milder than that your so great crimes should be punished by the coercion of fines? And who could relate all the things that each of you, where he could, by no friendship of judges or of any powers, commits by his own domination in your places? Which of us, among our own people, has not either learned of some such thing from his predecessors, or experienced it himself? Is it not the case that at Hippo, where I am, there are those who remember that your Faustinus, in the time of his rule, since there was a small number of Catholics there, commanded that no one should bake them bread, so that the baker tenant of a certain deacon of ours threw away his landlord's bread unbaked, and, though the man was condemned by no law of exile, denied him fellowship not only in the Roman city, but even in his own homeland, and not only in his own homeland, but even in his own house?

What of recently, which I still grieve over: did not your Crispinus of Calama, when he had bought an estate, and that on lease, not hesitate, on the estate of Catholic emperors, by whose laws you were ordered not even to be in the cities, in one onslaught of terror to submerge nearly eighty souls, muttering with pitiable groaning, by rebaptizing them? But by what, except such deeds, did you force even those very laws of which you complain to be enacted—far indeed below the desert of your crime, but nevertheless such as they are? Or would we not, by the violent incursions of your Circumcellions, who under your rule serve in frenzied bands, be driven from the fields on every side, unless we held you as hostages in the cities—you who in any case are unwilling to bear, if not out of fear, then out of shame, the very public face and the reproach of honorable men? Do not, then, say: Far be it, far be it from our conscience, that we should drive anyone to our faith. For you do it where you can; and where you do not do it, you cannot, whether out of fear of the laws, or of resentment, or because of the multitude of those resisting.

84. 185. PETILIAN SAID: For the Lord Christ says: No one comes to me, unless the Father has drawn him (John 6:44). But why do you not permit each one to follow his own free choice, since the Lord God himself gave free choice to men; yet showing the way of righteousness, lest anyone perhaps perish in ignorance? For he said: I have set before you good and evil, I have set before you fire and water; choose what you will (Sir 15:16-17). And by this free choice, wretches, you have chosen for yourselves not water, but rather fire. But, he says, choose the good, that you may live (Deut 30:19). You who refuse to choose the good have condemned yourselves to be unwilling to live.

84. 186. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: If I propose to you the question, how God the Father draws to the Son men whom he has left in free choice, perhaps you would resolve it with difficulty. For how does he draw, if he leaves it so that each may choose what he wills? And yet both are true: but few are able to penetrate this by understanding. As, then, it can come about that those whom he has left in free choice the Father nonetheless draws to the Son; so it can come about that the things which are admonished by the coercions of laws do not take away free choice.

For whatever hard and troublesome thing a man suffers, he is admonished to consider why he suffers it; so that, if he perceives that he suffers for the sake of righteousness, he may choose that very good of enduring such things for the sake of righteousness; but if he sees that it is for iniquity that he suffers, considering that he labors and is tormented most fruitlessly, he may change his will for the better, and at the same time be rid both of fruitless trouble and of the iniquity itself, which would surely have done him much graver and more ruinous harm.

And you, when kings establish something against you, believe that you are being admonished to consider why you suffer these things; if for the sake of righteousness, then indeed they are your persecutors; but you are blessed, who having suffered persecution for the sake of righteousness, shall possess the kingdom of heaven (See Matt 5:10; 1 Pet 2:20);

but if for the iniquity of your schism, what are they but your correctors; while you, like the rest who are guilty of various crimes and pay the penalties by the laws, are surely unhappy both in this age and in the age to come? No one, then, takes free choice from you; but attend diligently to what you would rather choose: whether, corrected, to live in peace, or, persevering in malice, to suffer true torments under the name of a false martyrdom.

But he addresses you as though you were suffering things unworthy, for the sake of righteousness. As though you were suffering anything worthy of your iniquity, when you do so many unworthy things, and reign in such great impunity; so frenzied that by the Praises of God you terrify more than a war trumpet; so slanderous that you charge even the voluntary self-destructions of your own people to our persecutions.

84. 187. He also says, as a most kindly teacher: You who refuse to choose the good have condemned yourselves to be unwilling to live. Yes indeed—if we believed your accusations, we would be living well; because we believe the promises of God, we condemn ourselves to be unwilling to live. You remember well, I suppose, what the apostles said to the Jews, when they were forbidden to preach Christ: this, then, we too say, that you may answer us whether we ought to obey God rather than men (See Acts 5:29).

Traitors, incense-burners, persecutors—these are the words of men against men. Christ has remained in the love of Donatus alone—these are the words of men exalting the glory of a man under the name of Christ, so that the glory of Christ himself may be lessened. For it is written: In a broad nation is the glory of a king; but in the diminishing of the people is the ruin of the prince (Prov 14:28); these, then, are the words of men.

But those words in the Gospel: That Christ should suffer and rise on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:46-47); these are the words of Christ, commending the glory which he received from the Father in the breadth of his kingdom. Having heard both, we rather choose this communion of the Church, and we prefer the words of Christ to the words of men. I ask: who is there who would say that we have chosen evil, except one who says that Christ taught evil?

85. 188. PETILIAN SAID: Did God, then, command slaughter to be inflicted even on schismatics? And if he commanded it at all, you ought to be killed by some Scythians and barbarians, but not by Christians.

85. 189. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Let your Circumcellions be at rest, and do not frighten us with barbarians. But whether we are schismatics or you, let neither me nor you, but Christ be questioned, that he may point out his Church. Read, then, the Gospel; and it answers you: In Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the whole earth (Acts 1:8). Whoever, then, is not found in the Church, let him no longer be questioned, but either, corrected, let him be converted, or, rebuked, let him not complain.

86. 190. PETILIAN SAID: For the Lord God has never delighted in human blood, since he willed that Cain, the slayer of his brother, should remain in life as his own executioner.

86. 191. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: If God did not will death to be inflicted on the slayer of his brother, but that he be left as the executioner of his own life; see whether perhaps this is the reason that, since the heart of the king is in the hand of God (See Prov 21:1), whence he himself established many laws to admonish and rebuke you, yet no royal law has commanded you to be killed; perhaps for this reason, that whoever of you persist in the stubborn breath of sacrilegious fury may, with the punishment of Cain the murderer, be tormented by a life that is their own executioner.

For we read that many were mercifully slain by Moses, the servant of God; for in this, that he so entreated the Lord on behalf of their wicked sacrilege as to say: Lord, if you forgive them their sin, forgive it; but if not, blot me out of your book (Exod 32:31-32), his ineffable love and mercy sufficiently appear. Was he then suddenly made cruel, when, coming down from the mountain, he commanded so many thousands to be killed? Consider, therefore, whether perhaps it is by a greater wrath of God that, through so many laws enacted against you, you have been commanded by no emperor to be killed.

Or do you think you are not to be compared to those fratricides? Hear the Lord saying through the prophet: From the rising of the sun to its setting my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name, and a pure offering. Great is my name among the nations, says the Lord almighty (Mal 1:11). You show, by your slanders, that you envy this fraternal sacrifice upon which God looks; and whenever you hear that from the rising of the sun to its setting the name of the Lord is praised (See Ps 113:3 (112:3))—which is the living sacrifice of which it was said: Offer to God a sacrifice of praise (Ps 50:14 (49:14))—your face falls as that of the murderer's. But because you cannot slay the whole world, you are held by the very hatred of the matter, since John says: He who hates his brother is a murderer (1 John 3:15). And would that an innocent brother might rather fall to be slaughtered by the weapons of your Circumcellions than to be rebaptized by your tongue!

87. 192. PETILIAN SAID: We admonish you, then, if you will hear it willingly, and if you do not receive it willingly, we warn you; because the Lord Christ established for Christians a form not of killing, but of dying. For if he loved his enemies thus, he would not have willed to be killed for us.

87. 193. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Would that your martyrs followed his form; they would not hurl themselves down; which he, at the devil's suggestion, did not do (See Matt 4:6-7). But you, when you persecute even our deceased elders with false witness, where did you receive this form? That you try to stain us with the crimes of unknown men, while you refuse to let the most notorious misdeeds of your own people count against you, where did you receive this form?

But we are far too proud if we grow angry on our own account, when we see you giving false witness against the Lord himself; since he both promised and exhibited his Church throughout all the nations (See Luke 24:47); and you contradict it. This form you did not receive even from the very Jews who were persecutors: for they persecuted the flesh of him who walked on earth; you, the Gospel of him who sits in heaven. Which Gospel endured the flames of raging kings more mildly than it endures your tongues: for while they were burning it, unity remained; while you speak, it could not remain. Those who desired the words of the Lord to be abolished by burning did not believe that, once read, they could be despised. They, then, would not have exercised their flames against the Gospel, if you had been permitted to use your tongues against the Gospel before them.

In that persecution the Gospel of Christ was sought by some who raged, betrayed by some who feared, burned by some who tore it out, hidden by some who loved it; by none who contradicted it was it assailed; you have reserved for yourselves the more wicked parts of persecution, now that the persecution of the nations is past. Those who persecuted the name of Christ did not believe in Christ; those who are honored for the name of Christ contradict Christ.

88. 194. PETILIAN SAID: See here for you a most complete proof, that it is not lawful for a Christian to be engaged in the destruction of another. The beginning of this discipline was established for Peter, as it is written: Peter struck the ear of the servant of the chief of the Jews, and cut it off. And Jesus said to him: Peter, put back your sword into its sheath. For whoever uses the sword shall die by the sword (Matt 26:51-52).

88. 195. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Why, then, do you not restrain the arms of the Circumcellions with such a saying? Or do you think you are speaking apart from the Gospel, if you say: Whoever uses a club shall die by a club? Pardon us, then, because our elders could not restrain even those by whom you complain Marculus was hurled down: for it is not written in the Gospel: Whoever hurls someone down shall die by being hurled down. And would that, as those things are either false or past, so the clubs of these men might cease.

Although perhaps you are angry that we withdraw the armament from your legions, if not by laws, at least by words, because we say that they rage with clubs alone. For that was their old soldiery, but now they have advanced too far. For amid wine-soaked feasts, and with women who have no husbands, they have learned, with free license to accompany, to roam, to jest, to drink, to spend the night, not only to turn clubs, but even to brandish iron and to whirl slings.

But why should I not say to them (with what disposition I say it, and with what they receive it, God knows): Madmen, the sword of Peter, although still drawn by a carnal motion of the soul, was nevertheless drawn for the body of Christ against the body of the persecutor; but your arms are divided against Christ: his body, of which he is the head, that is, his Church (See Col 1:18), is throughout all the nations. He himself said this, and ascended into heaven (See Acts 1:8-9), where the fury of the Jews could not follow him: and your fury assails his members in the body which, ascending, he commended.

For these members, against you, and resisting you, rage whoever in the Catholic communion, still of small faith, are of that disposition in which Peter then was, when he drew the sword for the name of Christ. But there is a great difference between your persecution and theirs. You are like the servant of the priest of the Jews; because, serving your princes, you arm yourselves against the Catholic Church, that is, against the body of Christ: but these men are such as Peter then was, who fight even bodily for the body of Christ, that is, for the Church. But if it is said to them that they should be at rest, as it was then said to Peter; how much more must it be said to you, that, laying aside your heretical fury, you may belong to those members for which they so contend. But, wounded by such men, you hate even us, and, as though you had lost your right ears, you do not hear Christ sitting at the right hand of the Father.

But to whom shall I speak, or when shall I speak to them, for whom I cannot find an hour, since they belch wine even in the morning, whether already drunk or still drinking? Indeed they even threaten, not only they themselves, but about them their own bishops too, ready to deny that what they have done has anything to do with them. May the Lord grant us the song of ascents, by which we may say: With those who hated peace I was peaceable; when I spoke to them, they warred against me without cause (Ps 120:6-7 (119:6-7)). For this is said by the body of Christ, which throughout the whole earth, by some here, by others elsewhere, and by all manner of heretics wherever they are, is assailed.

89. 196. PETILIAN SAID: Therefore, I say, he established that death is to be undergone for the faith, rather than to be inflicted on anyone for the sake of communion. For Christianity profits by deaths. For no one most faithful would live, if death were feared by the faithful. For the Lord Christ says: If a grain of wheat falling into the earth does not die, it remains alone; but if it dies, it will bear much fruit (John 12:24-25).

89. 197. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: I would like to know who first, of your party, hurled himself down. For that grain was indeed very fertile, from which so great a crop of the corpses of those who hurled themselves down sprang up. To be sure, since you remember the words of the Lord, that he said he was a grain about to die and to bear much fruit; why do you envy that very fruit, because it has sprung up most abundantly throughout the whole world; and charge it with the crimes of weeds or chaff, whether what you have heard or what you have fabricated?

90. 198. PETILIAN SAID: But you scatter thorns and weeds, not seed, with which it is fitting that you be burned up at the final judgment. We do not curse; but every thorny conscience is so held by the sentence of God.

90. 199. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: At least by the mention of the weeds the wheat too would come to your mind; because both were commanded to grow throughout the field until the harvest (See Matt 13:30); but you fix the eye of malevolence sharply on the weeds, and, against the sentence of Christ, contend that these alone have grown throughout the whole earth, Africa excepted.

91. 200. PETILIAN SAID: Where is that which the Lord Christ says: If you receive a slap, prepare the other cheek as well (Matt 5:39)? Where is that which he who opened the eyes of the blind man with his most holy spittle suffered—spittle in the face? Where is that which the apostle Paul says: If anyone strikes you in the face? Where is that which he says again: In stripes beyond measure, in deaths often, in prisons more abundantly (2 Cor 11:20-23)? He recounts what he endured, not what he did. It was enough for the Christian faith that these things be done to it by the Jews: why, wretches, do you perpetrate these things?

91. 201. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Do you, then, when you have received a slap, offer the other cheek? It was not this reputation that your frenzied bands won for you, roaming everywhere throughout all Africa with dreadful disgrace. Would that men might bargain with you, that you might at least, according to the old Law, demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth (See Deut 19:21), and not raise clubs for words you have heard.

92. 202. PETILIAN SAID: But what have you to do with the kings of this world, whom Christianity has never found anything but hostile? To teach this briefly, a king persecuted the Maccabee brothers (See 2 Macc 7). A king too, being himself sacrilegious, consigned three boys, in his ignorance, to religious flames (See Dan 3). A king sought the life of the boy Savior (See Matt 2:16). A king cast most righteous Daniel, as he supposed, to the bites of beasts (See Dan 6). And the most wicked judge of a king killed the Lord Christ himself (See Matt 27:26). Hence it is that the Apostle cries out: We speak wisdom among the perfect, a wisdom not of this age, nor of the rulers of this world who are passing away; but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, which was hidden, which God established before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew. For if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of majesty (1 Cor 2:6-8).

But let this be said of the former pagan kings. But you, since the emperors of this age desire to be Christians, do not permit them to be Christians, when by the deceit and fog of your lying you lead those very men, who believe with a good mind, straight to your iniquity, so that with the arms prepared for them against the enemies of the state they may rush upon Christians, and think that by your persuasions they do God a service, if they kill us whom you hate, since the Lord Christ says: The time will come, he says, when whoever kills you will think he does God a service (John 16:2).

It makes no difference, then, to you who teach evil, whether the kings of the earth desire to be pagans—which God forbid—or Christians; since you do not cease to arm those same men against the family of Christ. But you do not know, or rather you have not read, that greater than the crime of one who kills a man is the crime of the one who persuades it? Jezebel had roused her husband the king to the death of a just or poor man, yet with equal punishment both the man and his wife perished (See 1 Kgs 21).

For you do not drive kings otherwise than as a subtle womanly persuasion has often driven kings into guilt. For through her daughter the wife of Herod obtained and earned that the head of John be brought on a platter to the table (See Matt 14:8-9). The Jews so compelled Pontius Pilate that he fastened the Lord Christ to the cross, whose avenging blood they willed to remain upon themselves and their own forever (See Matt 27:24-26). So, then, you overwhelm with our blood those who sin. For even if the judge strikes, it is not so much that the judge struck us as that your slanders did.

For you invent for them the things that are evil, and conceal the things that are good. Let them at last read, even if too late, what they ought to have read long ago. For what does it say? And now, kings, understand; be instructed, you who judge the earth. Serve the Lord in fear, and exult in him with trembling; lay hold of discipline, lest at any time the Lord be angry, and you perish from the righteous way. When his anger blazes up against you, how quickly, blessed are all who trust in him (Ps 2:1-9).

You press the emperors, I say, with persuasions, as the Jews, whom we mentioned, pressed Pilate, although he himself cried out, washing his hands publicly: I am free from the blood of this just man (Ps 2:10-13); yet how can he who did it be clean of the crime? But, to be silent about ancient things, observe in your own examples how very many emperors and judges of yours perished by making persecution against us.

For the guilt of the incense implicated all of you who consented to Mensurius. Macarius perished, Ursacius perished, and all your Counts likewise perished by the vengeance of God. For Ursacius, laid low in a barbarian battle, the birds with savage talons and the greedy teeth of dogs tore apart with their bites. Is he not, at your impulse, the slayer, who, like king Ahab, whom we mentioned as persuaded by a woman, killed the just poor man (See Matt 27:24)?

So you do not cease to cut the throats of us too, the just and the poor (I would say poor as regards worldly resources, for the grace of God in us is not poor). For (even if you do not do it with your hand) you do cut a man's throat with the executioner tongue. For it is written: Death and life are in the hands of the tongue (Prov 18:21). All, therefore, who have been killed, you who are the persuader have killed. For the hand of the executioner grows hot only by your tongue, and that hard heat of the breast is kindled against another's blood by your words—just blood, the avenger of those who shed it.

92. 203. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: To this passage, so copiously amplified and arranged by you, where you speak invidiously against us about the kings of this world, if I were to reply as is due and fitting, I fear that you too would charge me with having wished to rouse the wrath of kings against you. Although, since in your manner you are carried by the force of this invective universally against all Catholics, you certainly do not pass me over. I will take care, nevertheless, to show, if I can, that you have done this rather by saying such things, than I by replying to them.

And first see how you yourself oppose yourself; surely you began this passage thus: But what have you to do with the kings of this world, whom Christianity has never found anything but hostile? By these words you certainly forbid us to approach the kings of this world.

And a little after you say: And those same men, that is, the kings, lest as though ignorant or unaware they should desire to persecute Christians, he admonished by these precepts, that they might not perish; which precepts, since they do not know them, would that we might teach them; or certainly you would without doubt show them to them, if you wished them to live.

How, then, do you want us to be teachers of kings? And our people indeed, if they have any friendship with Christian kings, if they use it well, do no wrong; but if any are puffed up by it, they sin much more lightly than you. For you, who reproach us thus, what had you to do with a pagan king—and, what is graver, an apostate and an enemy of the Christian name, Julian—from whom, when you begged that the basilicas be given back to you as though they were yours, you put this in his praise, that with him justice alone had a place?

By which words (for I believe you understand Latin) both the idolatry of Julian, and his apostasy, were called justice. The petition which your elders submitted is on record; the constitution which they obtained; the proceedings where they pleaded. Wake up, and attend: to an enemy of Christ, an apostate, an adversary of Christians, a slave of demons, with such words did he, he, that Pontius of yours, make supplication. Go now, and say to us: What have you to do with the kings of this world? so that, deaf, you may read to deaf peoples what you are unwilling to hear along with them: You see the straw in your brother's eye, you do not see the beam in your own eye (Matt 7:3).

92. 204. What, you say, have you to do with the kings of this world, whom Christianity has never found anything but hostile? When you had said this, you tried to enumerate which kings the righteous found to be enemies; and you did not consider that more could be enumerated whom they had as friends. Father Abraham, by a king divinely admonished not to touch his wife, was both treated most amicably and received a gift (See Gen 20). Isaac his son likewise experienced a most friendly king (See Gen 26). Jacob, received honorably in Egypt by a king, even blesses him (See Gen 47).

What shall I say of his son Joseph, who, after the affliction of prison, by which, as by fire, his chastity was tested like gold, was raised to great honors by him, and even swore by the health of Pharaoh (See Gen 41:41; 42:15), not as one lifted up by pride, but as one not ungrateful for the king's good will. A king's daughter adopted Moses (See Exod 2:10). David, driven by the iniquity of the king of Israel, fled to a foreigner (See 1 Sam 27). Elijah ran before the chariot of a most wicked king, not by his command, but in his own homage (See 1 Kgs 18:44-46). Elisha thought that, if the hostess woman wished anything to be granted her by the king through his intercession, it should even be offered to her unasked (See 2 Kgs 4:13).

But I will come now to those very times when the people of God was held captive, where, to put it more mildly, a strange forgetfulness crept upon you. For, wishing to prove that Christianity has never found kings anything but hostile, you mentioned the three boys and Daniel, what they suffered from persecuting kings, and you could be admonished not by neighboring matters, but plainly by these very ones, what sort the king himself proved to be after the miracle of the harmless flames, whether in praising and proclaiming God, or in honoring the boys themselves;

what sort of Daniel the king had, and with what gifts he adorned him, Daniel not refusing them, since he, rendering the honor due to the royal power, as sufficiently appears in his words, did not withhold the gift of God with which he was endowed, in indicating it, in interpreting the king's dream.

Hence, when the king was compelled, unwilling, to throw him into the lions' den by the holy man's enviers, slandering him with sacrilegious madness, although he did it in sorrow, he nevertheless presumed that, through the help of his Lord, he would be safe. And so, when Daniel had lived unharmed, the rage of the lions divinely restrained, with the king's own anxious and friendly voice sent ahead to him, he too answered with a blessing from the den: O king, live forever (Dan 6:21).

Why these friendships of kings with the saints, when your discourse was dwelling on that very subject, when you yourself were mentioning the examples of those servants of God in whom these things were done, did you either not see, or refuse to see, or—what I know not how you would excuse—keep silent about though you saw and knew them?

But if the zeal for building up falsehood did not hinder you, like the defender of a most evil cause, and turn you, unwilling or unaware, away from the light of truth; you would surely recall, without any difficulty, that some kings were good, some evil, and some friends of the saints, others enemies.

And we wonder that your Circumcellions hurl themselves down so. Who was running after you, I beg you? What Macarius, what soldier was pursuing? Surely none of us pushed you into the precipice of this falsehood.

Why, then, with closed eyes were you so headlong that, when you had said: But what have you to do with the kings of this world? you did not add, whom Christianity has often found hostile; but did not hesitate to say, whom Christianity has never found anything but hostile?

Did you yourself really not think, nor suppose that those who read your writings would think, that the examples of so many kings cry out against you: He does not know what he is saying?

92. 205. Or is it that, because those whom I mentioned were of ancient times, you therefore judge that they do not oppose you at all, because you did not say: Whom righteousness has never found anything but hostile; but said, whom Christianity has never found anything but hostile; wishing them perhaps to be understood as envying the righteous from that time at which they began to be called Christians? What, then, do the examples of ancient times mean to you, by which you wished to teach, more imprudently, what you imprudently said?

For did not the Maccabees, or the three boys, or Daniel, either do those things or endure them before Christ was born on earth? Then, the one whom I mentioned a little before, why did you make supplication to Julian, a true enemy of Christianity? Why did you ask the basilicas from him? Why did you say that with him justice alone had a place? If an enemy of Christianity hears these things, what are they from whom he hears them?

But Constantine, by no means an enemy of the Christian name, but plainly glorious in the Christian name, mindful of the hope he bore in Christ, judging most justly for its unity, deserved to be accepted by you—though you did not even appeal to him. Both were now in Christian times, but both were not Christians; and if both were enemies of Christianity, why did you appeal to one of them thus, and make supplication to the other thus? For when your elders petitioned, Constantine had granted an episcopal judgment, both at Rome and at Arles; the first of which you accused before him, from the second you appealed to him. But if, as is true, one of them had believed in Christ, the other had apostatized from Christ; why is the Christian who consults for unity despised, and the apostate who favors division praised?

Constantine commanded the basilicas to be taken from you, Julian to be restored. Which of these befits Christian peace, do you wish to know? The one was done by him who had believed in Christ, the other by him who had abandoned Christ.

Oh, how you would wish to say: It was wrongly done that supplication was made to Julian thus, but what does this have to do with us? And if you said this, even in these your very words the Catholic Church would win, to whose saints spread throughout the whole world whatever you say has much less to do, against whom you wish, as you wish.

But you cannot say that it was wrongly done that supplication was made to Julian thus; the authority of your own house stops your throat, presses your tongue; Pontius did it, Pontius made supplication, Pontius called the apostate most just; Pontius proclaimed that with the apostate justice alone had a place. That Pontius made supplication to him in these words Julian himself expressed by name, without ambiguity, in that same rescript of his. Your pleadings are extant: not uncertain rumor, but public records testify to these things. Or is it perhaps that, because the apostate granted something to your petition against the unity of Christ, you think it true that it was said that with him justice alone had a place? But because Christian emperors, against your will, establish what they judge to avail for the unity of Christ, are they called enemies of Christianity? So may all heretics lose their senses, and come to their senses, that they may not be heretics.

92. 206. And where, you will say, was that fulfilled which the Lord says: The time will come, when whoever kills you will think he does God a service (John 16:2)? For this could not be said of the pagans, who persecuted the Christians not for God's sake, but for the sake of their idols. Do you not see that, if this had been said of these emperors who rejoice in the Christian name, they would surely have commanded this above all, that you be killed?

Which they never at all commanded. But your people, resisting the laws in a hostile manner, pay the penalties they owe; and their voluntary deaths, while they think them invidious to us, they do not think ruinous to themselves. But if they judge that this was said by the Lord about kings who honor the name of Christ, let them ask what the Catholic Church suffered in the East, when Valens the Arian was ruling. See, I would have a way to understand that what the Lord says was fulfilled: The time will come, when whoever kills you will think he does God a service; lest heretics take it to themselves for the glory of their reputation, if Catholic emperors should command anything against their error.

Nevertheless we recall that that time was fulfilled after the Lord's ascension; holy Scripture, known to all, is the witness of this matter. The Jews thought they were doing God a service, when they killed the apostles. Among these who judged that they were rendering God a service was even our Saul, not yet ours; so that he counts this among his praises that are past and to be forgotten: A Hebrew, he says, of Hebrews, according to the law a Pharisee, according to zeal persecuting the Church (Phil 3:5-6).

See the one who thought he was doing God a service, when he was doing what he himself soon endured. For forty Jews had conspired to kill him, when he made this known to the tribune, so that, surrounded by armed soldiers, he might escape their ambushes (See Acts 23:12-13). But there was not yet one to say to him: What have you to do, not with kings, but with tribunes and royal arms? There was not one to say to him: Do you dare to seek protection through soldiers, when your Lord was led by them to the passion? These ravings did not yet exist, but against these future ones those examples were even then being prepared.

92. 207. Indeed you even dared to set forth terribly and to say: But, to be silent about ancient things, observe in your own examples how very many emperors and judges of yours perished by making persecution against us. When I had read this in your letter, I waited most intently for what you would say, and whom you would enumerate; when behold, as though by way of leaving them aside, you began to mention Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Geta, Decius, Valerian, Diocletian, Maximian. I admit there are more: but you have utterly forgotten against whom you are speaking. Were not all these pagans, and did they not universally persecute the Christian name for the sake of their idols? Wake up, then: for these were not of our communion; they persecuted the whole of unity itself, whether—as you suppose—the one from which we come, or—as Christ teaches—the one from which you have departed. But you had set out to show that our emperors and judges perished by making persecution against you.

Or do you not even require that we count these, because, leaving them aside, you mentioned them, saying: To leave aside Nero; and under that leaving-aside you ran through the rest? What need was there, then, that those who do not bear on the matter be mentioned? But what is that to me? I now leave these aside with you: let those at least now come forward whom you promised, the very many ones. Unless perhaps they are not found, for the reason that you said they perished.

92. 208. For now you go on, and name bishops, whom you are accustomed to accuse of the handing over of books. About whom we too are accustomed to reply: Either you do not prove it, and it pertains to no one; or you prove it, and it does not pertain to us. For each one bore his own burden, whether good or bad (See Gal 6:5): and good indeed we believe it; but whatever kind, still his own; just as your wicked ones bear neither yours, nor you theirs; but the common, most evil burden of you all is the schism. This we have already often said.

Show forth, then, not the names of bishops, but of our emperors and judges, who perished by persecuting you. For this you had set out, this you had promised, for this you had made us most intent. Hear, you say, Macarius perished, Ursacius perished, and all your Counts likewise perished by the vengeance of God. You mentioned only two, of whom neither was an emperor. Whom does this please, I ask you? Do you not displease even yourself?

You promise that you will mention very many of our emperors and judges, who perished by persecuting you, and, with the emperors passed over in silence, you name two, either judges or Counts. For what you add: And all your Counts likewise perished by the vengeance of God, does not bear on the matter. For in this way you could long ago have finished this passage, so as to name no one at all. Why, then, did you not mention our emperors, that is, those of our communion? Or did you fear to be accused as guilty of treason? Where is the Circumcellion courage?

Then what do you do about those whom you named, so many above, who could more rightly say to you: Why did you seek us out? For they helped your cause not at all, and yet they were named. Then what sort of man are you, who fear to name those whom you mention as having perished? At least you might name more of those very judges or Counts, whom you seem not to have feared. But you have come down to Macarius and Ursacius. Are these two, then, the very many? Or do you know only what we learned as boys? For if you should ask me what number two is, singular or plural; what should I answer it to be, but plural? But even for this I do not lack what to say. I take Macarius out from there: for you did not say how he perished. Or is it perhaps that whoever persecutes you, unless he is immortal in this land, when he has died, will be reckoned to have died on your account?

What if Constantine, who first established many things against your error, had not lived in so long a reign and with such long good fortune; and what if Julian, who gave you the basilicas, had not been so quickly snatched from life? When would you cease to chatter these things, since even now you are unwilling to be silent? Nor, however, do we say that Julian died quickly for the reason that he gave you the basilicas. For we could be equally copious in these matters, but we do not wish to be equally empty.

Accordingly, as I had begun to say, I separate Macarius from those two. For when you had set forth two, him and Ursacius, you repeated the name of Ursacius, to show us what death he deserved, and said: For Ursacius, laid low in a barbarian battle, the birds with savage talons and the greedy teeth of dogs tore apart with their bites. From which it sufficiently appears that, since you are accustomed to stir up greater resentment over Macarius, so that you call us Macarians, not Ursacians; you would by far most of all have spoken about him, if you had been able to say something of the kind about his death. From these two, therefore, where you put a plural number, with Macarius set apart, there remains Ursacius, a proper name of singular number. Where, then, is that so threatening and dreadful promise of so very many?

92. 209. Now how ridiculous this is, those who know how to speak in any way at all understand, I think: that when you had said: Macarius perished, Ursacius perished, and all your Counts likewise perished by the vengeance of God; as though we required you to prove it—when in reality neither hearer nor reader would require anything else—you at once attached a great proof, by which you might prove that all our Counts likewise perished by the vengeance of God. For Ursacius, you say, laid low in a barbarian battle, the birds with savage talons and the greedy teeth of dogs tore apart with their bites.

In this way another, likewise not knowing what he says, could say that all your bishops perished by the vengeance of God in prison: and when it is demanded of him whence he proves this, he could at once add, For Optatus, accused of being of the retinue of Gildo, was destroyed by such a kind of death. We are compelled to hear and discuss and refute these trifles: so greatly do we fear for the weak, lest, slower in understanding, they run quickly into your snares. But this Ursacius, if perhaps he lived well, and truly so died, will be consoled by the promise of God, who says: I will require the blood of your souls from the hands of all beasts (Gen 9:5).

92. 210. But as for the slander you bring against us, saying that the kings of this world are roused by us to anger against you, while we do not teach them the divine Scripture, but rather suggest our malice to them; I do not think they are so deaf to the very utterances of the holy books that you should not rather fear that they may know them. But, whether you will or not, they enter the Church, and even if we are silent, they lend an ear to the readers; and, to be silent about the rest, they take in most intently this very psalm which you mentioned.

For you said that we do not teach them, nor allow them, willing though they are, to know what is written: And now, kings, understand; be instructed, you who judge the earth; serve the Lord in fear, and exult in him with trembling; lay hold of discipline, lest at any time the Lord be angry (Ps 2:10-12), and so on. Believe that these things too are sung, and that they hear them; but surely they hear also that earlier passage in the same psalm, which you, unless I am mistaken, were unwilling to pass over for this reason, lest you be understood to have feared it. They hear, then, this too: The Lord said to me: You are my Son, today I have begotten you; ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession (Ps 2:7-8).

Hearing which, they surely wonder that there are some who contradict this inheritance of Christ, and try to reduce it to a scanty part of the earth; and wondering, they perhaps inquire, on account of what they hear in the words that follow: Serve the Lord in fear; in what way they can serve him, insofar as they are kings.

For all men ought to serve God: in one way by the common condition by which they are men; in another way by their various gifts, since one man does one thing in human affairs, another another. For no one as a private person could command idols to be taken away from the earth, which was foretold so long before to be in the future (See Isa 2:18; Zech 13:2). Kings, then, have—apart from the fellowship of the human race, by the very fact that they are kings—a way to serve the Lord such as those who are not kings cannot.

92. 211. When, then, they think of these things, they hear also that which you yourself mentioned about the three boys, and they hear it with a wonderful solemnity. For that same Scripture is sung in the Church most of all at the time when the very festival makes more fervent even those who throughout the rest of the year are more sluggish. What disposition, then, do you think Christian emperors have, when they hear that the three boys were sent into the furnace of burning fire, because they refused to consent to the king's iniquity of worshiping an image (See Dan 3:1-24); except that they consider that the pious freedom of the saints can be overcome neither by royal power nor by the cruelty of punishment? And that they rejoice that they are not of the number of such kings, who punished as sacrilegious the despisers of idols?

But further, when in what follows they hear that the same king, terrified by so great a miracle—of not only the boys, but also the flames serving God—himself too began to serve God in fear, and to exult with trembling (See Ps 2:10-11), and to lay hold of discipline; do they not understand that these things were written down, and recited with such great solemnity, so that to the servants of God, that they may not yield to sacrilege for kings' sake, and to the kings themselves, that they may turn to religion and believe in God, examples might be set forth?

These men, then, wishing—from the admonition of that very psalm which you too inserted into your writings—to understand, and to be instructed, and to serve the Lord in fear, and to exult with trembling, and to lay hold of discipline, how intently do they hear what that king afterward said. For he said that he would set forth a decree to all the peoples over whom he ruled, that whoever spoke blasphemy against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego should perish, and their houses be torn down (See Dan 3:96). And if they learn that he decreed this, lest the God who tempered the fires and freed the three boys be blasphemed; they surely consider what they ought to decree in their own kingdom, lest in their faithful that same God, the remitter of sins and now the liberator of the whole earth, be blown away.

92. 212. See, therefore, when Christian kings establish something against you for Catholic unity, lest perhaps with your lips you reproach them as ignorant of the divine Scriptures, while in your heart you grieve that they are sufficiently learned. For who could bear this sacrilegious and odious deceit of yours, to accuse kings in the case of Daniel alone, because he was cast into the lions' den; and not to praise kings, because he was loftily honored; when even at the time he was cast in, the king himself believed that he would rather be safe than die, and, anxious about him, did not dine? Then do you dare to say to Christians: What have you to do with the kings of this world? because Daniel suffered persecution from a king; and not to regard that same Daniel faithfully interpreting dreams for kings, calling the king lord, receiving gifts and honors?

And likewise, in the case of those same three boys, that, refusing to worship the statue, they were cast into the flames, to stir up the flames of resentment against kings (See Dan 3:1-24); but that they were thus proclaimed and thus honored by the king, to keep silent and conceal it? See, the king was a persecutor, when he threw Daniel to the lions: what when, having received him safe, rejoicing and giving thanks, he sent his enemies to be torn apart and consumed by those same lions—was he a persecutor, or was he not?

I want you to answer. For if he was, why did Daniel himself not resist him, especially since by such great familiarity he could most easily have done so? And do you tell us to call kings back from the persecution of men? But if he was not a persecutor for the reason that he most justly avenged the crime committed against a holy man; how is it to be avenged by kings that the sacraments of Christ are blown away, if the members of the prophet, because they were put in danger, deserved to be so avenged?

Likewise I grant, and it is plain, that the king was a persecutor, when he cast the three boys into the flame, because they refused to worship the image: but I ask whether he was a persecutor, when he set forth that decree, that those who blasphemed the one true God should perish and their houses be laid waste? For if he was a persecutor, why do you answer Amen to the words of a persecutor (See Dan 2-6)? But if he was not, why do you call those persecutors who deter you from the fury of blasphemy? For if they compel you to make supplication to an idol, they are like the impious king, and you like the three boys; but if they prevent you from fighting against Christ, you are the impious ones, if you do this. But what they are, if they terribly forbid this, I do not say: you find something else to say, if you are unwilling to call them pious emperors.

92. 213. If I had mentioned these examples about Daniel and the three boys, perhaps you would resist, and cry out that they ought not to be taken from those times and applied to these times of ours. Thanks be to God, that you yourself set them down, for the purpose you wished, indeed, but you see that they have rather availed for the purpose you did not wish.

Is this not your deceit; but is it human error? Would that it were so. Correct it, then; do not fear, you will not be the less for it; rather, it is the mark of greater talent to extinguish the flames of animosity by confessing, than to avoid the clouds of falsehood by understanding.

93. 214. PETILIAN SAID: Where is the law of God, where is your Christianity, if you commit and command slaughter and deaths?

93. 215. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: To this, see what the coheirs of Christ (See Rom 8:17) say throughout the whole earth. We neither commit nor command slaughter and deaths: and you rage much more wickedly against those who do these things, you who commit these things in the minds of men against eternal life.

94. 216. PETILIAN SAID: If you want us as friends, why do you drag us in unwilling? But if you make us out to be enemies, why do you kill your enemies?

94. 217. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: We neither drag the unwilling in, nor kill our enemies; but whatever we do with you, although we do it to you while you are unwilling, we do nevertheless out of love, so that, willing, you may correct yourselves, and, corrected, may live.

For no one avoids vices unwilling: and yet a boy, that he may learn this willingly, is beaten unwilling, and this for the most part by one most dear to him. And these things indeed kings would say to you, if they struck; for to this their power is divinely ordained; but since even these do not strike, you cry out.

95. 218. PETILIAN SAID: But what is the rationale, or what inconstancy of vanity is it, that while you call us heretics by a false term, you greatly desire our communion?

95. 219. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: If we greatly desired the communion of heretics, we would not wish you to be corrected from heretical error; but since we do this with you, that you may not be heretics, how do we greatly desire the communion of heretics? For dissension and division make you heretics; but peace and unity make Catholics. When, therefore, you come here from there, you cease to be what we hate, and you begin to be what we love.

96. 220. PETILIAN SAID: Choose at last which of two things you will say. If you have innocence, why do you pursue us with the sword? Or if you call us guilty, why do you seek us as innocent?

96. 221. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: O most acute dilemma, or rather most inept loquacity! Is it not the custom to set forth that one of two things be chosen as the answer, where both cannot be chosen? For if you set before me to choose one of two things to say—whether we are innocent or guilty, or again, of two others, whether you are guilty or not guilty—I could choose only one thing to say; but now you set before me these two, whether we are innocent, or whether you are guilty, and you want me to choose one of these two to answer. But I refuse to say one; because I say both, both that we are innocent, and that you are guilty. We say that we are innocent of your false and slanderous accusations, whoever in the Catholic communion can say with a clear conscience that we have neither handed over the holy books, nor consented to the worship of idols, nor killed anyone; or whatever other evil you are accustomed to charge; and that those who perhaps—which indeed you have not proved even of them—did these things, have shut the kingdom of heaven not against us, but against themselves; because each one of us bears his own burden (See Gal 6:5).

See, you have one. And that all of you are guilty and wicked, not some by the crimes of others which are committed among you by some and reproved by some, but by the crime of schism, from which most monstrous sacrilege none of you can say he is free, so long as he does not communicate with the unity of all the nations, unless he is forced to say that, concerning the Church which is spread through all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem, Christ lied (See Luke 24:47). See, you have the other. See, I have rendered to you the two, of which you wished us to say one. You surely ought to have considered that both could be said by us; and at least, if you wished this, to ask us to say one, when you saw that we could say both.

96. 222. But if you have innocence, you say, why do you pursue us with the sword? Look for a moment at your bands, which are armed not, after the old manner of their parents, with clubs alone, but have added axes and lances and swords; and recognize whose voice it ought rather to be: Why do you pursue us with the sword? Or if you call us guilty, you say, why do you seek us as innocent? Here I answer briefly: You are sought as guilty by the innocent, so that you may cease to be guilty, and begin to be innocent. See, I have chosen both of ours, and answered to both of yours; now you choose one of two: Are you innocent, or guilty?

Nor can you say both; but say both, if this pleases you. For surely you cannot in the same cause be innocent, in which you are guilty. If, then, you are innocent, do not wonder that you are sought for peace by brothers: but if guilty, do not wonder that you are sought for punishment by kings. But because of these two you usurp one for yourselves, and hear the other from us; for you usurp innocence for yourselves, but you hear from us that you live impiously; receive again what I say about both. If you are innocent, why do you contradict the testimony of Christ? But if guilty, why do you not flee to his mercy? For both his testimony is about the unity of the world, and his mercy is in brotherly love.

97. 223. PETILIAN SAID: Finally, as we have often already said, what kind of presumption is yours, that you presume upon kings, when David says: It is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in man: it is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in princes (Ps 118:8-9 (117:8-9)).

97. 224. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: We do not hope in man; but, as far as we can, we admonish men to hope in the Lord; nor do we hope in princes; but, as far as we can, we admonish princes to hope in the Lord, and if we ask anything of princes for the benefit of the Church, we do not nonetheless hope in them. For neither did the Apostle hope in that tribune as in a prince, from whom he obtained that armed escorts be given him; nor in those armed men as in men, by whose multitude, surrounded, he escaped the ambushes of the lost (See Acts 23:12-33).

But neither do we reproach you yourselves, because you asked the emperor that the basilicas be given back to you, as though you had hoped in Julian the prince; but we reproach you because you despaired of the testimony of Christ, from whose unity you separated those very basilicas. For you received them, at the command of the enemy of Christ, in order that in them you might despise the commands of Christ, while what Julian established seems to you valid and true, when he says: This too, to those who make supplication—Rogatianus, Pontius, Cassianus, and the rest of the bishops, and also the clergy—is added to fill the measure: that, the things which were wrongly done against them without a rescript being abolished, all be recalled to their ancient state; but what Christ established seems invalid and false, when he says: You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the whole earth (Acts 1:8).

We beseech you, be corrected: return to this most evident unity of the whole world, so that not by the words of the apostate Julian, but by the words of Christ the Savior, all may be recalled to their ancient state. Have mercy on your soul. We no longer compare Constantine and Julian, to show how unequal they are.

We do not say: If you did not hope in man and in a prince, when you said to a pagan and apostate emperor, a man, that with him justice alone had a place, with which prayers and rescript, as is there written, as the records of the pleading testify, the party of Donatus universally made use; then much less ought we to be charged by you, as though we hope in man and in a prince, if we have asked anything of Constantine or of the rest of the Christian emperors with no sacrilegious flattery; or if they themselves, without our asking, mindful of the account they will render to the Lord, under whose words they tremble when they hear what you yourself mentioned: And now, kings, understand (Ps 2:10), and so on, and many other things, of their own accord establish anything for the unity of the Catholic Church.

But I am silent about Constantine: we set Christ and Julian against you; I say too little, God and man, the Son of God and a child of hell, the Savior of our souls and the slayer of his own soul. Why, in possessing the basilicas, do you hold the rescript of Julian, and, in embracing the peace of the Church, do you not hold the Gospel of Christ? We too cry out: Let the things which were wrongly done all be recalled to their ancient state. More ancient is the Gospel of Christ than the rescript of Julian: more ancient is the unity of Christ than the party of Donatus: more ancient are the prayers of the Church to the Lord for the unity of Christ, than those of Rogatianus and Pontius and Cassianus to Julian for the party of Donatus. Is it wrongly done, when kings forbid division; and not wrongly done, when bishops divide unity? Is it wrongly done, when, to defend the Church, kings serve the testimony of Christ; and not wrongly done, when, to deny the Church, bishops contradict the testimony of Christ? We beseech, then, that not against the Gospel, but according to the Gospel, even the words of Julian himself, to whom you so made supplication, be heard, and that the things which were wrongly done all be recalled to their ancient state.

98. 225. PETILIAN SAID: You, you, wretches, I call upon, who, terrified by the fear of persecutions, while you seek your riches, not your souls, do not so much love the faithless faith of the traitors as, against the malice of those very men, the patronages which you have procured for yourselves; in no other way than as the shipwrecked in the waves go under waves that are about to fall, and in great peril of life reach for what is feared;

If this is to avoid danger, to flee beneath a ruin; and a damnable faith besides, to keep faith with a robber. Finally, it is the commerce of a madman's gain, to lose your souls, lest you lose your riches. For the Lord Christ says: If you gain the whole world, and lose your soul, what will you give in exchange for your soul? (Matt 16:26).

98. 226. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: This exhortation would be useful, I admit, if anyone used it in a good cause. You have altogether done well to deter men from preferring riches to their soul. But you who have heard these things, hear us too a little; for we too say this, but attend in what way.

If kings threaten to take away your riches, because you are not Jews according to the flesh, or because you do not worship idols or demons, or because you are not carried off into any heresies, but remain in Catholic unity; choose rather that your riches perish, lest you yourselves perish; but do not prefer anything else either, nor temporal life itself, to the eternal salvation which is in Christ. But if kings threaten you with losses or condemnation for this reason, because you are heretics; they terrify you not cruelly, but mercifully; while you fear them not bravely, but stubbornly. Hear, then, Peter saying: But what glory is it, if, sinning, you suffer punishments? (1 Pet 2:20), so that you have neither here earthly consolations, nor in the age to come eternal life; but both here the straits of the unhappy, and there the hells of heretics?

You see, then, brother, with whom I now have to deal, that you ought first to show whether you hold the truth, and then to exhort men, that for the sake of holding it they may be ready to be without all the things they temporally hold; since you do not show this; because you cannot; not because talent is lacking, but because the cause is bad; why do you hasten, by your exhortations, to make men both beggars and ignorant, and needy and erring, and ragged and contentious, and famished and heretics, both losing temporal goods in this age and finding eternal evils in the judgment of Christ? But the cautious son, who, fearing the father's scourge, withdraws from the serpent's lair, is neither beaten nor perishes. But he who despises the pains of discipline before his own ruinous will, is both beaten and perishes. Do you not now understand, eloquent man, that he who, for the peace of Christ, is without all earthly things, has God; but he who, for the party of Donatus, loses even a few coins, has no heart?

99. 227. PETILIAN SAID: But we, poor in spirit (See Matt 5:3), do not fear for riches, but dread riches. We, having nothing, and possessing all things (See 2 Cor 6:10), believe the soul to be our wealth, and by our punishments and blood purchase the eternal riches of heaven, since the Lord says, Whoever loses his substance shall receive it a hundredfold.

99. 228. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: This too bears on the matter, to point out how it is written. For where nothing hinders my purpose, if you deceive or are deceived about anything from the Scriptures, I do not mind. It is not, then, written thus: Whoever loses his substance; but: Whoever loses his soul for my sake (Matt 16:25). But about substance it is not written: Whoever loses; but: Whoever leaves (Matt 19:29); and not substance of money alone, but also many other things.

But you, meanwhile, have not lost your substance; whether you have left it, since you so boast of poverty, I do not know; if perhaps my colleague Fortunatus knows this, since you are in the same city, he has never told me, because I had never asked. Nevertheless, even if you have done this, you yourself, against yourself, in this very letter of yours mentioned the apostolic testimony: If I distribute all my goods to the poor, and hand over my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing (1 Cor 13:3). For if you had love, you would not charge against the whole earth, unknown to you and unknown by you, even the proved crimes of the Africans, let alone the unproved. If you had love, you would not fabricate it in your slanders, but would recognize unity, most plainly expressed in the words of the Lord, to the whole earth (Acts 1:8). But if you have not done this, why do you boast as though you had done it? Do you, then, really dread riches, so that, having nothing, you may possess all things?

Say these things to your colleague Crispinus, who recently, near our Hippo, bought an estate, where he might plunge men into the deep. Hence I too know this all too well; you perhaps do not know it, and so, untroubled, you cry out: We dread riches. Hence I wonder that this voice of yours, in order to reach us, leaped over him. For between Constantina, where you are, and Hippo, where I am, Calama, where he is, although nearer to us, is nevertheless set between.

I wonder, then, how he did not first catch this voice, and throw it back so that it would not pass to us, and recite against you the praises of riches far more copiously. For he not only does not dread riches, but even loves them. And surely, for the rest, before you publish, recite such things to him; if he does not correct himself, we reply. But you, if it is true that you are poor, you have there my brother Fortunatus: you will more easily be able to please that colleague of mine from there, than this colleague of yours.

100. 229. PETILIAN SAID: By the fear of God in which we live, we do not fear the punishments and deaths which you inflict with the sword; but this alone, in the end, we flee, that by a most wicked communion you cut the throats of souls, since the Lord himself says: Do not fear those who kill the body, for they cannot kill the soul; but rather fear him who has the power to send body and soul into the hell of fire (Matt 10:28).

100. 230. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: What you say, you do, not with a visible sword, but with that of which it was said: The sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword (Ps 57:4 (56:5)). For with this sword—accuser and slanderer of a world it does not know—you slaughter the souls of the ignorant.

But if you accuse a most wicked communion, see, by a mouth not mine but your own, whether you ascend, descend, go out, enter, turn this way and that, you are such as Optatus. But if you return to your heart, and find that you are not such—not because he did not share the sacraments with you, but because he displeased you—you will absolve the whole earth of the crimes of others, and find that you are implicated in the crime of schism.

101. 231. PETILIAN SAID: You, then, who by a most false baptism wish to be washed rather than to be born, not only do not lay aside your own faults, but you even burden your souls with the crimes of the guilty. For just as the water of the guilty has been emptied of the Holy Spirit, so it is plainly filled with the crimes of traitors. Whoever, then, wretch, you are baptized by such a one, if you wished to be free of lying, you are drenched in falsehood. If you wished to shut out the faults of the flesh, with the conscience of the guilty added you will receive their guilt too. If you wished to extinguish the flame of avarice, you are drenched in fraud, drenched in crime, drenched also in fury. Finally, if you believe that the faith both of the one receiving and of the one giving is at stake, by him who kills a man you are drenched in a brother's blood. So it comes about that you who had come innocent to baptism, return from baptism a parricide.

101. 232. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: I would like to converse with those who, when these words were read or heard, applauded. For such men have not ears in the heart, but the heart in the ears. Let them, nevertheless, read again and again, and ponder, and feel them—not what they sound like, but what they mean.

First, to dispatch this last point: So it comes about, you say, that you who had come innocent to baptism, return from baptism a parricide; answer first, who comes innocent to baptism, except him who came to be baptized not in order that his iniquity might be washed away, but in order that the authority of humility might be set before us? For what will be forgiven the innocent? Or are you really so eloquent as to show us a certain sinful innocence? Do you not hear Scripture saying: No one is clean from sin in your sight, not even the infant whose life on earth is of one day (Job 14:4-5)? For why is recourse had to the remission of sins even with infants? Do you not hear another: I was conceived in iniquity (Ps 51:7 (50:7))?

Then, if he who had come without parricide returns a parricide for the reason that a parricide baptizes him; then as many as returned baptized by Optatus have been made Optatuses. Go now, and charge us with rousing the wrath of kings against you. Do you not fear lest as many of Gildo's henchmen be sought out from you as there are men who could have been baptized by Optatus? Do you see at last how this sentence of yours, like a bladder, has burst not only with an empty sound, but even upon your own head?

101. 233. Now the other points above, which we have now set forth to be refuted, are such that anyone baptized is said to return altogether such as the one by whom he is baptized was. But far be it that, deranged as you are in saying these things, those whom you baptize should return as deranged as you. And how prettily it sounded to you, what you said: You are drenched in fraud, drenched in crime, drenched also in fury!

But you, unless you were not drenched but filled with fury, would not pour out these things. Is it really so, that—to say nothing of other things—whoever, not avaricious, come to your avaricious colleagues or your presbyters to be baptized, return avaricious; and whoever, sober, run to those whirlpools of wine to be baptized, return drunkards? Holding these views and persuading these things, do you dare even, as though against us, to mention what you set down a little before above: It is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in man; it is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in princes (Ps 118:8-9 (117:8-9)).

What else do you teach, I ask, than to hope not in the Lord, but in man, when you say that the baptized becomes such as the baptizer was? And because you assume to yourselves this primacy of baptizing, men should believe you; and those who were going to hope in the Lord, should hope in princes? Rather, let them not hear you, but rather those testimonies which you set down against yourselves; and something even more terrible; because not only: It is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in man (Ps 118:8 (117:8)); but also: Cursed is everyone who places his hope in man (Jer 17:5).

102. 234. PETILIAN SAID: At least imitate the prophets, who feared that their sacred souls be deceived by a false baptism. For Jeremiah said first that among impious men the water is deceitful. The water, he says, is deceitful, it has no faith (Jer 15:18).

102. 235. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: One who, ignorant of the Scriptures, hears these things, and does not believe that you are either so erring that you do not know what you are saying, or so deceiving that the one whom you have deceived does not know what he is saying, supposes that the prophet Jeremiah, when he wished to be baptized, took care lest he be baptized by impious men, and so said these things. For to what does it bear that, before you set down this testimony, you said: At least imitate the prophets, who feared that their sacred souls be deceived by a false baptism?

As though in Jeremiah's times anyone was washed by the sacrament of baptism, except that the Pharisees dipped themselves, in those washings which the Lord reproved, at almost every moment, and their couches and cups and dishes, as is read in the Gospel (See Mark 7:4). How, then, could Jeremiah, as though desiring baptism and avoiding being baptized by the impious, have said these things? He said this, then, when he was complaining about a faithless people, by whose most evil conduct he was afflicted, not mingling himself with their deeds; who nevertheless did not bodily separate himself from that people, nor seek other sacraments than those which that people, according to the order of the Law, suited to that time, received.

This people, then, living wickedly, he called a wound, by which the heart of the just man was grievously struck, whether he said this of himself, or figured in himself what he saw would come. For thus he says: Lord, remember me, and visit me, and make me innocent of those who persecute me—not in long-suffering; know how I have received reproach for your sake from those who despise your words. Consume them: and your word will be to me a delight and the joy of my heart, for your name has been invoked upon me, Lord almighty. I did not sit in the council of those making sport, but I feared before the face of your hand; I sat alone, for I am filled with bitterness. Why do those who grieve me prevail against me? My wound is strong; whence shall I be healed? It has become to me as deceitful water, which has no faith (Jer 15:15-18). In all these things it is seen what the prophet wished to be understood, but it is seen by those who do not wish to pervert, for their own perverse cause, what they read.

For Jeremiah called his wound, which had become to him deceitful water that has no faith; but he wished those to be understood as his wound, who grieved him by living wickedly. Hence the Apostle too says: Fightings without, fears within (2 Cor 7:5); and again: Who is weak, and I am not weak? And who is made to stumble, and I am not set on fire? (2 Cor 11:29) And because he despaired of their being able to be corrected, therefore he said: Whence shall I be healed? as though he would always have grief, so long as they were such, among whom he was compelled to live. But that a people is wont to be signified by the name of water is made plain in the Apocalypse, where we learn that the many waters are many peoples, not by our conjecture, but by the interpretation unfolded there (See Rev 17:15).

Do not, then, by a wrong understanding, or rather error, blaspheme the sacrament of baptism, even if it be in a most lost man; for neither in Simon the liar was the baptism he had received deceitful water (See Acts 8:13), nor do your so many liars give deceitful water, when they baptize in the name of the Trinity. For they do not begin to be liars when, betrayed and convicted, they confess their crimes; but rather they were liars then, when, being adulterers and wicked, they pretended that they were chaste and innocent.

103. 236. PETILIAN SAID: David also said: The oil of the sinner shall not anoint my head (Ps 141:5 (140:5)). Whom, then, does he assert to be the sinner? Me, who suffer your crimes, or you, who persecute the innocent?

103. 237. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: In the person of the body of Christ, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of truth (See 1 Tim 3:15), spread throughout the whole earth, on account of the Gospel which is preached, as the Apostle says, in every creature which is under heaven (Col 1:23); in the person of the whole earth, of which the same David, whose words you do not understand, says: He established the earth, which shall not be moved (Ps 93:1 (92:1)); which you contend has not merely not been moved by the sins of others, but has altogether perished; in his person, then, I answer: I do not persecute the innocent. But David said the oil of the sinner; he did not say, of the traitor; not, of the incense-burner; not, of the persecutor; but, of the sinner. What, then, will you do according to your own understanding? See first whether you yourself are not a sinner. I do not want you to say to me: I am not a traitor, I am not an incense-burner, I am not a persecutor. Neither indeed am I, if it please the Lord, any of these; nor is the whole earth which shall not be moved. But say, if you dare: I am not a sinner. For he said, the oil of the sinner. For whatever even of light sin is found in you, how do you show that it does not belong to what was said, the oil of the sinner?

For I ask whether you pray with the Lord's Prayer? For if you do not pray with that prayer, with which the Lord taught the disciples to pray, whence did you learn another, exceeding the merits of the apostles, for your greater merits? But if you pray as that Master deigned to teach, how do you say: Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors (Matt 6:12)? For we do not ask this about those sins which were forgiven us in baptism. Therefore these words of the prayer either do not permit you to be one who entreats God, or they disclose you to be a sinner.

Let those go now, and kiss your head, who were baptized by you, whose heads perished by your oil. But you, see what you are, or what you think of yourself. Is it really so, that Optatus, whom pagans, Jews, Christians, ours, yours, throughout all Africa, cry out to be a thief, a plunderer, a betrayer, an oppressor, a separator, and the henchman—not the friend, not the client, but the henchman—of him whom a certain one of you called his Count God, was not even a sinner of some sort?

What, then, will they do, whose heads one guilty of a capital crime has anointed? Do not even they themselves kiss your heads, about whose heads, through your understanding, you judge so ill? At least betray them, and admonish them to be healed. Or is it rather your head that needs healing, raving as you are? What, then, you will say, did David say? Why do you ask me? Ask him; in the previous verse he will answer you: The just man, he says, will correct me in mercy, and reprove me; but the oil of the sinner shall not anoint my head (Ps 141:5 (140:5)).

What plainer? What more open? I prefer, he says, to be healed by merciful chiding, than to be deceived and perverted by smooth flattery, as though my head were anointed. Under other words, the same sentence is elsewhere in the Scriptures: Better are the wounds of a friend than the willing kisses of an enemy (Prov 27:6).

104. 238. PETILIAN SAID: But the ointment of concord he praises among brothers thus: Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell as one. Like the ointment on the head, which runs down upon the beard, the beard of Aaron, which runs down upon the edge of his garment; like the dew of Hermon, which runs down upon Mount Zion. For there the Lord commanded blessing, and life forever (Ps 133:1-3 (132:1-3)). Thus, he says, is unity anointed, as the priests were anointed.

104. 239. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: You speak truly. For that priesthood, in figure of the body of Christ, had an anointing, which is made safe by the joining of unity. For Christ himself is named from the chrism, that is, from the anointing. Him the Hebrews call Messiah, which word agrees with the Punic tongue, as do very many other Hebrew words, and almost all.

What, then, in that priesthood is the head, what the beard, what the edge of the garment?

As far as the Lord grants me to understand, the head is the Savior himself of the body, of whom the Apostle says: And he himself is the head of the body, the Church (Col 1:18). By the beard, not incongruously, strength is understood. Therefore upon those who are strong in his Church, and cling to his mouth, that they may preach the truth without fear, the holy ointment runs down from Christ himself as from the head, that is, spiritual sanctification. The edge of the garment is given to be understood as that which is at the head of the garment, by which the head of the one putting it on enters; by this are signified the perfect faithful in the Church.

For in the edge is perfection; and surely you remember that it was said to a certain rich man: If you wish to be perfect, go, sell all that you possess, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me (Matt 19:21-22). He indeed departed sad, a neglecter of perfection, a chooser of falling away; but were there therefore lacking those in whom the ointment of unity, by such a forsaking of earthly things made perfect, would run down from the head as upon the edge of the garment?

For, apart from the apostles, and those who with them were set over others and were teachers, whom we understand as the more eminent and stronger in the beard, read in the Acts of the Apostles and see who laid the prices of their things sold at the feet of the apostles, and no one said anything was his own, but they had all things in common, and it was distributed to each as each had need, and they had one soul and one heart in God (Acts 4:32-35). Surely you recognize that it is written thus.

Recognize, then, the good and pleasant thing, brothers dwelling as one. Recognize the beard of Aaron; recognize the edge of the spiritual garment. Ask Scripture itself where these things began to be done: you will find, in Jerusalem. From this edge of the garment the whole unity is woven throughout all the nations. By this the head entered into the garment, so that Christ might be clothed with the variety of the whole earth; for in this edge of the garment appeared that very variety of tongues.

Why, then, do you resist the head itself, from which that ointment of unity runs down, that is, the spiritual fragrance of love; why, I say, do you resist the head itself, testifying and saying: Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:47)? And in this ointment you wish to interpret the sacrament of the chrism; which indeed, in the class of visible signs, is most sacred, like baptism itself; but it can be also in most evil men, consuming their life in the works of the flesh, and not about to possess the kingdom of heaven; and therefore belonging neither to the beard of Aaron, nor to the edge of his garment, nor to any weaving of the priestly garment.

For where will you place the things the Apostle enumerates as the manifest works of the flesh, which are, he says, fornications, uncleannesses, debaucheries, the service of idols, sorceries, enmities, rivalries, jealousies, animosities, dissensions, heresies, envyings, drunkennesses, carousings, and the like; which I foretell to you, as I have foretold, that those who do such things will not possess the kingdom of God (Gal 5:19-21)? I set aside fornications, which are committed secretly; interpret uncleannesses as you will, I set those aside too; let us place there sorceries also, because no one is openly a maker and giver of poisons; I set aside heresies too, because you wish this; the service of idols I do not know whether I ought to set aside, since the Apostle there places avarice, which rages publicly (See Col 3:5). These, then, being set aside, are there none among you debauched, none avaricious, none stubbornly practicing enmities, none contentious, jealous, animose, devoted to dissensions, envious, drunken, given to carousings? Are none such among you anointed, and do they not die known and manifest in these vices? If you say none; since out of zeal for contention you openly lie, see lest you yourself be of such.

But if you are removed from such men, not by separation of body, but by unlikeness of life, and grieving you behold such crowds around your altars; what shall we say, since they have been anointed with the holy oil, and, as the Apostle confirms with clear truth, will not possess the kingdom of God?

Is a sacrilegious injury to be done to the beard of Aaron and the edge of his garment, so that we should judge that they are to be placed there? Far be it. Distinguish, then, the visible holy sacrament, which can be both in the good and in the wicked—to the former for a reward, to the latter for a judgment—from the invisible anointing of love, which is proper to the good.

Distinguish these things, distinguish: may God distinguish you from the party of Donatus, and recall you to the catholic communion, from which they bound you—a catechumen snatched away to them—with the bond of a death-bearing honor.

Now the dew of Hermon upon the mountains of Zion (See Ps 133:3 (132:3)), however it be taken by you, you are not on the mountains of Zion; for you are not in the city set upon a mountain, which has this sure sign, that it cannot be hidden (See Matt 5:14). It is therefore known to all the nations; but the party of Donatus is unknown to most nations; it is therefore not the one.

105. 240. PETILIAN SAID: Woe, then, to you, who, by violating what is holy, tear apart unity, since the prophet says: If the people sins, the priest will pray for it; but if the priest sins, who will pray for him? (1 Sam 2:25).

105. 241. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: And I seemed, a little before, when we were discussing the oil of the sinner, to anoint your forehead, so that you might say, if you dared, whether you yourself were not a sinner. See, you have said it. O crime! O monstrosity! For because you assert that you are a priest, what else, by this prophetic testimony, did you say, except that you are altogether without sin? For if you have sin, who will pray for you according to your understanding? For you so sell yourselves to the wretched common people, mentioning from the prophet: If the people sins, the priest will pray for it; but if the priest sins, who will pray for him? (1 Sam 2:25) that they may believe you to be without sin, and entrust their sins to be purged by your prayers.

Great men you, lofty, heavenly, divine, no longer men, but angels, who pray for the common people, and are unwilling that the common people pray for you! Are you more just than Paul, more perfect than so great an Apostle, who commended himself to the prayers of those he taught? Persevere in prayer, he says, watching in it, in thanksgiving; praying at the same time for us also, that God may open to us a door of the word, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in chains, that I may make it manifest, as I ought to speak (Col 4:2-4). See, prayer is made for the Apostle, which you are unwilling should be done for a bishop. Do you see how diabolical this pride is?

Prayer is made for the Apostle, that he may make manifest the mystery of Christ, as he ought to speak. Accordingly, if you had pious common people, you ought to have exhorted them to pray for you, lest you should speak as you ought not. Are you more just than John the evangelist, who says: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (1 John 1:8)? Are you, finally, more just than Daniel, whom you yourself, in this very letter, mentioned, so as to say: A king cast most just Daniel, as he supposed, to the bites of beasts? Which he had not supposed; since with a most friendly disposition, as the context of the reading proves, he said to Daniel himself: Your God, whom you serve continually, will himself deliver you (Dan 6:16).

But about this we have already said much; now, what is at issue—surely Daniel was most just; not by your testimony, although this would suffice me for the cause I am pleading with you; but by the testimony of the Spirit of God, speaking also through Ezekiel, where he named three of most eminent righteousness, Noah, Daniel, and Job, whom he said alone could be freed from a certain most vehement wrath of God, which was hanging over the rest (See Ezek 14:14).

A most just man, then, one of three memorable ones, prays, and says: While I was praying and confessing my sins and the sins of my people in the sight of the Lord my God (Dan 9:20). And do you say that you are without sin; because, forsooth, you are a priest, and if the people sins, you pray for it; but if you sin, who will pray for you? Truly, because by the impiety of so great arrogance you show yourself unworthy that that priest should intercede for you, whom by these words, which you do not understand, the prophet wished to be understood.

For now, lest anyone inquire why this was said, I will explain it, as far as the Lord grants. God was preparing the minds of men through the prophet, that they might desire such a priest as no one could pray for. He himself was prefigured in the times of the first people and the first temple, where all things were figures of ours. Therefore the high priest alone entered into the holy of holies, to pray for the people, who did not enter with the priest into those inner holy things (See Lev 16; Heb 9:7); just as that Priest entered into the secret places of the heavens, into those truer holy of holies, while we are still placed here, for whom he intercedes. Therefore the prophet said: If the people sins, the priest will pray for it; but if the priest sins, who will pray for him? that is: Desire such a priest, who cannot sin, that he may not need to be prayed for. And therefore prayer is made by the peoples for the apostles (See Acts 14:22); but for that Priest, the Master and Lord of the apostles, prayer is not made. Hear John confessing and teaching this: Brothers, he says, I write these things to you, that you may not sin; and if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the just; he is the propitiation for our sins (1 John 2:1-2). We have, he said; our sins, he said. Learn humility, lest you fall; rather, that you may at last rise. For you would not have said these things, unless you had fallen.

106. 242. PETILIAN SAID: And lest the one who is a layman should clear himself of fault, he is held by this prohibition: Do not share in the sins of others (1 Tim 5:22).

106. 243. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: You err, as the saying goes, by the whole heaven through pride, while you refuse to communicate with the whole earth through humility. For neither was this said to a layman, and you do not know in what way it was said. When the Apostle was writing to Timothy, he was admonishing this same Timothy; to whom in another place he says: Do not despise the grace that is in you, which was given to you through the laying on of the presbyter's hands (1 Tim 4:14).

And by many other proofs it is shown that he was not a layman. But what he says: Do not share in the sins of others; he wished to be understood of consent and approval. Hence, adding at once how this is done: Keep yourself, he says, chaste (1 Tim 5:22). For neither did Paul himself share in the sins of others, because he tolerated in bodily unity the false brothers over whom he groans (See 2 Cor 11:26); nor did his predecessors the apostles share in the theft and crime of Judas, because they shared the most holy supper with him when he was already the betrayer of the Lord, and pointed out by the Lord.

107. 244. PETILIAN SAID: And likewise by this sentence the Apostle himself compares the partners of an evil conscience: And those who do these things, he says, and those who consent to those who do such things, are worthy of death (Rom 1:32).

107. 245. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: However you may have said them, I do not mind; these things are true, and this is what the catholic Church teaches, that there is a great difference between those who consent, whom these things please, and those who tolerate, whom these things displease. For the former become chaff, while they follow the barrenness of chaff; the latter, since they are wheat, let them wait, that they may be separated, for Christ the winnower (See Matt 13:24-40).

108. 246. PETILIAN SAID: Come, then, to the Church, peoples, and flee the traitors, if you do not wish to perish with them. For, that you may easily recognize that, although they themselves are guilty, they judge most favorably of our faith: I baptize their infected ones; they receive mine, which God forbid, as already baptized; which they would by no means do, if they had recognized any faults in our baptism. See, then, what we give, how holy it is, which the sacrilegious enemy fears to destroy.

108. 247. AUGUSTINE REPLIED: Against this error indeed we have already said much, both in this work and elsewhere. But because you judge that so great a buttress of your vanity is in this sentence, that you thought to end your letter with it, so that it might remain, as it were more freshly, in the minds of readers, I answer briefly. We approve baptism in heretics—not of heretics, but of Christ—just as in fornicators, the unclean, the debauched, idolaters, sorcerers, retainers of enmities, the contentious, the jealous, the animose, the devotees of dissensions, the envious, the drunken, carousers, and the like, we approve baptism, not theirs, but Christ's. For all these, among whom the heretics too are placed, as the Apostle says, will not possess the kingdom of God (See Gal 5:19-21); and therefore they will belong to the left-hand part with the devil.

Nor are they therefore to be thought to be in the body of Christ, which is the Church, because they bodily become partakers of his sacraments. For those sacraments are holy even in such men, and to them, handling and taking them unworthily, they will avail for a greater judgment. But they themselves are not in that frame of the Church, which in the members of Christ, through connection and contact, grows into the increase of God. For that Church is on the rock, as the Lord says: Upon this rock I will build my Church (Matt 16:18). But they build on the sand, as the same Lord says: Whoever hears my words and does not do them, I will liken him to a foolish man, who builds his house upon the sand (Matt 7:26). But lest you think that the Church which is on the rock is in one part of the earth, and is not spread to the ends of the earth: hear its voice from the Psalm, groaning amid the evils of its pilgrimage. For it says: From the ends of the earth I have cried to you; when my heart was in anguish, you exalted me upon a rock; you have led me, for you have become my hope, a tower of strength before the face of the enemy (Ps 61:2-3 (60:3-4)). See how it cries from the ends of the earth.

It is not, then, in Africa alone, or in Africans alone, you who send a bishop to Rome to a few Mountain-folk, and to Spain to the house of one woman from Africa. See how it is exalted upon a rock. Not all, then, are to be reckoned in it who build on the sand, that is, who hear the words of Christ and do not do them; who nevertheless, both among us and among you, have and hand on the sacrament of baptism. See how its hope is God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, not Peter, not Paul; how much less Donatus, or Petilian? It is not, then, yours that we fear to destroy, but Christ's: which even in the sacrilegious is in itself holy.

For we cannot receive those who come from you, unless we destroy what is yours. For we destroy the faithlessness of the deserter, we do not destroy the seal of the emperor. Accordingly, consider yourself, and destroy what you said: I, you say, baptize their infected ones; they receive mine, which God forbid, as already baptized. For you do not baptize the infected, but, in order to infect them by the fraud of your error, you rebaptize.

But we do not receive your baptized, but we destroy your error, whence they are yours, and we accept the baptism of Christ, whence they are baptized.

And so, opportunely, in the middle you put: Which God forbid. For you said: They receive mine, which God forbid, as baptized. For while you wished it to be understood, which God forbid, they receive, fearing that we receive your people; I take you to have said, not knowing it: Mine, which God forbid.

For truly God forbid that they should be yours, who now pass over to the catholic communion: nor do they so pass over that, baptized, they may be ours, but that they may be our partners; and that, baptized, they may be Christ's along with us.

1. 1. I have read your letter, Petilian, when I was able to read it, by which you have sufficiently indicated that, against the catholic Church, on behalf of the party of Donatus, you have neither been able to say anything fit, nor been permitted to be silent. What tossings you suffered, with how great a tempest of heart you wavered, when you had read the things by which I replied, with as much brevity and clearness as I could, to a part of your letter, which had then come into my hands!

For you saw the truth which we hold and defend so strengthened with such firmness, so illumined with such light, that you could not find what was to be said against it, by which, refuted, it might be confuted. You also noticed that the expectation of the many who had read these things was turned toward you, desiring to know what you would say, what you would do, by what way you would escape, where you would break out from the great straits in which the word of God had hemmed you.

Here you, who ought, with the opinion of the empty-minded despised, to have proceeded into a true and sound view, did what Scripture foretold about such men: You have loved malice above kindness, iniquity rather than to speak equity (Ps 52:3 (51:5)). Accordingly, if I too wished to repay you curses for curses, what else would we be but two revilers, so that those who read us would, some, in sound seriousness, cast us off in disgust, others sweetly drink us in with malevolent pleasure?

When I reply to anyone either by speaking or by writing, even when provoked by abusive accusations, as far as the Lord grants me, with the stings of vain indignation reined in and crushed, taking thought for the hearer or reader, I do not act so as to become superior to the man by reviling, but more wholesome by refuting his error.

1. 2. For if those who consider what you have written have any heart at all; what has it profited you, for the cause which is at issue between us about catholic communion or about the party of Donatus, that, leaving aside the public business, so to speak, by a certain private grudge you have pursued the life of one man with reviling reproaches, as though that man were the cause being inquired into?

Have you thought so ill, I will not say of Christians, but of the human race itself, that you did not believe your writings could come into the hands of any prudent persons, who would lift themselves above our persons, and rather inquire into the question that was at issue between us, and would attend not to who or what sort we were, but to what we said for the truth or against error?

The judgment of these men ought to have been revered by you, the reproach of these men guarded against, lest they should judge that you had found nothing to say, except by setting before yourself someone to revile in any way at all. But, no doubt, by the levity and vanity of certain people, who gladly hear the quarrels of disputing speakers, so that, while they attend to how eloquently you revile, they do not perceive how truly you are confuted.

At the same time, I suppose, you did this too, that, occupied with my defense, I too might desert the cause I had undertaken; and so, with men turned not to the words of those debating, but of those quarreling, the truth might be obscured, which you dread to have grow clear and known.

I, therefore, against such a plan, what shall I do, except, with my own defense rather neglected, hold to the matter, from which no accuser of mine may shake my purpose? The house of my God (See Ps 26:8 (25:8)), whose beauty I have loved, I will extol by the proclamation of a serving voice, but myself I will humble and cast down. For I have chosen to be cast down in the house of my God, rather than to dwell in the tents of heretics (See Ps 84:10 (83:11)). From you, then, Petilian, I will turn my discourse for a little while; and I will turn it to those whom you tried to turn away from me by your curses, as though I were contriving this, that men should be turned to me, and not rather with me to God.

...and addresses them with apostolic words.

2. 3. Hear, then, whoever you are who have read the curses which Petilian, more angry than considerate, vomited against me. First I will address you with apostolic words; which certainly, whatever sort I myself may be, are true. So let a man regard us as ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. Here now it is required among stewards that one be found faithful. But to me it is a very small thing that I be judged by you, or by any human day; nor do I even judge myself (1 Cor 4:1-3).

Now what follows, although I do not dare to apply to myself, so as to say: For I am conscious of nothing in myself (1 Cor 4:4), yet I confidently say in the sight of God: Of none of the things with which Petilian accused the time of my life, after I was baptized in Christ, am I conscious in myself; Yet I am not thereby justified; but he who judges me is the Lord. Therefore do not judge anything before the time, until the Lord comes, and illumines the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the thoughts of the heart, and then each will have praise from God. But these things, brothers, I have transferred in a figure to myself, that you may not be puffed up, one for the one against the other, beyond what is written (1 Cor 4:4-6). And so let no one glory in man. All things are yours, but you are Christ's, and Christ is God's (1 Cor 3:21-23).

Again I say: Let no one glory in man (1 Cor 3:21); more often I repeat: Let no one glory in man. If you notice anything praiseworthy in us, refer it to the praise of him from whom comes every best gift, and every perfect gift: for it comes down from above, from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change, nor shadow of a moment (Jas 1:17). For what do we have that we have not received? But if we have received it, let us not glory as though we had not received it (See 1 Cor 4:7).

And in all these things, whatever good you know in us, be imitators of us, if indeed we are of Christ (See 1 Cor 4:16); but if you suspect or believe or see any evils in us (See Acts 25:18), hold to that word of the Lord, by which, secure, you may not desert his Church on account of the evils of men: What we say, do; but what evils you think or know us to do, do not do (See Matt 23:3). For it is not the time to clear myself to you, since, with my own cause neglected, I have undertaken to commend to you a wholesome matter, that no one may glory in man (1 Cor 3:21). For cursed is everyone who places his hope in man (Jer 17:5).

With this command of the Lord and the Apostle held and kept, even if I, in my own cause, as the enemy desires me to be regarded, fail and am overwhelmed, the cause which I serve will be victorious.

For if you most firmly hold what I exhort and strive for—that cursed is everyone who places his hope in man, that no one may glory in man; you will in no way desert the Lord's threshing floor on account of the chaff which either now, struck by the wind of pride, flies away, or at the final winnowing will be separated (See Matt 3:12), nor will you flee the great house on account of the vessels made for dishonor (See 2 Tim 2:20), nor will you go out through torn nets on account of the bad fish to be separated on the shore (See Matt 13:47-48),

nor will you leave the good pastures of unity on account of the goats to be placed on the left by the shepherd who will divide (See Matt 25:32-33), nor, on account of the mingled weeds, will you, by a wicked tearing-apart, separate yourselves from the fellowship of the wheat, whose head is that grain put to death and multiplied, and which grows together throughout the world until the harvest (See Matt 13:24-40). For the field is the world, not Africa; the harvest, the end of the age (Matt 13:38-39), not the time of Donatus.

3. 4. These evangelical likenesses surely you recognize, given for no other purpose than that no one may glory in man, and that no one, puffed up for the one against the other, may be divided, saying: I am of Paul; when surely Paul was not crucified for you, nor were you baptized in the name of Paul, how much less in the name of Caecilian or of any of us (1 Cor 1:12-13): so that you may learn, as long as the chaff is threshed with the grain, as long as the bad fish swim with the good within the Lord's nets, before the time of winnowing rather to tolerate, for the sake of the good, the mixture of the bad, than to violate, on account of the bad, the love of the good?

For this mixture is not eternal, but temporal; not spiritual, but bodily. In it the angels will not err, when they gather the bad from the midst of the just, and cast them into the furnace of burning fire (Matt 13:49-50). For the Lord knows who are his. And if for a time he cannot bodily withdraw from the wicked, let everyone who names the name of the Lord nevertheless withdraw from iniquity itself (2 Tim 2:19).

For it is permitted meanwhile to be separated from and to depart from the wicked in life, conduct, heart, and will: which separation ought always to be kept. But bodily separation should be awaited, confidently, patiently, bravely, until the end of the age: on account of which awaiting it was said: Wait for the Lord, act manfully; let your heart be strengthened, and wait for the Lord (Ps 27:14 (26:14)).

For the greatest palm of toleration is, among false brothers brought in secretly, seeking their own, not the things of Jesus Christ (See Phil 2:21), with the love of those who seek not their own but the things of Jesus Christ, to disturb nothing by any turbulent and rash dissension, nor to tear apart, by a proud and wicked contention, the unity of the Lord's net, which gathers from every kind of fish, while it is drawn to the shore, that is, to the end of the age,

when each one thinks himself to be something, while he is nothing, and so deceives himself (See Gal 6:3); and wishes his own judgment, or that of his own people, to suffice for the separation of Christian peoples—those who say that they most plainly know certain wicked men to be unworthy of the communion of the sacraments of the Christian religion: about whom, nevertheless, whatever they say they know, they cannot persuade the universal Church, which is spread, as it was foretold, throughout all the nations.

And when they flee the communion of these men, as of those whom they have known, they desert the unity of that Church: when they ought rather, if there were in them a love that bears all things, lest they divide themselves from the good, whom in all the nations they could not teach the evils of others, themselves to tolerate, in one nation, what they had known (See 1 Cor 13:7).

Hence too, even when the cause is not discussed, in which by the gravest proofs they are convicted of having slandered the innocent, it is more probably believed that they fabricated false crimes of handing-over, who did not hesitate to commit, far more wickedly, the crime of a wicked division. For even if whatever they boasted about the handing-over were true; yet they ought by no means to have abandoned the fellowship of the Christians whom divine Scripture commends to the very ends of the earth, on account of what they themselves knew, but those others did not know.

4. 5. Nor would I say this so that ecclesiastical discipline be neglected, so that each one be permitted to do what he wishes, without any rebuke, and a certain medicinal punishment, and a terrible gentleness, and the severity of love. For where will that word of the Apostle be: Rebuke the unruly, console the fainthearted, support the weak, be patient toward all. See that no one renders evil for evil to anyone (1 Thess 5:14-15)? When he added this: See that no one renders evil for evil to anyone; he sufficiently showed that it is not a rendering of evil for evil to rebuke the unruly, although for the fault of unruliness the penalty of rebuke be rendered.

The penalty of rebuke, then, is not an evil, since the fault is an evil. For it is not the iron of an enemy wounding, but of a physician cutting. These things are done in the Church, and that spirit of inner (See Gal 6:1) gentleness burns with zeal for God, lest the chaste virgin, betrothed to one husband, Christ, be corrupted in any of her members from the chastity that is in Christ, as Eve was seduced by the cunning of the serpent (See 2 Cor 11:2-3).

Nevertheless, far be it from the servants of the head of the household that they be unmindful of the command of their Lord, and so blaze with the burning of holy indignation against the multitude of weeds that, while they wish to gather them before the time (See Matt 13:29-30), the wheat too be uprooted along with them.

Of which sin these men would be held guilty, even if they had shown that they charged true crimes against the traitors whom they accused: since they were separated, by an impious presumption, not only from the wicked, whose fellowship they were, as it were, avoiding, but also from the good faithful established in all the nations, to whom they could not prove what they said they knew; and they drew along with them into the same ruin many among whom they prevailed by some authority, and who were less able to understand that the unity of the Church spread throughout the whole world was by no means to be deserted for the sins of others;

so that, even if they themselves knew that they were charging true crimes against certain persons, in that way the weak one would perish in their knowledge, for whom Christ died (See 1 Cor 8:11), while, offended by the evils of others, he destroyed in himself the good of peace which he had with the good brothers, who had, some of them, not heard such things, some had feared to believe rashly things undiscussed and unproved, some had left them, whatever they were, with peaceful humility to the ecclesiastical judges, to whom the whole cause was brought across the sea.

5. 6. You, then, holy offspring of the one mother, the catholic Church, subject to the Lord, with as great a vigilance as you can, guard against an example of this kind of crime and error. With whatever light of learning and reputation he may shine, and boast himself to be a precious stone, whoever wishes to draw you after himself, remember that that strong woman, lovable to one husband alone, whom holy Scripture describes at the end of Proverbs (See Prov 31:10), is more precious than precious stones. Let no one say: I will follow him, because he made me a Christian; or: I will follow him, because he baptized me. Neither is he who plants anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase (1 Cor 3:7). And God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God in him (1 John 4:16).

No one, even though he preaches the name of Christ, and bears and administers the sacrament of Christ, is to be followed against the unity of Christ. Let each one prove his own work; and then he will have glory in himself alone, and not in another. For each one will bear his own burden (Gal 6:4-5), the burden, that is, of rendering an account: for each one of us will render an account for himself. Let us therefore no longer judge one another (Rom 14:12-13). For as far as concerns the burdens of mutual love, bear one another's burdens, and so you will fulfill the law of Christ. For he who thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, deceives himself (Gal 6:2-3). Let us, then, bear with one another in love, taking pains to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace (See Eph 4:2-3): outside which whoever gathers, does not gather with Christ: but whoever does not gather with Christ, scatters (See Matt 12:30).

6. 7. Accordingly, whether about Christ, or about his Church, or about any other matter that pertains to your faith and life, I will not say we, by no means to be compared to him who said: Even if we; but altogether what he added, following: If an angel from heaven should announce to you anything beyond what, in the lawful and evangelical Scriptures, you have received, let him be anathema (Gal 1:8-9).

Transacting these things with you, and with all whom we desire to win for Christ, and, among the rest, preaching the holy Church, which we read promised in the Letters of God, and which we behold rendered, as it was promised, in all the nations, we have earned the flames of hatreds in return for the giving of thanks, from those whom we desire to be drawn to her peaceful bosom: as though we had bound them in that part, on behalf of which they find nothing to say; or as though we had commanded the prophets and apostles so long before to put in their books no testimonies by which the party of Donatus might be taught to be the Church of Christ. And we indeed, dearly beloved, when we hear false crimes from those whom we offend by preaching the utterances of truth and by refuting the empty talk of error, have, as you know, a most abundant consolation. For if, in those things for which they accuse me, the testimony of my conscience does not stand against me in the sight of God, on which no mortal eye is fixed; not only ought I not to be saddened, but I ought even to rejoice and exult, because my reward is great in heaven (See Matt 5:12).

For one must consider not how bitter, but how false is what I hear, and how truthful is he for whose name I hear this, and to whom it is said: Your name is ointment poured out (Song 1:3 (1:2)). And rightly it is fragrant among all the nations, whose fragrance these men, who curse us, try to shut up in one little part of Africa. Why, then, should we take it ill that those defame us who so detract from the glory of Christ, to whose party and contention it is hostile, that about his ascension to the heavens, and about the pouring out of his name as ointment, it was foretold so long before: Be exalted above the heavens, O God; and over all the earth your glory (Ps 57:11 (56:12))?

7. 8. Bringing forward these and such divine testimonies against human empty talk, we endure bitter reproaches from the enemies of the glory of Christ. Let them say what they will, while he exhorts us, saying: Blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed shall you be when they persecute you, and revile you, and say every evil against you, lying, for my sake (Matt 5:10-11). What he said above, for the sake of righteousness; this he repeated, what he said afterward, for my sake: because he was made for us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption; that, as it is written: He who glories, let him glory in the Lord (1 Cor 1:30-31). And since he says: Rejoice and exult, for your reward is great in heaven (Matt 5:12); if what was said, for the sake of righteousness and for my sake, I hold in a good conscience, whoever willingly detracts from my reputation, unwillingly adds to my reward.

For he did not teach me only by his word, and not also confirm it by his example. Follow the faith of the holy Scriptures, you will find that Christ rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father. Follow the accusations of his enemies, and you will now suppose that he was stolen from the tomb by the disciples. What else, then, ought we, as far as he grants, defending his house, to expect from his enemies? If they called the head of the household Beelzebul, how much more those of his household (Matt 10:25)? If, then, we endure, we shall also reign with him (2 Tim 2:12). But if not only does the wrath of the accuser strike the ear, but the truth of the crime also bites the conscience, what does it profit me if the whole world extols me with continual praises? So neither does the proclamation of the one praising heal a bad conscience, nor does the reproach of the one reviling wound a good one. Nor, even so, is your hope, which is in the Lord, deceived (See Ps 62:7 (61:8)), even if perhaps in secret we are such as the enemy desires us to be thought: because you did not place it in us, nor ever heard this from us. You are secure, then, whatever sort we may be, who have learned to say: Hoping in the Lord, I shall not be moved (Ps 26:1 (25:1))? and: In God I will hope, I will not fear what man may do to me (Ps 56:11 (55:11)). And to those who strive to seduce you to the earthly heights of proud men, you know how to answer: In the Lord I trust: how do you say to my soul, Migrate to the mountain like a sparrow? (Ps 11:1 (10:2))

8. 9. And not only you, to whom the very truth of Christ in us is pleasing, however and wherever it is preached through us, and who, because you gladly hear it through the small ministry of our tongue, think well and kindly even of us, are secure, whatever sort we may be; because your hope is in him whom we preach to you out of his mercy upon you; but also whoever of you have received, by our dispensation, even the sacrament of holy baptism, rejoice with the same security; since you were baptized not in us, but in Christ. And so you put on not us, but Christ (See Gal 3:27);

nor did I ask you whether you were being converted to me, but to the living God; nor whether you believed in me, but in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And if you answered with a truthful mind, what saved you was not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the inquiry of a good conscience (See 1 Pet 3:21); not a fellow servant, but the Lord; not a herald, but the judge. For it is not truly, as Petilian inconsiderately said: The conscience of the one giving, or what he added: The conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving.

For when that which is God's is given, even a conscience that is not holy gives something holy. Which conscience, certainly, whether it be holy or not holy, cannot be inspected by the one receiving; but plainly that which is given can be, which, known to him who is always holy, by whatever sort of minister it is received, is most securely received.

For unless the words from the chair of Moses were holy, the Truth would not say: What they say, do. But if those who gave the holy words were themselves holy, he would not say: What they do, do not do; for they say and do not do (Matt 23:2-3). For in no way is a grape read of from thorns; because it never springs from the roots of thorns; but when the shoot of the vine has entangled itself with thorny (See Matt 7:16) hedges, the fruit that hangs there is not therefore shuddered at; but the thorn is avoided, the grape is plucked.

9. 10. And so, as I have often said, and vehemently impress, whatever sort we may be, you are secure, who have God as Father and his Church as mother. For although the goats are pastured along with the sheep, they will not stand at the right hand. Although the chaff is threshed along with the wheat, it will not enter the barn. Although the bad fish swim along with the good within the Lord's nets, they will not be put into the vessels. Let no one glory, not even in a good man; let no one flee the good things of God, not even in an evil man.

10. 11. Let these things suffice you, dearly beloved catholic Christian brothers, for the present business; which if you hold with catholic love, since you are one flock secure under one shepherd, I do not much mind that some enemy reviles me—whether your fellow member of the flock, or certainly your dog; provided that he compels me to bark more for your defense than for my own;

which defense, nevertheless, if it were needed for the cause, I would use most briefly and most easily—namely, condemning and detesting, along with everyone, the whole time of my life before I received the baptism of Christ, as far as concerns my own desires and errors, lest in the defense of that time I should seem to seek my own glory, not that of him who freed me, through his grace, even from myself. Hence, when I hear that life of mine reproached, with whatever disposition he who does this may do it, I am not so ungrateful as to grieve; for as much as he accuses my vice, so much do I praise my physician. Why, then, should I now labor to defend those past and abolished evils of mine, about which Petilian said indeed many false things, but did not say more true ones?

But about the time of my life which is after baptism, to you who know me I speak superfluously of things which can be known to men; but those who do not know me ought not to be so unjust toward me as to believe Petilian about me rather than you. For if a praising friend is not to be believed, neither is a detracting enemy.

There remain the hidden things of a man, where the conscience alone is witness, which cannot be a witness among men (See Rom 2:15-16). In these Petilian says that I am a Manichee, speaking of another's conscience: this I say that I am not, speaking of my own conscience. Choose whom to believe. Nevertheless, since there is no need even of this brief and easy defense of mine, where the question turns not on the merit of any one man, but on the truth of the holy Church; to you also I must say more, whoever in the party of Donatus have read the curses which Petilian wrote against me, which I would not hear from him if I despised your perdition: if I did not have the bowels of Christian love.

11. 12. What wonder, then, if, when I draw the grains shaken out from the Lord's threshing floor inward along with the earth and chaff, I suffer the injury of the dust that springs back: or, when I diligently seek the lost sheep of my Lord, I am torn by the brambles of thorny tongues? I beseech you, lay aside for a little while the zeal of partisanship, and judge between me and Petilian with some fairness. I wish you to know the cause of the Church, he the cause of me: for what other reason, except that he does not dare to tell you not to believe my witnesses, whom I steadfastly bring forward in the cause of the Church; for they are the prophets, and the apostles, and Christ himself, the Lord of the prophets and apostles: but whatever he wishes to say about me, do you easily believe a man against a man, and yours against another?

And if I should bring forward any witnesses of my life, what great thing is it for him to say that they are not to be believed, and to persuade you of this quickly: especially since whoever speaks any word for me will at once be reckoned an enemy of the party of Donatus, and through this yours? And so Petilian reigns: when he hurls any insults at me, you all applaud and clap for him.

He has found for himself a winnable cause, but with you as judges: he requires neither witness nor argument, for whom this alone is to prove what he says, that he reviles most copiously the one whom you most hate.

For since the testimonies of divine Scripture, when they are recited so densely and so clearly for the catholic Church, remain mute to your grief;

he has chosen a subject in which he may speak with you favoring him, though conquered as to the truth even if he says such things, or even more wicked ones, about me a thousand times over.

For the matter I am now treating, it is enough for me that, whatever sort I may be in it, nevertheless the Church for which I speak is unconquered.

12. 13. For I am a man from the threshing floor of Christ; chaff if bad, grain if good. The tongue of Petilian is not the winnowing fork of this threshing floor: and through this, whatever evil he may even truly have said against its chaff, in no way prejudices its wheat. But whatever of curses and slanders he may have hurled against the wheat itself, their faith is exercised on earth, their reward is increased in heaven. For to the holy servants of God, soldiering in holiness for God, not against Petilian and flesh and blood of this kind, but against the principalities and powers and rulers of such darkness (See Eph 6:12), as are all the adversaries of the truth, to whom would that we might say: You were once darkness, but now light in the Lord (Eph 5:8); to the servants of God soldiering in this warfare, whatever criminal insults are spoken by the enemies, which among the malevolent and rashly credulous make a bad reputation, are weapons on the left; even by these the devil is overcome. For when, through a good reputation, we are tested whether we lift ourselves up into pride, and, through a bad reputation, we are tested whether we love the very enemies by whom things are fabricated against us, through the weapons of righteousness on the right and on the left we conquer the devil. Which, when the Apostle had mentioned, saying: Through the weapons of righteousness on the right and on the left; at once, as though expounding what he had said: Through glory, he says, and dishonor, through ill repute and good repute (2 Cor 6:7-8), and other such things: counting glory, that is, and good repute among the weapons on the right, but on the left dishonor and ill repute.

13. 14. If, then, I am a servant of God and a soldier not rejected, however eloquent a reviler Petilian may prove against me, ought I to take it ill that a most skillful smith of left-hand weapons has been procured for me? It is necessary that I fight most skillfully with these in the help of my Lord, and that I strike with them him against whom I fight invisibly, who, with a most perverse and most ancient cunning, craftily aims and acts so that, on account of these things, I may hate Petilian, and thus may not be able to fulfill the command of Christ which says: Love your enemies (Luke 6:35).

May the mercy of him avert this from me, who loved me, and handed himself over for me, so that, hanging on the cross, he might say: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do (Luke 23:34): and might teach me to say about Petilian and such enemies of mine: Lord, forgive them, for they do not know what they say.

14. 15. Accordingly, if I obtain from you, as I have aimed, that, with all zeal of partisanship removed from your minds, you be fair judges between me and Petilian; I will show you that he did not answer my writings: so that you may understand that, compelled by the poverty of truth, he abandoned the cause, and hurled what curses he could against the man who so conducted it that he could not answer.

Although the things I am going to say shine forth with such great clearness that, even if, through zeal of partisanship and hatred of me, your minds are alienated from me, if only you read both, you would certainly confess, among yourselves in your hearts, that I have spoken the truth.

14. 16. For I, in replying to the first part of his writings, which had then come into my hands, passing over the abusive and sacrilegious verbosity where he says: They charge us with a second baptism, those who, under the name of baptism, have polluted their souls with a guilty washing, than whom indeed, in their obscenity, all filth is cleaner; whom a perverse cleanness has caused to be defiled by their own water;

set myself to discuss and refute what follows, where he says: For the conscience of the one giving is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving. And I asked whence he is to be washed who receives baptism, when the conscience of the one giving is polluted, and the one about to receive does not know this.

15. 17. Read now his most copious curses, which, puffed up and angry, he poured out against me; and see whether he answered me when I asked whence he is to be washed who has received baptism, when the conscience of the one giving is polluted, and the one receiving does not know this. I beseech you, search attentively, examine all the pages, count all the lines, turn over all the words, pick apart all the syllables; and tell me, if you find it, where he answered, when the conscience of the one giving is polluted, whence that of the one who does not know this, about to receive it, is to be washed.

15. 18. For what did it bear on the matter, that he added a word which he said had been omitted by me, and so contends that he wrote thus: For the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving?

For—that you may know it was not omitted by me—the addition in no way hinders my inquiry, in no way relieves his failure. For I ask again of the very words, and inquire whether he answered: If the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving; whence is the conscience of the one receiving washed, when the conscience of the one giving is stained, and the one about to receive does not know this?

Demand that this be answered, and do not permit the man, abandoning the cause, to be abusively alienated: If the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded: see that I did not say, the conscience of the one giving; but I added, of the one giving in holiness: If the conscience, I say, of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving; whence, then, is he to be washed who receives baptism, when the conscience of the one giving is polluted, and the one about to receive does not know this?

16. 19. Let him go now, and with panting lungs and swollen throat accuse me as a dialectician: rather, not me, but dialectic itself, as the artificer of lying, let him summon as a defendant to a popular tribunal, and against it let him distend the mouth of a forensic advocate with whatever most thunderous din.

Let him say whatever he wishes among the ignorant, at which the learned grow indignant, and the unlearned are deluded. Let him brand me, on account of rhetoric, with the name of Tertullus the orator, by whom Paul was accused (See Acts 24:1): let him impose on himself, on account of the advocacy in which he once boasts of his power, the name of the Paraclete, and on this account let him rave that he is—not that he is, but that he was—the namesake of the Holy Spirit.

Let him most gladly amplify the uncleannesses of the Manichees, and try, by barking, to twist them onto me. Let him recite the deeds of condemned men, unknown and known to me, and let him turn the fact that there a former friend of mine named me, absent, rather for his own defense, into the slander of a prejudged crime, by some new law of his own. Let him read the titles of my letters, inscribed by himself, or by his own people, as it pleased them, and let him exult as though he had caught me confessing in them.

Let him defame, with a ridiculous name of poisonous shamefulness and frenzy, the eulogiae of bread given simply and cheerfully, and let him think so ill of your heart as to presume that it can be believed of him that love-charms were given to a woman, with her husband not only aware but even favoring it. What the ordainer of my future episcopate, angry, wrote about me while I was still a presbyter, let him wish to avail against me: but that he asked and obtained pardon from the holy council for this, in which he so sinned against us, let him be unwilling should avail for me; so ignorant or forgetful of Christian gentleness and the evangelical command that he charges as a crime even that which was clemently forgiven to a brother humbly asking that it be forgiven him as for himself.

17. 20. Let him proceed too, with verbose, but plainly empty, speech, into things which he utterly does not know, or rather in which he abuses the ignorance of very many: and from the confession of a certain woman, that she said she was a catechumen of the Manichees, who had been a consecrated woman in the catholic Church, let him say and write what pleases him about their baptism, not knowing, or pretending not to know, that there catechumens are not so called as though baptism were owed to them at some time; but that those are called this who are also called Hearers, because, forsooth, they cannot observe the better and greater precepts which are observed by those whom they think to be distinguished and honored by the name of the Elect.

Let him contend, with wonderful rashness, whether deceived or deceiving, that I too was a presbyter of the Manichees. Let him set forth, under whatever understanding seems good to him, and find fault with, the words of the fourth book of my Confessions, which are by themselves, and from much said before and after, most plain to readers. Finally, let him, as a thief of his words, because I omitted two, exult as victor, as though they had been restored.

18. 21. In all these things, certainly, as you will be able to learn or relearn by reading, he exercised the onslaught of his tongue in whatever circuit of boasting he pleased: nowhere, however, did he say whence the conscience of the one receiving is washed, when he does not know the stained conscience of the one giving.

But I, amid his great din, or after his great din, and—as he himself thinks—exceedingly terrible, slowly, as the saying goes, and well, repeat this very thing, demanding that he at least answer it: If the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving; whence is he to be washed who does not know the stained conscience of the one giving? And throughout his whole letter I find nothing said to this.

19. 22. For perhaps one of you will say to me: All these things which he said against you he wished to avail for this, to deform you, and through you those with whom you communicate, lest henceforth they think you to be of any importance, whether they themselves, or those whom you strive to bring over to your communion. But from the point at which he set forth the words of your letter, from that point it is to be considered whether he answered nothing to them. So, then, let us do: from that very place let us consider his writings.

Setting aside, then, the preface by which I wished to prepare the reader's mind, and passing over a few of his first words, abusive rather than pertinent to the matter: He says, I say: For the conscience of the one giving is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving. What if the conscience of the one giving is hidden, and perhaps stained? How will it be able to wash the conscience of the one receiving, if, as he says, the conscience of the one giving is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving?

For if he says that whatever evil has been hidden in the conscience of the one giving does not pertain to the one receiving, that ignorance will avail perhaps for this, that the receiver, not knowing, cannot be stained by the conscience of his baptizer. Let it suffice, then, that another's stained conscience, when it is unknown, does not stain: but can it also wash? Whence, then, is he to be washed who receives baptism, when the conscience of the one giving is polluted, and the one about to receive does not know this; especially since he adds and says: For he who has taken faith from a faithless man does not receive faith, but guilt (See above, 1.1-2)?

20. 23. All these words Petilian set forth from my letter to be refuted: let us see, then, whether he refuted them, whether he answered at all. For I add the words which he slanderously claims I omitted, and repeat those very ones, even more briefly.

For by adding these two words, he has also helped me greatly toward the brevity of this proposition. If the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving, and he who knowingly takes faith from a faithless man does not receive faith, but guilt; whence is the conscience of the one receiving washed, when he does not know the stained conscience of the one giving; and when, not knowing, he takes faith from a faithless man? I ask, whence is he washed?

Let him tell us, let him not go off into something else, let him not spread clouds before the ignorant. Finally, with however many and winding circuits interposed and gone through, let him at last at some time tell us whence the conscience of the one receiving is washed, when the stained conscience of the faithless baptizer is hidden, if the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving, and he who knowingly takes faith from a faithless man does not receive faith, but guilt.

For, not knowing, he takes from a faithless man who does not have the conscience of one giving in holiness, but a stained and hidden one: whence, then, is he washed? Whence does he receive faith?

For if he is neither washed then, nor receives faith then, when the faithless and stained baptizer is hidden; why, when that man has afterward been betrayed and condemned, is he not baptized anew, that he may be washed and receive faith? But if, with that faithless and stained man hidden, he is washed and receives faith; whence is he washed, whence does he receive, where there is not the conscience of one giving in holiness, which washes that of the one receiving?

Let him say this, let him answer this: Whence is he washed, whence does he receive, if the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving; and this is not there, when the stained and faithless baptizer was hidden? Nothing at all has been answered to this.

21. 24. But behold, hemmed in in the cause, he again makes a cloudy and windy onslaught against me, so that the serenity of the truth may be obscured; and he becomes copious out of the utmost poverty, not by saying true things, but by vomiting empty curses.

Hold most intently and most firmly, indeed, what he ought to answer, that is, whence the conscience of the one receiving is washed, when the stained conscience of the one giving is hidden: lest perhaps his blast shake this out of your hands, and you yourselves be swept away by the dark tempest of turbid speech, so that you do not at all know either whence the departure was made, or whither return is to be made.

And see the man wandering wherever he can, while he cannot stand firm for the business he undertook. See how many things he says, having nothing to say. He says that I slip and am slippery, but am held: that I neither establish nor confirm what I object, that I devise uncertain things for certain, that I do not permit readers to believe what is true, but make them suspect the doubtful things more deeply. He says that I have the damnable talent of the Academic Carneades.

He even tries to insinuate what the Academics hold about the falsity or deceptiveness of human sense, being utterly ignorant, even in these things, of what he is saying. He asserts that it is said by them that snows are black when they are white, and that silver is black, that a tower seems round or smooth when it is square, that an oar in water is broken when it is whole.

And all this for the reason that, when he had said: The conscience of the one giving or of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which washes that of the one receiving; I, on the contrary, said: What if the conscience of the one giving is hidden, and perhaps stained?

These are the black snows, and the black silver, and the round tower for the square, and the oar in water broken instead of whole! For I said a thing which can be supposed, and cannot be: that the conscience of the one giving is hidden, and perhaps stained.

21. 25. And he pursues himself, and cries out: What is 'What if'; what is 'Perhaps'? except the uncertain and inconstant hesitation of one doubting, about which that man of yours says: What if I now return to those who say: What if the sky should now fall? (Terence, Heautontimorumenos 4.3.41).

Is this which I said: What if the conscience of the one giving is hidden, and perhaps stained; such as if I had said: What if the sky should now fall?

It was said, surely: What if; because it can be that it is hidden, it can be that it is not hidden: for when it is not known what he thinks, or what he has committed, the conscience of the one giving is certainly hidden from the one receiving; but when his sin is made manifest, it is not hidden.

It was said: And perhaps stained; because it can be that it is hidden and clean, and again it can be that it is hidden and stained. Therefore: What if; therefore: Perhaps. Is this like: What if the sky should now fall?

O how often have men been both convicted and confessed that they had stained and adulterous consciences, when the unwitting were baptized by them, after, the crime being made manifest, they were degraded, and yet the sky did not fall! What does Philus do here, and Furius, who defended injustice against justice?

What does the atheist Protagoras do here, who denied that God exists, so that of him the prophet seems to have foretold: The fool said in his heart: There is no God (Ps 14:1 (13:1))? What do these men do here? Why were they named, except to intervene for a man who has nothing to say; so that, while at least something is said about them without cause, the cause may seem to be conducted, and what has not been answered may be believed to have been answered?

22. 26. Finally, if those two or three words: What if, and Perhaps, are so intolerable that on their account the long-sleeping Academics are roused, and Carneades, and Philus, and Furius, and Diagoras, and the black snows, and the falling of the sky, and the rest, likewise insane and absurd; let them be removed from the midst. For in truth, without them, what we wish to say can be said. See, it suffices, what was put down a little after, and interposed by him himself from my letter: Whence, then, is he to be washed who receives baptism, when the conscience of the one giving is polluted, and the one about to receive does not know this? (See above, 1.2) Surely here there is no: What if, and Perhaps. Let it be answered, then. Attend, lest perhaps in what follows he answer this: But I, he says, bind you, cavilling, to the faith of believing, that you may wander no further. Why do you turn life away with arguments of folly, with errors? Why do you disturb the reason of faith about irrational matters? By this one word I hold and confute you.

These things Petilian said, not I. These are from the letter of Petilian; but to it I added those two words which he charges me with having taken away, and nonetheless showed that the statement of my inquiry, to which he does not answer, stands fixed much more briefly and clearly. Surely these are those two, in holiness, and knowingly: so that it is not, forsooth, the conscience of the one giving, but the conscience of the one giving in holiness; and it is not, he who takes faith from a faithless man, but he who knowingly takes faith from a faithless man. Which words indeed I had not omitted, but had not found in the codex which had been given to me. But it can be that it was faulty; for neither is this incredible, that even from this an Academic resentment be roused against me, and that what I said—that the codex was faulty—be asserted to be such as if I said the snows are black. For why do I repay him a rash suspicion, so as to say that he himself afterward added what he pretended I had omitted; when the codex, which does not grow angry, can bear this mark of faultiness without my abusive rashness?

23. 27. The first of these, namely of one giving in holiness, does not in the least hinder my inquiry, on which he is hard pressed: whether I should put it this way, If the conscience of the one giving is regarded, or rather this way, If the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving; for then, how is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, if the conscience of the one giving is defiled, and the one who is going to receive it does not know this?

As for the other word that is added, knowingly, so that it does not read, For whoever receives faith from one who is faithless, but rather, Whoever knowingly receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt;

I admit that I said certain things as though it were missing, the loss of which I bear easily, since they brought more delay to my ease than help to my argument.

For how much more readily, how much more plainly and briefly, do I put the question thus: If the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving, and, whoever knowingly receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt, then by what is the one cleansed from whom the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness is hidden, and from what does the one receive true faith who is unknowingly baptized by one who is faithless?

Let it be said from what, and there the whole case of baptism will lie open, there everything that is in question will come to light—but only if it is said, not if the time is used up in cursing.

24. 28. Whatever, then, he slanderously alleges about these two words—either when they are taken away or when they are added, in which he glories—you see that it in no way hinders my question. Finding nothing to answer to it, yet so as not to be silent, he repeatedly rushes upon my person; I would say that he wanders away from the case, if he had ever come to the case at all. As though it were a matter of me, and not of the truth of the Church or of baptism, he says that I argued by removing those two words, so that it would not tell against my conscience, as he puts it, that I was ignorant of the sacrilegious conscience of the one who, as he says, defiled me.

But if that were so, the word that was set down, knowingly, would rather have helped me when added and harmed me when taken away. For if I had wanted to defend myself in such a way as to be thought ignorant of the conscience of the one who baptized me,

I would have taken Petilian to have spoken on my behalf, since he does not say merely, Whoever receives faith from one who is faithless, but, Whoever knowingly receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt—so that from this I might boast that I had received not guilt but faith, because I would say: I did not knowingly receive it from one faithless, but, being human, I was ignorant of the conscience of the man who gave it.

See, then, and count, if you can, how many superfluous things he says against the one word I was ignorant, which he sets forth as my having said, though I said no such thing at all—for it was not a matter of me, that I should say it, nor did any charge appear against the one who baptized me, such that I should be forced, in my own defense, to say that I was ignorant of his conscience.

25. 29. And yet, so as not to answer the things I have said, he sets before himself what I did not say; and he leads people away from attending to what he owes, so that what he must answer is not demanded. He frequently interposes, You say, I was ignorant; and he replies, But if you were ignorant; and he, as it were, refutes me, so that I may not be allowed to say, I was ignorant.

He recalls Mensurius, Caecilian, Macarius, Taurinus, and Romanus, and affirms that they acted against the Church of God in ways that I could not be ignorant of, since I am an African, and now nearly an old man in age—although, as I hear, Mensurius died in the unity of communion before the party of Donatus tore itself away, and I have read the case of Caecilian, that they brought it before Constantine, and that he was acquitted, both once and again, by the bishops whom that emperor had appointed as judges, and a third time by the emperor himself, when they appealed to him against them.

As for Macarius, Taurinus, and Romanus, whatever they did by judicial or executive power against the obstinate fury of those men on behalf of unity, it is established that they did it according to the laws—the very laws which those same men compelled to be enacted and applied against themselves by bringing the case of Caecilian to the emperor's judgment.

25. 30. Among many things that have nothing at all to do with the matter, he also says that I was struck by a sentence of the proconsul Messianus, so that I fled from Africa; and on account of this falsehood (which, if he did not himself invent it, he at least believed with ill will when malicious people invented it), he did not fear, with astonishing rashness, not only to say but even to write many other falsehoods consequent upon it;

whereas I came to Milan before Bauto was consul, and on the first of January, before so great an assembly and in the sight of so many people, I recited a panegyric in his honor, as consul, in keeping with my profession of rhetoric at the time; and from that sojourn I returned to Africa only after the death of the tyrant Maximus, while the proconsul Messianus heard the case of the Manichees after the consulship of Bauto, as the date of the proceedings inserted by Petilian himself shows. And if it were necessary to prove these things to those who doubt or who believe the contrary, I could bring forward as most reliable witnesses many men illustrious in the world for that whole period of my life.

26. 31. But why do we pursue these matters? Why do we both endure and cause superfluous delays? Are we going to find from this how the conscience of the one receiving is to be cleansed, when he is ignorant of the stained conscience of the one giving; and from what he receives faith, who is unknowingly baptized by one faithless? When Petilian had set this before himself from my letter, as though to answer it, he said whatever else he pleased rather than what the case required.

How often did he say, If you were ignorant, as though I had said—what I never said—that I was ignorant of the conscience of the one who baptized me? And with his slanderous mouth he seemed to be doing nothing else than to prove that I was not ignorant of the evils of those among whom I was baptized and in whose communion I was joined—understanding well enough that ignorance would not make me guilty. See, then: if I were ignorant, as he so often repeated, I would without doubt be innocent of all those evils. From what, then, would I be cleansed, who, being ignorant of the conscience of one not giving in holiness, could in no way be hindered by his crimes?

From what would I receive faith, who am unknowingly baptized by one faithless? For it was not in vain that he so often repeated, If you were ignorant, except that he might not allow me to be thought innocent—indicating without doubt that no one's innocence is violated if he unknowingly receives faith from one faithless and is ignorant of the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness. Let him say, then, from what such people are cleansed, from what they receive faith and not guilt.

But let it not deceive you: let him say it; let him not, by saying much, say nothing, or rather, by saying nothing, say much. Then there is something that comes to mind and must not be passed over. If I am guilty for this reason, that I was not ignorant—to speak as he does—and the reason I was not ignorant is that I am both an African and now nearly an old man in age, then at least the children in the rest of the world should not be guilty, who by neither nation nor age could know these charges of yours, whether true or false; and yet, if they fall in with you, they are rebaptized without any regard.

27. 32. But now we are not asking about that; let him rather answer this (and to avoid being forced to answer it, he digresses most copiously):

from what is the conscience of the one receiving cleansed, who is ignorant of the stained conscience of the one giving, if the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving;

and from what does he receive faith, who is unknowingly baptized by one faithless, if whoever knowingly receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt.

Setting aside, then, his curses, which he flung at me without any sound consideration, let us still attend, in case he should perhaps say in what follows the thing we are asking for. It is worth observing, too, how garrulously he set out my words, as though he were going to demolish and overturn them most easily. But let us return, he says, to that argument of your fantasy, in which you fancied you could paint for me with words any baptizer you pleased. For it was fitting that you should imagine verisimilar things, you who do not see the truth. These words of his own Petilian spoke first, intending to set forth my words. Then he added: See, you say, the faithless one stands ready to baptize, but the one who is to be baptized is ignorant of his faithlessness (See above, 1.2.3).

He did not state my whole proposition and question, and soon he himself began to question me, saying: Who is this, or from where did he spring up, whom you set forth? Why do you seem to yourself to see one whom you feign, so as not to see the one whom you ought most diligently to see and examine and approve? But because I understand that you are ignorant of the order of the sacrament, I tell you this briefly: you ought both to have examined the baptizer and to have been examined by him.

What is it we were waiting for? That he should say from what the conscience of the one receiving is cleansed, who is ignorant of the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness, and from what he receives faith and not guilt, who unknowingly receives baptism from one faithless. See, we have heard that the baptizer ought to be most diligently examined by the one who wishes to receive faith and not guilt, so that he may find the conscience of one giving in holiness, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving.

For the one who has not examined him, and has unknowingly received from one faithless, by the very fact that he did not examine him and was ignorant of the stained conscience of the one giving, had nothing from which to receive faith, but guilt.

What help, then, was it that he added, as something great, the word knowingly, which he slanderously claimed I had removed? For when he refused to have it said this way—Whoever receives faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt—he seemed to have left some hope for the one who is ignorant.

But now, when he is asked from what he receives faith, who is unknowingly baptized by one faithless, he answered that the man ought to have examined the baptizer; without doubt he does not even permit the wretched man to be ignorant, since he finds nothing from which the man could receive faith unless he has placed his hope in the man baptizing him.

28. 33. This is what we shudder at in you, this is what the divine sentence condemns, crying out most truly and most plainly: Cursed is everyone who places his hope in man (Jer 17:5). This is what holy humility and apostolic love most openly forbids, when Paul cries out: Let no one boast in men (1 Cor 3:21). This is why the onslaught of empty slanders and bitter curses grows ever fiercer against us, so that, with the man as it were overthrown, no hope may remain for those to whom we minister the word of God and the sacrament, according to the stewardship entrusted to us. We answer them: How long will you set yourselves upon a man? (Ps 62:3 (61:4))

The venerable catholic society answers them: Shall not my soul be subject to God? For from him is my salvation. For he himself is my God and my protector; I shall not be moved (Ps 62:1-2 (61:2-3)). For what other cause was there for these men to depart from the house of God, except that they pretended they could not bear the vessels made for dishonor (See 2 Tim 2:20), without which that house will not be until the day of judgment—although it appears, from the deeds done and recorded at the time, that this was rather their own doing, which they slanderously charged against others?

Concerning these vessels made for dishonor, lest on account of them he should be disturbed and depart from the great house, which belongs to one great householder, the servant of God—the good and faithful man, or the one who is to receive faith in baptism—says what I recalled a little before: Shall not my soul be subject to God? To God, indeed, not to man. For from him is my salvation, not from man.

But this man, so that he might not even then give the man to God to be cleansed and made clean, when the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness is hidden, and someone unknowingly receives faith from one faithless—This, he says, I tell you briefly: you ought both to have examined the baptizer and to have been examined by him.

29. 34. I beg you, attend to this: I ask from what the conscience of the one receiving is cleansed, when he is ignorant of the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness, if the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving;

and from what he receives faith, who is unknowingly baptized by one faithless, if whoever knowingly receives faith from one faithless receives not faith but guilt; and he answers me that both the baptizer and the one to be baptized must be examined.

And to prove this, about which there is no question, he brings forward the example of John, that those who asked him who he said he was examined him (See John 1:22); and that he too examined those to whom he said: Brood of vipers, who showed you how to flee from the wrath to come? (Matt 3:7) What has this to do with the matter? What has this to do with the case?

God had borne witness to John's most excellent holiness, with a most splendid prophecy preceding both when he was conceived and when he was born. But those men, already believing him to be holy, were asking which of the holy ones he said he was, or whether he himself was the holy one of holy ones, who is Christ Jesus. For so great was the grace attributed to him that whatever he said about himself was immediately believed. But if from this example it is asserted that any baptizer now must be examined, then whatever each one says about himself will have to be believed. And who is the feigned man, whom indeed the Holy Spirit flees, as it is written (See Wis 1:5), who does not want the best to be believed about himself, and who does not try to bring this about with whatever words he can? So then, when he has been asked who he is, and has answered that he is a faithful steward of God and has a conscience defiled by the stain of no crime, will this be the whole examination, or must his character and life also be looked into more carefully? Yes, indeed—but it is not written that those who questioned John in the desert of the Jordan as to who he was did this.

30. 35. Hence this example does not pertain at all to the matter in question. That apostolic sentence rather instills sufficient care, where it says: Let them first be tested, and so let them serve, having no charge against them (1 Tim 3:10). And since this is done carefully and customarily by almost everyone on both sides, how is it that so many reprobate men have been found after the time of their stewardship was carried out, except that human diligence is very often deceived, and that some who were at first good change for the worse?

Since these things happen so often that they let no one disregard or forget them, what is the point of Petilian's teaching us briefly and insultingly that the baptizer must be examined by the one to be baptized, when we are asking from what the conscience of the one receiving is to be cleansed, when the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness is hidden, if the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving? Because I understand, he says, that you are ignorant of the order of the sacrament, I tell you this briefly: you ought both to have examined the baptizer and to have been examined by him. What an answer!

In so many places so great a multitude of people surrounds him, people who were baptized by men who, though they seemed at first to be just and chaste, were afterward, when their crimes were laid bare, convicted and cast down;

and he thinks he can escape the force of this question, by which we ask from what the conscience of the one receiving is cleansed, when he is ignorant of the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness, if the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving—because he briefly says that the baptizer must be examined.

Nothing is more wretched than not to consent to the truth, by which a person is so hemmed in that he can find no way out. We ask from whom he receives faith, who is unknowingly baptized by one faithless. The answer is: He ought to have examined his baptizer. So then, because he does not examine him and receives faith, even unknowingly, from one faithless, does he receive not faith but guilt?

Why, then, are those not baptized anew who are established to have been baptized, while they were still in hiding, by men afterward exposed and convicted?

31. 36. And where is the word I added, he says, namely 'knowingly,' so that I would not say, 'Whoever receives faith from one faithless,' but, 'Whoever knowingly receives faith from one faithless receives not faith but guilt'?

Therefore the one who unknowingly received from one faithless received faith, not guilt; and so I ask from what he received it. Here, hemmed in, he answers: He ought to have examined him.

Granted, he ought to have; he did not, or was not able to. What is your judgment about him? Was he cleansed or not? If he was cleansed, I ask, from what? For the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness, of which he was ignorant, could not cleanse him. But if he was not cleansed, then command that he be cleansed. You do not so command; therefore he was cleansed. Say from what!

Say, at least, what he did not say. For I set forth the very words to which he could not reply. See, the faithless one stands ready to baptize; but the one who is to be baptized is ignorant of his faithlessness. What do you think he will receive—faith or guilt? (See above, 1.2.2) What has been set forth thus far is enough: answer it, or look carefully at what he answered.

You will find his reproaches refuted. For he blames me, as though mocking, because I set forth verisimilar things, I who do not see the truth. And repeating my words, with the sentence cut in half, he says: You say, see, the faithless one stands ready to baptize, but the one who is to be baptized is ignorant of his faithlessness. Then he adds: Who is this, or from where did he spring up? As though there were one or two, and not everything full on both sides of such men.

Why does he ask me who this man is, or from where he springs up, and not rather look around and see that the churches are rare, whether in the cities or in the country, that do not have men detected in crimes and cast down from the clergy? While they were in hiding, and wished to seem good when they were evil, and to be thought chaste when they were adulterers, they were surely feigned; surely the Holy Spirit fled from them, as it is written (See Wis 1:5).

From the crowd of these men still lying hidden, then, sprang up that faithless one whom I set forth. Why does he ask me from where he sprang up, closing his eyes against so great a crowd, from which—if one considers only those who could be convicted and cast down—their noise is enough even for the blind?

32. 37. What of the fact that he himself put in his letter that Quodvultdeus, convicted of two adulteries among you and cast out, was received by our people? What then (and I would say this without prejudice to that man, who either proved or persuaded that his cause was good): when such men among you, not yet detected, baptize, what is received from them—faith or guilt?

Surely not faith, because they do not have the conscience of one giving in holiness, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving. But neither guilt, on account of that added word: For whoever knowingly receives faith from one faithless receives not faith but guilt. And when people were baptized by these men, they certainly did not know what sort of men they were.

Accordingly, since they did not receive faith from them, because they did not have the conscience of one giving in holiness, and did not receive guilt either, because they were baptized not knowing but unknowing of their crimes, they remained without faith and without guilt.

They are not, then, in the number of such criminals. But neither can they be in the number of the faithful, since they could receive faith from them no more than guilt. Yet we see them reckoned by you in the number of the faithful, and none of you decides that they should be baptized, but you ratify the fact that they were baptized.

So they received faith; yet they did not receive it from those men, who did not have the conscience of one giving in holiness, which would cleanse the conscience of the one receiving. From what, then, did they receive it? This is what I am at pains over, this is what I urgently ask, this is what I most vehemently demand to be answered.

33. 38. Look now at Petilian, lest he answer this, or lest he be found unable to answer it: see how he wanders about emptily through his abuse of us, accusing and proving nothing; and where he perhaps tries to resist for his cause, as though pugnaciously, he is everywhere most easily overcome; and yet to this one thing that we ask, he answers nothing at all: If the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving, from what is the one to be cleansed who receives baptism, when the conscience of the one giving is polluted, and the one who is going to receive it is ignorant of this.

For with these words recalled from my letter, he set forth my question and showed himself answering nothing. For when he had said the things I have already reviewed, in which I showed that he did not answer what I asked,

and when, hemmed in by great difficulties, he was forced to say that the baptizer must be examined by the one to be baptized, and the one to be baptized by the baptizer; and when he had tried to establish this by the example of John, in case he should perhaps find the most negligent or most ignorant hearers, he brought forward other testimonies from the Scriptures that do not pertain to the matter:

namely, that the eunuch said to Philip, See, here is water; what prevents me from being baptized? (Acts 8:36) because he knew, he says, that the lost are prevented; and that Philip did not forbid him to be baptized because he had approved, from his reading, how he believed in Christ—as though Philip had forbidden Simon Magus.

And that the prophets feared to be deceived by a false baptism, and that Isaiah therefore said, deceitful water, having no faithfulness (Jer 15:18), as though showing that among faithless men the water is deceitful—although it was not Isaiah but Jeremiah who said this of deceitful men, calling the people figuratively "water," which is most plainly shown in Revelation (See Rev 17:15). And that David said, Let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head—although he said this of the flattery of a fawner deceiving with false praise, by which the head of the one praised swells into pride.

The words set down earlier in the same psalm open up this meaning. For he says thus: The just man will correct me in mercy and reprove me; but let not the oil of the sinner fatten my head (Ps 141:5 (140:5)). What is clearer than this sentence? What more evident? For he prefers to be reproved by the harsh correction of a just man, mercifully, so that he may be healed, rather than to be anointed by the soft flatteries of a fawner, lest he be puffed up.

34. 39. Petilian also recalls that the apostle Paul warned us not to believe every spirit, but to test the spirits, whether they are from God (See 1 John 4:1)—as though this diligence were applied so that now, before the time, the wheat might be separated from the chaff, and not rather so that the wheat might not be deceived by the chaff; or as though, indeed, if even a lying spirit said something true, it must be denied because a detestable spirit said it. Whoever thinks this is so mad that he might perhaps contend that Peter ought not to have said, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matt 16:16), because the demons had already said something of the kind (See Matt 8:29; Mark 1:24; Luke 8:28). Since, then, the baptism of Christ, whether administered through an unjust or a just man, is nothing other than the baptism of Christ, the cautious and good believer must avoid the man's wickedness, not condemn the sacraments of God.

34. 40. In all these things, certainly, Petilian does not answer: if the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving, from what is the one to be cleansed who receives baptism, when the conscience of the one giving is polluted, and the one who is going to receive it is ignorant of this.

A certain colleague of his from Thubursicu, named Cyprian, was caught with a most disgraceful woman in a brothel, was brought before Primianus of Carthage, and was condemned. This man, when he baptized, before he was detected and cast out, certainly did not have the conscience of one giving in holiness, which would cleanse the conscience of the one receiving.

From what, then, were those cleansed who today, now that he is condemned, are certainly not cleansed again? It would not have been necessary for me to name the man, except so that Petilian might not again say, Who is this, or from where did he spring up? (See above, 3.29.34) Why did your people not examine this baptizer, as John, on Petilian's view, was examined? Or did they examine him too, as far as men could examine a man, but failed for a long time to find one who lay hidden by cunning pretense?

Was this man's water not deceitful, or is the oil of a fornicator not the oil of a sinner? Or is it as the Catholic Church says, and as is true—that the water and the oil belonged not to the one who administered them, but to the one whose name was invoked there? Why did those who were baptized by this feigned and hidden man not test the spirit, since it was not from God? For the Holy Spirit of discipline flees the feigned man (Wis 1:5). Or did the Spirit both flee him and yet not desert his own sacraments, although administered through him?

Finally, since you do not deny that those were cleansed whom, now that he is condemned, you do not trouble to have cleansed again,

see whether, amid so many clouds spread about in manifold ways, Petilian answers at any point from what these were cleansed, if the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving—a conscience which the hidden, unclean man could not have.

35. 41. Answering nothing, then, to what is so insistently asked of him, and next procuring for himself a broad scope of speech, he says: Since both the prophets and the apostle feared these things cautiously, with what face do you say that for those who believe well the baptism of a sinner is holy? As though I, or any Catholic, would say that the baptism is a sinner's baptism, which is given or received with a sinner administering it, and not the baptism of him in whose name the one believing is baptized.

From there he now runs off to Judas the traitor, and says against him whatever he can, bringing in the prophetic testimonies that were sent forth about him so long before—as though he would drench the Church of Christ, spread throughout the whole world, whose cause is at issue in this question, with the impiety of Judas the traitor; not considering that from this very thing he ought to have been admonished that it is no more to be doubted that the Church of Christ is the one spread among all nations, since this was truly prophesied so long beforehand, than it is to be doubted that Christ had to be betrayed by one of his disciples, since this too was likewise prophesied.

36. 42. But clearly, after these things, when Petilian comes to that objection of ours—that they received the baptism of the Maximianists, whom they had condemned (See 1.10.11)—although in setting forth this question he preferred to use his own words rather than mine (for we do not say that the baptism of sinners ought to benefit us, since we say it is the baptism not only of no sinners, but of no men at all, because we recognize that it is Christ's)—he set it forth thus: But you persistently assert, he says, that the baptism of sinners ought to benefit you, on the ground that we too, as you said, preserve the baptism of the guilty whom we justly condemned.

When he came to this question, as I said, all his strength, even his feigned combat, failed him. Where to go, by what way to get out, by what passage—searched out or contrived—to escape secretly, or by what force to break out, he did not find. Although I shall show in the second book, he says, how great a difference there is between us and our people and you and yours, whom you call innocent—still, in the meantime, first rescue yourselves from the crimes of your colleagues, which you know, and then inquire into the case of those whom we cast out. Is this how anyone answers? What man would answer thus, except one who opposes the truth, against which he finds nothing to answer? If, then, we too say the same words—In the meantime, first rescue yourselves from the crimes of your colleagues which you know, and then lay any charge against us concerning those whom you think evil among us—have we both won, or have we both been defeated?

Rather, he won for his Church and in his Church who taught us in his Scripture, that no one should boast in man, and that he who boasts should boast in the Lord (1 Cor 3:21). For see: we who say, with the word of truth, that the believer is justified not by the man by whom he is baptized, but by him of whom it is written, To the one who believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness (Rom 4:5)—since we do not boast in man, and strive, with him giving the grace, when we boast, to boast in the Lord—how secure we are, whatever error or crime he could prove about certain men of our communion!

For among us whoever are evil either lie wholly hidden, or, being known to some, are tolerated for the sake of the good to whom they are unknown and before whom they cannot be convicted, for the sake of the bond of unity and peace, lest the wheat be rooted up along with the weeds; so they bear the burden of their own wickedness in such a way that no one shares in it with them except those whom their iniquity pleases. For we do not fear that those whom they baptize cannot be justified, since those believe in him who justifies the ungodly, so that their faith is reckoned as righteousness (See Rom 4:5).

37. 43. Accordingly, among us neither the man he said was cast out by us for the crime of the Sodomites, with another appointed in his place, and then restored again to our college—not knowing what he is talking about—nor the man whom he recalls to have been a penitent among you—however their cases may or may not be defended—prejudge anything against the Church of God, which is spread among all nations and grows in the world until the harvest;

in which, if those you accuse are truly evil, they are no longer in the Church itself but in its chaff; but if they are good, then when you defame them with unjust accusations, they themselves are tested like gold, while you burn like chaff. Yet the Church is not stained by others' sins—the Church which, spread throughout the whole world according to the most faithful prophecies, awaits the end of the age as a shore, where, once it has been brought, it will be free of the bad fish, with which, within the same nets of the Lord, so long as it ought not impatiently to be separated from them, the inconvenience of nature could be borne innocently.

Nor, for all that, is ecclesiastical discipline neglected by the steadfast, diligent, and prudent stewards of Christ, where crimes are made manifest in such a way that they cannot be defended on any probable ground. Countless instances exist among those who were either bishops or clergy of some such rank, and who, now degraded, have either gone off to other lands out of shame, or crossed over to you yourselves or to other heresies, or are known in their own regions; the multitude of these, scattered across the lands, is so great that, if Petilian had thought about it with the rashness of his cursing reined in a little, he would by no means have fallen into so plainly false and empty a sentence, by which he thought he must say to us: None of you is innocent, where no guilty person is condemned.

38. 44. For, to pass over others dwelling in various lands—for scarcely anywhere is this kind of man lacking, from whom it is clear that wicked overseers and ministers are wont to be condemned in the Catholic Church as well—he could have looked close at hand at Honorius of Mileu.

And as for Splendonius, whom he made a presbyter after he had been condemned as a deacon in the Catholic Church and rebaptized by him—whose condemnation in Gaul, sent to us by the brethren, our colleague Fortunatus there at Constantina set out to be read publicly, and whom afterward this same Petilian cast out, having experienced his dreadful treacheries—about this Splendonius, then, how could he fail to be reminded in what way evil men are degraded even in the Catholic Church?

I wonder on what precipice of rashness his heart stood when he dictated these things, where he dared to say: None of you is innocent, where no guilty person is condemned. Therefore the evil, mingled bodily but separated spiritually in the Catholic Church—both when they are unknown by the human condition and when they are condemned by the consideration of discipline—bear their own burdens.

And on this account those are secure, provided they do not share in their sins by imitation and consent, whoever are baptized through them with the baptism of Christ; for even if they were baptized by the best of men, they would be justified only by him who justifies the ungodly. For to those who believe in him who justifies the ungodly, faith is reckoned as righteousness (See Rom 4:5).

39. 45. But you, when the Maximianists are brought up against you—condemned by the sentence of a council of three hundred and ten, attacked by that same council cited in so many proconsular and municipal records,

driven out of the basilicas they held by the orders of judges and the help of the cities, and then received back and honored by you, together with those whom they had baptized outside your communion, without any question of baptism—you find nothing to answer.

For you are defeated by a sentence—not the true one, but your own—by which you contend that within the same communion of the sacraments some perish by the crimes of others, and that each one is such as is the man by whom he was baptized: if guilty, guilty; if innocent, innocent.

And if these things are true, then—to pass over countless others—the crimes of the Maximianists at least, whose wickedness your people exaggerated in so numerous a council, even to a likeness of those whom the earth swallowed alive (See Num 16), have ruined you. But if the crimes of the Maximianists have not ruined you, then the things you so believe are false, and much less could some unproven crimes or other of Africans have ruined the whole world. And on this account, as the Apostle writes, each one bears his own burden (Gal 6:5); and the baptism of Christ belongs to no one but Christ; and Petilian promises in vain that, regarding what we urge about the Maximianists, he will speak in the second book—thinking far too ill of human hearts, as though they would not understand that he has nothing to say.

40. 46. For if the baptism that Praetextatus and Felicianus administered in the communion of Maximian was theirs, why was it received by you, in those whom they baptized, as the baptism of Christ? But if it is truly Christ's, as it is, and yet could not benefit those who possessed it together with the wickedness of schism, what can you say that you conferred on those whom you received together with that same baptism, except that—through the bond of peace, the crime of wicked division being blotted out—they were not forced to receive the sacrament of the holy washing as though they did not have it, but that what they had, which was previously ruinous, began now to be useful to them?

Or if this was not conferred on them in your communion, because no such thing could be conferred on schismatics among schismatics, yet this is conferred on you in the Catholic communion: not that you may receive baptism as though it is lacking to you, but that the very baptism you received may benefit you. For all the sacraments of Christ are held, without the love of the unity of Christ, not for salvation but for judgment. But since it is your sentence, not the true one, that through the baptism of some traitors or other the baptism of Christ has perished from the whole world, it is fitting that you find nothing to answer concerning the baptism of the Maximianists that you took back.

40. 47. See, then, and remember most vigilantly, how Petilian did not answer even those very things which he sets before himself in such a way as to seem to say something. But that other thing he long ago abandoned altogether, nor was he willing to tell us—since indeed he could not, nor will he ever, down to the end of his volume, say it—which he recalled from the first parts of my letter as though it were to be refuted.

For even with the two words added—which he boasted I had removed, as though they were his strongest defenses—he nonetheless lies undefended, finding nothing to answer when it is asked: If the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving, from what is the conscience of that one to be cleansed who is ignorant of the polluted conscience of one not giving in holiness; and if anyone who knowingly receives faith from one faithless receives not faith but guilt, from what is the one to receive faith and not guilt who is unknowingly baptized by one faithless—to this it is manifest that he has answered nothing for a long while now, ever since he began to speak.

40. 48. Next he proceeded with his abusive mouth to the disparagement of monasteries and monks, even accusing me of having instituted this kind of life. What that kind of life is like he does not know at all; or rather, he pretends not to know what is most widely known throughout the whole world. Then, asserting that I had said Christ is the baptizer, he subjoined certain words from my letter, as though I had said from my own opinion what I said from yours and his own; and he inveighed with most copious savagery, as though against me for having said it—though that which he reproves is not my opinion but his own and yours, as I shall presently show clearly, as far as I am able.

Then he tried to teach us, with many superfluous words, that Christ does not baptize but that baptism is given in his name, together with the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; and concerning that very Trinity he said either what he wished or what he could: that Christ is the middle of the Trinity. Then, from the name of the magicians Simon and Bar-Jesus, he heaped on us such insults as it pleased him.

Then, holding the case of Optatus of Thamugadi in suspense step by step, lest he be drenched with the odium of that man, he said that neither he nor his people had been able to pass judgment on him; and in that very point he charged us with the fact that Optatus had been pressed by my suggestions.

41. 49. Finally, he concluded his letter by exhorting and warning his own people not to be deceived by us, and lamenting concerning our people that we had made them worse than they had been.

These things, then, having been carefully considered and examined, it appears clearly enough from the very letter that he wrote that Petilian did not answer at all what I first put forward in my letter: if, as he says, the conscience of the one giving, or rather—to add what he thinks a great support—if the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving, from what is the one to be cleansed who receives baptism, when, if the conscience of the one giving is polluted, the one who is going to receive it is ignorant.

Hence it is not to be wondered at that a man resisting on behalf of falsehood, pressed against the straits of the truth coming upon him, gasped out insane reproaches rather than being willing to walk with that truth which cannot be overcome.

41. 50. Now, then, I beg you, attend for a few moments, so that I may show you plainly what he feared, in order not to answer this, and may bring to light what he tried to obscure.

He could certainly have answered us most easily, when we ask from what the one is to be cleansed who receives baptism when the conscience of the one giving is polluted, and the one who is going to receive it is ignorant of this: From the Lord God; and he could have said with complete confidence: God indeed cleanses the conscience of the one receiving, when he is ignorant of the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness.

But the man, who had already been driven by zeal for your sect to place the cleansing of the one receiving in the conscience of the one giving—since he had said, For the conscience of the one giving, or of the one giving in holiness, is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving—feared that a man might seem better baptized by a hidden evil man than by a manifest good man; for then he would be cleansed not by the conscience of a man giving in holiness, but by the most excellent holiness of God himself.

Fearing this, then—lest so great an absurdity, or rather madness, should follow him, that he would not know which way to flee—he was unwilling to say from what the conscience of the one receiving is to be cleansed, when he is ignorant of the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness; and, throwing everything into confusion with quarrelsome clamor, he preferred to hide what was being asked of him rather than to answer this to the one asking, by which he would at once be choked—never, however, supposing that our letters could be read by people of sound heart, or that his own could be read by those who had read mine, to which he pretended to be replying.

42. 51. For what I just said is set down most plainly in that very letter of mine, against which he said nothing in his writing; and what he did there, I ask you, attend for a little; and although you favor him and hate us, bear it, if you can, with an even mind.

For since in his earlier letter—to the first parts of which alone, the only parts that then came into our hands, I had first replied—he had so placed the hope of the man being baptized in the man baptizing that he said, For everything consists of its origin and root, and if a thing does not have a head, it is nothing (See 1.4.5); because, then, Petilian had said this, wishing the origin and root and head of the man being baptized to be understood as nothing but the man by whom he would be baptized, I added and said: We therefore ask: when that faithless baptizer is hidden, if then the one whom he baptizes receives faith and not guilt, if then his baptizer is not his origin and root and head, who is the one from whom he receives faith? Where is the origin from which he arises? Where is the root from which he sprouts? Where is the head from which he begins? Or perhaps, when the one being baptized is ignorant that the baptizer is faithless, then Christ gives faith, then Christ is the origin and root and head (See 1.5.6)?

This, then, I both say now and cry out, as I cried out there too: O human rashness and pride! Why do you not rather allow that Christ always gives faith, intending to make a Christian by giving it? Why do you not allow that Christ is always the origin of the Christian, that the Christian fixes his root in Christ, that Christ is the head of the Christian? For not even when spiritual grace is imparted to believers through a holy and faithful steward does the steward himself justify, but that one alone of whom it is said that he justifies the ungodly (See Rom 4:5). Or was the apostle Paul the head and origin of those he had planted, or Apollos the root of those he had watered, and not rather he who had given them the increase, since the same Paul says: 'I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase; so neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase' (1 Cor 3:6-7)? Nor was Paul himself their root, but rather he who says: 'I am the vine, you are the branches' (John 15:5). And how could he be their head, when he most plainly proclaims in many places that we, though many, are one body in Christ, and that Christ himself is the head of the whole body? Therefore, whether anyone receives the sacrament of baptism from a faithful or a faithless steward, let all his hope be in Christ, lest he be the cursed man who places his hope in man (See Jer 17:5).

43. 52. These things I set down in the earlier letter, when I was replying to Petilian, both plainly and truly, I think. These things I have recalled now too, conveying and commending this: that our hope should in no way be in man, and that we should believe Christ, God, to be the cleanser and justifier of men, of those who believe in him who justifies the ungodly, so that their faith is reckoned as righteousness (See Rom 4:5)—whether the man who administers baptism be holy, or ungodly and feigned, whom the Holy Spirit flees (See Wis 1:5).

Then, next, I added how great an absurdity would follow if it were otherwise, and I said what I say now too: Otherwise, if each one is reborn in spiritual grace such as is the one by whom he is baptized, and when the one who baptizes is a manifest good man, he himself gives faith, he himself is the origin and root and head of the one being born; but when the faithless baptizer is hidden, then each one receives faith from Christ, then he draws his origin from Christ, then he is rooted in Christ, then he glories in Christ as head—then it must be wished by all who are baptized that they have faithless baptizers and are ignorant of them.

For however good the baptizers they have, Christ is surely incomparably better, who will then be the head of the baptized, if the faithless baptizer is hidden. But if it is most insane to believe this—for Christ always justifies the ungodly, by making a Christian out of the ungodly; faith is always received from Christ; Christ is always the origin of the regenerated and the head of the Church—what weight do those words have, which empty readers do not consider for what they contain within, but only for how they sound? (See 1.6.7; 7.8) These things I said then; these things are written in that letter of mine.

44. 53. Then a little later, since he had said: Since these things are so, brothers, what perversity can there be, that one who is guilty of his own crimes should make another innocent, when the Lord Jesus Christ says: 'A good tree makes good fruit, a bad tree makes bad fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns?' (Matt 7:17, 16) and again: 'Every good man brings forth good things from the good treasure of his heart, and every evil man brings forth evil things from the treasure of his heart' (Matt 12:35)?—by which words Petilian shows plainly enough that the man who baptizes is to be taken as the tree, and the one who is baptized as the fruit—to this I had answered: If the good tree is the good baptizer, so that his fruit, the one whom he has baptized, is good, then whoever is baptized by an evil man, even one not manifest, will not be able to be good, for he has arisen from a bad tree. For a good tree is one thing, a hidden but nonetheless bad tree another (See 1.8.9).

What else did I wish to be understood by these words, except what I had set down a little above: that the tree and its fruit are not the one who baptizes and the one who is baptized, but that the man is to be taken as the tree, and his work and life as the fruit, which the good man always has good, and the evil man evil—lest that absurdity follow, that a man baptized even by a hidden evil man should be evil, as the fruit of a tree that is hidden but nonetheless bad? Against which he answered nothing at all.

45. 54. But lest he, or any of you, should say that when the one who baptizes is a hidden evil man, then the one whom he baptizes is not his fruit but the fruit of Christ, I immediately added what a mad error this opinion too entails, and I repeated, though in other words, what I had said a little before: If, when the bad tree is hidden, whoever is baptized by it is born not from it but from Christ, then those who are baptized by hidden evil men are more holily justified than those who are baptized by manifest good men (See 1.8.9).

Petilian, then, hemmed in by these so forceful straits, was silent about the earlier matters on which these depended, and recalled in his reply these absurd things that follow from his error, as though I had said them from my own opinion—things that were said in order that he might attend to how much evil followed his opinion, and might be forced to change it.

Practicing this deceit, then, upon his hearers or readers, and despairing altogether that what we wrote could be read, he began to inveigh against me gravely and impudently, as though I had held that it must be wished by all who are baptized that they have faithless baptizers and be ignorant of them, since, however good the ones they have, Christ is incomparably better, who will then be the head of the baptized if the faithless baptizer is hidden. Likewise, as though I had held that those who are baptized by hidden evil men are more holily justified than those who are baptized by manifest good men;

whereas this remarkable madness was recalled by me for the very reason that it necessarily follows those who think with Petilian that the baptized man stands to his baptizer as the fruit stands to the tree from which it is born—good from a good tree, bad from a bad—since, when we tell them to answer whose fruit they think the baptized man is when he is baptized by a hidden evil man (since they do not dare to rebaptize him), they are forced to answer that he is then not the fruit of that hidden evil man, but the fruit of Christ; and on this account there follows for them what they do not want and what it is mad to hold: for if a man is then the fruit of the man who baptized him when he is baptized by a manifest good man, but when he is baptized by a hidden evil man he is then not that man's fruit but Christ's, then those who are baptized by hidden evil men are more holily justified than those who are baptized by manifest good men.

46. 55. When Petilian attributes this to me, as though I had held it, and inveighs against me gravely and vehemently, he himself surely demonstrates, by that very grave invective of his, how great a wickedness it is to hold such things; and on this account, whatever he wished to seem to have said against me on account of this opinion is found to have been said against himself, who is convicted of holding such things. For there he shows by how great a force of truth he was overcome, where he found no other way out than to feign that I had held what he himself holds. It is just as if those whom the Apostle reproves, because they said there is no resurrection of the dead, wished to accuse the same Apostle, since he said, Neither has Christ risen (1 Cor 15:13), and that the preaching of the apostles is empty, and the faith of believers also empty, and that they who had said that he raised up Christ are found to be false witnesses against God. This is what Petilian wished to do to me, despairing that what I wrote could be read—what he could not answer—and greatly desiring to be thought to have answered.

But just as, if anyone had done that to the Apostle, then when the whole passage itself was recited from his letter, and the preceding words restored from which whoever reads understands that those things depend, all that slanderous reproach would be hurled back into the face of the reprovers; so, when the preceding words are restored from my letter, while Petilian accuses me, they are thrown back with greater force into his own face, from which he tried to remove them.

46. 56. For the Apostle, refuting those who denied the resurrection of the dead, corrects them by that absurdity which follows, against their will, those who hold such things, so that, while they shudder at what it is wicked to say, they may correct what they dared to believe. Accordingly he says thus: If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not risen; but if Christ has not risen, our preaching is empty, and your faith also is vain; and we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we have testified against God that he raised up Christ, whom he did not raise up (1 Cor 15:13-15)—so that, while they fear to say that Christ has not risen, and the other evil and wicked things that follow, they may correct what they said foolishly and faithlessly, that there is no resurrection of the dead.

If, then, you take away what is set at the head of this reasoning, If there is no resurrection of the dead, the rest is wrongly said and must be attributed to the Apostle. But if you restore what they depend on and set it at the beginning, There is no resurrection of the dead, then there rightly follow: Neither has Christ risen, and: our preaching is empty, your faith also is empty, and the other things that are connected; and all these were said well and prudently by the Apostle, since whatever evil they contain is to be imputed to those who denied the resurrection of the dead.

So too in my letter: take away what is set down, If each one is reborn in spiritual grace such as is the one by whom he is baptized, and when the one who baptizes is a manifest good man, he himself gives faith, he himself is the origin and root and head of the one being born; but when the faithless baptizer is hidden, then each one receives faith from Christ, then he draws his origin from Christ, then he is rooted in Christ, then he glories in Christ as head; take away these things, on which what follows depends, and then it is very badly said and must be attributed to me: It must be wished by all who are baptized that they have faithless baptizers and be ignorant of them. For however good the ones they have, Christ is surely incomparably better, who will then be the head of the baptized, if the faithless baptizer is hidden.

But let those things which you say be restored, and then this which depends on them and follows, bound to them, is found not to be held by me, and whatever evil it contains is turned back upon your opinion. Likewise, take away what is set down: If the good tree is the good baptizer, so that his fruit, the one whom he has baptized, is good, and if, when the bad tree is hidden, whoever is baptized by it is born not from it but from Christ; take away these things, which you are forced to confess both from your sect and from Petilian's letter, and that insane thing which follows will be mine and must be imputed to me: Those who are baptized by hidden evil men are more holily justified than those who are baptized by manifest good men. But restore those things on which this depends, and you will at once see both that I rightly set this down to correct you, and that the whole of what deservedly displeases you in this opinion has fallen back upon your own face.

47. 57. Accordingly, just as those who denied the resurrection of the dead could in no way defend themselves from the great evils that the Apostle connected in order to refute them, saying, Neither has Christ risen (1 Cor 15:13), and the other wicked things likewise, unless they changed their opinion and confessed that there is a resurrection of the dead; so too you, if you do not want to have imputed to you what we say in order to convict and correct you—that those who are baptized by hidden evil men are more holily justified than those who are baptized by manifest good men—change your opinion, and do not place in man the hope of those who are baptized.

For if you do place it there, see what I say, lest someone again suppress this and say that I held what I recall in order to refute and correct you. See what I say, on what depends what I am about to say: If you place the hope of those who are to be baptized in the man by whom they are baptized; if you make the man baptizing, as Petilian wrote, the origin and root and head of the one who is baptized; if you take the good man baptizing as the good tree, and his good fruit as the one who has been baptized by him—then you prompt us to ask of you: from what origin does the one whom a hidden evil man baptizes arise, from what root does he sprout, to what head is he joined, from what tree is he born? For to this inquiry belongs also that question to which I have so very often noted that Petilian did not answer: From what is the one cleansed who receives baptism, when he is ignorant of the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness? For he wants this conscience of the one giving, or of the one giving in holiness, to be the origin, root, head, seed, tree, from which the sanctification of the baptized arises, is propagated, begins, sprouts, is born.

48. 58. When, therefore, we ask from what the one was cleansed whom you do not rebaptize in your communion, even when it is established that he was baptized by someone who, on account of hidden wickedness, no longer had the conscience of one giving in holiness, what are you going to answer except: By Christ, or by God—although Christ too is God over all, blessed forever (See Rom 9:5)—or by the Holy Spirit, since he too is God, because this Trinity, a unity, is God? Hence Peter, when he had said to the man, You have dared to lie to the Holy Spirit, at once went on to add what the Holy Spirit is, and said, You have not lied to men, but to God (Acts 5:3-4).

Finally, even if you say that he is cleansed and made clean by an angel, when he is ignorant of the polluted conscience of one not giving in holiness, see that of holy men, when they have risen to eternal life, it is then said that they will be equal to the angels of God (See Matt 22:30). Whoever, then, is cleansed even by an angel, is cleansed better than if he were cleansed by the conscience of any man whatever. Why, then, do you not want it to be said to you: If a man cleanses when he is a manifest good man, but when he is a hidden evil man—since he does not have the conscience of one giving in holiness—it is no longer he himself, but God or an angel that cleanses, then those who are baptized by hidden evil men are more holily justified than those who are baptized by manifest good men? And if this opinion displeases you, since indeed it ought to displease everyone, take away the things from which it is born, correct the things to which it is bound; for then those do not go before, and this does not follow.

49. 59. Do not say, then: The conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving; lest it be said to you: When the polluted conscience of the one giving is hidden, who cleanses the conscience of the one receiving?

And when you have answered, Either God or an angel (since you have nothing else to answer), there follows you something by which you are confounded: Those who are baptized by hidden evil men, so as to be cleansed either by God or by an angel, are more holily justified than those who are baptized by manifest good men, who are not compared to God or to the angels.

But say what the Truth and the Catholic Church say: that not only when the minister of baptism is evil, but even when he is holy and good, hope is not to be placed in man, but in him who justifies the ungodly, in whom faith is reckoned as righteousness to those who believe (See Rom 4:5). For when we say, Christ baptizes, we do not say it of a visible ministry, as Petilian supposes, or wishes us to be supposed to say; but of a hidden grace, a hidden power in the Holy Spirit, as was said of him by John the Baptist: This is he who baptizes in the Holy Spirit (John 1:33).

Nor, as Petilian says, has he now ceased to baptize; but he still does it, not by a bodily ministry, but by the invisible work of his majesty. For when we say, He himself baptizes, we do not say, He himself holds and dips the body of believers in the water; but, He himself invisibly cleanses, and this the whole Church entirely. For the apostle Paul is not to be disbelieved, who said of him: Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water in the word (Eph 5:25-26). See, then, that Christ sanctifies; see that Christ, even by that very washing of water in the word, where the ministers are seen to work bodily, he himself cleanses, he himself makes clean.

Let no one, then, arrogate to himself what is God's; the hope of men is sure in this way, when it is fixed on him who cannot deceive; for Cursed is everyone who places his hope in man (Jer 17:5); and: Blessed is the man whose hope is the Lord God (Ps 40:4 (39:5)). For the faithful steward will receive as his reward eternal life; but as for the unfaithful steward, when he distributes the Lord's provisions to his fellow servants, far be it that through his own unfaithfulness he should make the provisions useless. For, What they say, he says, do; but what they do, do not do (Matt 23:3). This was commanded against evil stewards for this reason: that the good things of God may be received through them, while their own evil life is avoided by being unlike it.

50. 60. But if it is manifest that Petilian did not answer these first words of my letter, and that where he tried to answer, he rather showed that he could not answer, what shall I say about those parts of my writings which he did not even attempt to answer, which he did not touch at all? Yet if anyone who has both my writings and his own wishes to review what sort they are, I think he will understand by how great a firmness they are strengthened. To show you this briefly, recall, or review by reading, the very testimonies brought forth from the holy Scriptures, which he set down as though against us, and those which I too set down in my reply against you; and see how I showed that the things he set down are contrary not to us but rather to you, while he did not touch at all the things I set down as most necessary; and in that one passage of the Apostle which he tried to treat as though on his own behalf, you will see how he found no way out (See 1 Cor 1:13).

50. 61. For the part of the letter that he wrote to his own people, from the beginning up to the place where he says, This the Lord commands us: 'When men have persecuted you in this city, flee to another; and if they persecute you in that one too, flee to another' (Matt 10:23), first came into our hands; to this we replied; and when our reply had also come into his hands, he wrote this one against it, which we are now refuting and showing that he did not answer ours.

In that first part, then, of his writings, to which we first replied, these are the testimonies of the Scriptures which he thought were against us: A good tree makes good fruit, and a bad tree makes bad fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns? (Matt 7:16-17) and again: Every good man brings forth good things from the treasure of his heart, and every evil man brings forth evil things from the treasure of his heart (Matt 12:35); and again: If one is baptized by a dead man, his washing profits him nothing (Sir 34:25).

By these testimonies he wished to show that the one who is baptized becomes such as was the one by whom he is baptized. I, on the contrary, showed how these testimonies were to be understood, and that they in no way helped his purpose. And as for the rest, which he set down as said against evil and wicked men, I taught well enough that they are not against the Lord's wheat—which, as was foretold and promised, is spread throughout the whole world—and that they can rather be said by us against you. Review them, and you will find it so.

50. 62. But the things I set down in support of the Catholic Church's assertion are these: regarding baptism, that the fact that we are regenerated, cleansed, and justified by the grace of God is not to be attributed to the man giving it: It is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in man (Ps 118:8 (117:8)); and: Cursed is everyone who places his hope in man (Jer 17:5); and that salvation belongs to the Lord (Ps 3:8 (3:9)); and: Vain is the salvation of man (Ps 60:11 (59:13)); and that neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase (1 Cor 3:7); and that he in whom one believes justifies the ungodly, so that his faith is reckoned as righteousness (See Rom 4:5).

And for the sake of the unity of the Church itself, which is spread among all nations, and with which you have no communion, I set down these testimonies as having been foretold of Christ: that he will rule from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth (Ps 72:8 (71:8)); and: I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession (Ps 2:8). And that the covenant of God made with Abraham is recited on behalf of our communion, that is, the catholic one, where it is written: In your seed all the nations shall be blessed (Gen 22:18); which seed the Apostle interprets, saying: And to your seed, which is Christ (Gal 3:16). From which it appears that in Christ not only the Africans or Africa, but all the nations, through whom the Catholic Church is spread, were to have the blessing promised so long beforehand. And that the chaff is with the wheat until the final winnowing, lest anyone, by the slander of others' crimes, should excuse the sacrilege of his own separation, in that he has left and deserted the communion of all the nations.

And lest, on account of evil stewards—that is, overseers—the Christian society be divided, I also set down that testimony: What they say, do; but what they do, do not do; for they say and do not do (Matt 23:3).

These testimonies from the holy Scriptures, set down by me, he neither showed how they ought to be understood otherwise—so as to show that they are not for us nor against you—nor was he willing to touch them at all; rather, he busied himself with the tumult of his reproaches, so that, if it could be done, it might come into no one's mind at all that these things were said by me, of anyone who, after reading my letter, also wished to read his own.

51. 63. But as for what he tried to treat on his own behalf, drawn by me from the writings of the apostle Paul, attend for a moment to what sort it is. For you said, he says, The apostle Paul rebukes those who said they belonged to the apostle Paul, and says: 'Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?' (1 Cor 1:13).

These words and this testimony of the Apostle he recalled from my letter, and set before himself to be refuted. Accordingly, see whether he answered to the point. For he says: This is an empty saying, inflated and childish and foolish, and far removed altogether from the account of our faith.

For you would rightly say this if we said: We were baptized in the name of Donatus; or: Donatus was crucified for us; or: We were baptized in our own name. But since these things are neither said nor are said by us, because we follow the form of the divine Trinity, it is certain that you, who lay such things to our charge, are mad. Or if you think that we were baptized in the name of Donatus, or in our own name, you are ruinously deceived, and at the same time you sacrilegiously confess concerning yourselves that you defile your wretched people in the name of Caecilian (See above, 1.3.4-4.5).

These things Petilian answered against those words of mine, not attending—or rather clamoring lest it be attended to by anyone—that he had answered nothing at all that pertained to the matter in question.

For who does not see that this testimony of the Apostle was the more rightly set down by us, precisely because you do not say that you were baptized in the name of Donatus, nor that Donatus was crucified for you, and yet on account of the party of Donatus you separate yourselves from the communion of the Catholic Church—just as those whom Paul reproved certainly did not say that they had been baptized in the name of Paul, or that Paul had been crucified for them, and yet were making a schism over the name of Paul?

Just as, then, to those for whom Christ, not Paul, was crucified, and who had been baptized in the name of Christ, not in the name of Paul, and yet said, I belong to Paul, it is for this reason the more rightly said, Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?—that they may cleave to him who was crucified for them, and in whose name they were baptized, and not be divided over the name of Paul; so to you also, much more, because you do not say, We were baptized in the name of Donatus, and yet wish to belong to the party of Donatus, it is fittingly said: Was Donatus crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Donatus? For you know that Christ was crucified for you, and that you were baptized in the name of Christ, and yet, on account of the name and party of Donatus, you resist with such obstinacy the unity of Christ, who was crucified for you, and in whose name you were baptized.

52. 64. But that Petilian did this by his writings, that the origin and root and head of the baptized should be none but the one by whom he is baptized, and that this was said by me neither emptily, nor childishly, nor foolishly, review the opening of his letter, to which I then replied, and you will see. Rather, attend diligently while I recall it. The conscience, he says, of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving; for whoever knowingly receives faith from one faithless receives not faith but guilt.

And, as though it were said to him, How do you prove this? For everything, he says, consists of its origin and root; and if a thing does not have a head, it is nothing; nor does anything regenerate well unless it is regenerated by good seed. Since these things are so, brothers, what perversity can there be, that one who is guilty of his own crimes should make another innocent, when the Lord Jesus Christ says: 'A good tree makes good fruit, a bad tree makes bad fruit. Do they gather grapes from thorns?' (Matt 7:16-17) and again: 'Every good man brings forth good things from the treasure of his heart, and every evil man brings forth evil things from the treasure of his heart' (Matt 12:35); and again: 'If one is baptized by a dead man, his washing profits him nothing' (Sir 34:25).

You see what all these aim at: namely, that the conscience of the one giving in holiness (lest anyone receiving from one faithless should receive not faith but guilt) should itself be the origin, and root, and head, and seed of the baptized. For wishing to prove that the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving, and that the one who knowingly receives faith from one faithless receives not faith but guilt, he at once added: For everything consists of its origin and root; and if a thing does not have a head, it is nothing; nor does anything regenerate well unless it is regenerated by good seed.

And lest anyone be so slow that he still did not understand that he was speaking of the one by whom each is baptized, he explains this in what follows, and says: Since these things are so, brothers, what perversity can there be, that one who is guilty of his own crimes should make another innocent, when the Lord Jesus Christ says: 'A good tree makes good fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns?' And lest the hearer or reader, blind with an incredible dullness of heart, should still not see that he is speaking of the man baptizing, he adds another text where he even names the man: And again, he says, 'Every good man brings forth good things from the treasure of his heart, and every evil man brings forth evil things from the treasure of his heart'; and again: 'If one is baptized by a dead man, his washing profits him nothing.'

Surely it is now manifest, surely it now needs no interpreter or disputant or demonstrator, that these men aim at this: that the origin and root and head of the baptized should be none but the one by whom he is baptized; and yet, overpowered by the force of truth, and as though forgetful of what he had said, Petilian afterward concedes to me that Christ is the origin and root of the regenerated and the head of the Church, and not any man who is the steward and minister of baptism.

For when he had said that the apostles baptized in the name of Christ, and laid Christ as the foundation, that they might make Christians, and proved this by the testimonies and examples of the holy Scriptures, as though we denied it, he says: Where now is that voice with which, rattling on with tiny and frequent little questions, you said many involved things about Christ and for Christ and in Christ, against human rashness and pride, enviously and haughtily? See, Christ is the origin of the Christian, Christ is the head, Christ is the root. Hearing these things, what should I do but give thanks to Christ himself, who forced the man to confess it?

False, then, are the things he said at the opening of his letter, when he wished to persuade us that the conscience of the one giving in holiness is regarded, which cleanses the conscience of the one receiving; and that when anyone knowingly receives faith from one faithless, he receives not faith but guilt.

For wishing as it were to show how much lies in the man baptizing, he had subjoined, as though great proofs, saying: For everything consists of its origin and root; and if a thing does not have a head, it is nothing. But afterward, when he says what we too say—See, Christ is the origin of the Christian, Christ is the head, Christ is the root—he cancels what he had said before, that the conscience of the one giving in holiness is the origin and root and head of the one receiving. The truth, then, has prevailed, so that the man who desires the baptism of Christ should not place his hope in the man who is the minister, but should come securely to Christ himself as to an origin that is not changed, a root that is not torn up, a head that is not cast down.

53. 65. And now, who would not notice from how inflated a vein it comes, that when he was as it were expounding the Apostle's sentence, he said: He who said, 'I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase' (1 Cor 3:6), what else did he say but: I made a man a catechumen in Christ, Apollos baptized, God confirmed what we did? Why, then, did Petilian not add what the Apostle added, and what I especially commended, so that he might expound this too for us: Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase (1 Cor 3:7)? And if he wished to expound it according to what he set down above, it follows without doubt that neither he who makes a catechumen, nor he who baptizes, is anything, but God who gives the increase.

For what does it now matter to the question how it was said, I planted, Apollos watered—whether it is really to be taken as though he had said, I made a catechumen, Apollos baptized, or whether there is another truer and more fitting meaning? See, meanwhile, according to his own exposition, neither he who makes a catechumen, nor he who baptizes, is anything, but God who gives the increase. But there is a great difference between confirming what another does and doing it. For he who gives the increase does not confirm the tree or the vine, but creates it.

For by that increase it comes about that even the planted wood produces and fixes a root; by that increase it comes about that the seed that is cast forth sends up a shoot. But why should we discourse on this at greater length? It is enough that, according to him, neither he who makes a catechumen, nor he who baptizes, is anything, but God who gives the increase. But when would Petilian say this, so that we might understand him to be saying: Neither is Donatus of Carthage anything, nor Januarianus, nor Petilian? When would that swelling allow it, by which a man thinks himself to be something when he is nothing, and deceives himself (See Gal 6:3)?

54. 66. Finally, a little later too, when he set himself and intended to handle again, as it were, those words of the Apostle that we had brought up, he was unwilling to set down these words which I had said, but others in which human inflation could somehow draw breath. For, that we may unfold again, he says, the words of that Apostle which you had brought up against us, he said: 'What then is Apollos, or what is Paul? Ministers of him in whom you believed' (1 Cor 3:5). What else, for example, does he say to all our people but: What is Donatus of Carthage, what is Januarianus, what is Petilian, except ministers of him in whom you believed?

I did not set down this testimony of the Apostle, but that one which he was unwilling to recall, I set down: Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase (1 Cor 3:7). But he chose to insert those words of the Apostle where he asks what Paul is, or what Apollos is, and answers, Ministers of him in whom you believed. This the swollen neck of heresy could somehow bear; but that other text, where he did not ask and answer what he was, but said that he is not anything, it could not bear at all. But now I wish to ask whether the minister of Christ is not anything.

Who would say this? How, then, is it true: Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase—except that with respect to one thing he is something, with respect to another he is not anything? With respect to ministering and dispensing the word and the sacrament, he is something; but with respect to cleansing and justifying, he is not anything; for this is not worked in the inner man except by him through whom the whole man was created, and who, remaining God, was made man—namely, he of whom it was said: Cleansing their hearts by faith (Acts 15:9); and: To the one who believes in him who justifies the ungodly (Rom 4:5). This testimony Petilian chose to set down among my words, but in his own he neither treated nor touched it.

55. 67. The minister, then—that is, the steward of the word and the gospel sacrament—if he is good, becomes a partner of the gospel; but if he is evil, he is not for that reason not a steward of the gospel. For if he is good, he does this willingly; but if he is evil—that is, seeking his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ—he does it unwillingly, for the sake of other things that he seeks. Yet see what the same Apostle said: If, then, I do this willingly, he says, I have a reward; but if unwillingly, a stewardship has been entrusted to me (1 Cor 9:17). As though he said: If I am good and announce the good, I myself also arrive; but if I am evil, I announce the good. For did he say: If I do it unwillingly, I shall not be a steward?

Peter and the other good men announced it willingly, Judas unwillingly, yet, sent with them, he announced it. They have a reward; to him a stewardship was entrusted. But those who received the gospel from all of them announcing it could be cleansed and justified not by the planter or the waterer, but by him who gives the increase. For we are not going to say that Judas did not baptize, when he was still among the disciples, when that was being done which is written: He himself did not baptize, but his disciples (John 4:2).

Or because he had not yet betrayed Christ—he who held the money box and carried off what was put into it (See John 12:6), and who could not be innocent as a keeper of money—was he yet a steward of grace without loss to those receiving? Or, if he did not baptize, at least you confess that he evangelized.

And if you reckon this small and slight, see what you think of the apostle Paul himself, who said: For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to evangelize (1 Cor 1:17).

To this is added that Apollos, who watered by baptizing, begins to be superior to Paul, who planted by evangelizing—although Paul claims for himself the office of father toward the Corinthians on this account, and does not concede this name to those who came to them after him. For he says: Though you have ten thousand guides in Christ, yet not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus, through the gospel, I begot you (1 Cor 4:15). He says, I begot you, to those to whom in another place he says: I thank God that I baptized none of you, except Crispus and Gaius and the household of Stephanas (1 Cor 1:14, 16). He had begotten them, then, not through himself, but through the gospel.

And even if he were seeking his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, and did this unwillingly, without a reward of his own, he would nonetheless be dispensing the Lord's money; which, though he himself were evil, he would not make evil or useless to those who received it well.

56. 68. And if this is rightly said of the gospel, how much more is it to be said of baptism, which so pertains to the gospel that without it indeed no one arrives at the kingdom of heaven, but only if righteousness is added to the sacrament? For he who said, Unless one is reborn of water and the Spirit, he will not enter the kingdom of heaven (John 3:5), the same one said: Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:20).

The form of the sacrament is given through baptism, the form of righteousness through the gospel. The one without the other does not lead to the kingdom of heaven. Nevertheless, even the less learned can baptize perfectly, but to evangelize perfectly is a much more difficult and rarer work. Therefore the teacher of the gentiles, more excellent than very many, was sent to evangelize, not to baptize; since the latter could be done by many, the former by few, among whom he was eminent. And yet we read that in several places he said, my gospel (See 2 Tim 2:8); but he never said, my baptism, nor that of anyone through whom it was administered. For only that baptism which John gave was called the baptism of John (See Acts 19:3).

That man received this as the chief gift of his stewardship, that the forerunning sacrament of the washing should be called even his, through whom it was dispensed; but the baptism that the disciples of Christ administered was called the baptism of none of them, so that it might be understood to belong to him of whom it was said: Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water in the word (Eph 5:25-26). If, then, the gospel, which so belongs to Christ that even the minister can call it his own on account of the gift of stewardship, a man can receive even through an evil steward without danger—doing what he says, but not doing what he does—how much more can anyone receive the baptism of Christ, which none of the apostles administered in such a way as to dare to call it his own, without the contagion of the evil minister, if he comes to Christ in good faith?

57. 69. Accordingly, if Petilian, when I did not omit to demonstrate that the testimonies he set down from the Scriptures were not against us, himself partly did not touch at all the things I set down, and partly, in what he chose to treat, showed nothing other than that he could not get out of it, you need not be long exhorted or admonished to see what you ought to hold and what to avoid. But perhaps he appeared able in the testimonies of the holy Scriptures, and prevailed somewhat in those records of the proceedings carried out among men concerning the schism itself?

Rather, in these too—although after the divine testimonies they are sought superfluously—what did he recall or what did he prove? When he had inveighed gravely against the traitors, and had proclaimed many testimonies against them even from the holy Books, he yet said nothing by which he might show us to be traitors. But I recalled that Silvanus of Cirta—whom, with certain men intervening, he himself also succeeded—was set down as a traitor in the municipal records (See above, 1.21.23), while he was still a subdeacon. Against this he dared to mutter nothing.

And surely you see how great a constraint compelled him to answer—namely, that he should show his predecessor, and not only his associate but, so to speak, his very fellow occupant of the chair, to be innocent of the crime of betrayal—especially since you place your whole cause in this, that you call traitors those whom you either feign or suppose to have succeeded traitors along the line of communion.

He, then, who by the very necessity of your cause—if I were to say that someone of Rusiccada or of Calama or of any other city of your party was shown to be a traitor in the municipal records—would in every way be forced to defend him, kept silent about his own predecessor. Why, except that here he found no fog to spread, by which he might at least deceive men of the slowest and most somnolent mind? For what would he say, except that these things are falsely alleged about Silvanus? But we recite the records, both when it was done and when it was also brought before the consular Zenophilus.

How could he resist these things, hedged about on every side—the cause of the Catholic Church being the best, yours the worst? Hence I recall these words from that letter of mine, to which he wished to seem to have replied through this one that I am now refuting—precisely so that you may see how invincibly it was set down, against which he could find nothing safer than silence.

58. 70. For when he had set down from the gospel a testimony as though against us, where the Lord says, They will come to you in the clothing of sheep, but within they are ravening wolves; by their fruits you will know them (Matt 7:15-16), I replied and said: Let us consider the fruits, then; and at once I subjoined and added: You charge us with betrayal; this very thing we charge against you with much more probability. And, not to run through many cases: in that same city of Constantina your elders ordained Silvanus as bishop at the very beginning of their schism. This man, while he was still a subdeacon, was set down as a most manifest traitor in the municipal records.

To these things, which I have recalled from that earlier letter of mine, Petilian answered nothing at all. And surely you see that in these few words the whole cause that is argued between us is contained. For what would he try to say, where, whatever he chose, he would be defeated?

58. 71. For when documents concerning traitors are brought forward both by us against your people and by you against ours (if indeed any are brought forward by you—which to this day we know nothing of at all; for Petilian, who so diligently took care to recall and insert against me those parts of the proceedings that pertain to the cause, would not have failed to insert them in his writings); nevertheless, as I had already begun to say, if such things are brought forward both by us and by you, then surely either both are true, or both false, or ours true and yours false, or ours false and yours true: nothing more can be said.

59. 72. But in all these four cases the truth is on the side of the Catholic communion. For if both are true, then on account of men such as you too had, you ought by no means to have deserted the communion of the whole world. If both are false, then on account of no crimes of betrayal, the most atrocious crime of division was to be avoided.

If ours are true and yours false, you have long had nothing to say. If yours are true and ours false, we could be deceived, along with the whole world, about the wickedness of men, not about the truth of the faith. For the seed of Abraham, spread among every nation, ought not to have regarded what you said you knew, but what you proved to the judges.

Hence, how do we know what those did whom your elders accused, even if true charges were laid against them, so that to the examiners of the cause, or certainly to the Church spread everywhere—which ought to regard nothing but the sentences of the examiners—those charges were thought not true but false? God does not therefore absolve whatever crime of men they cannot, as men, know; yet I think no one is rightly judged guilty who has believed a man innocent who was not convicted.

Whence, then, is the whole world guilty, if it could not know even a crime of Africans that was perhaps true; and this either it could not know because no one brought it to it, or because, in what was brought, it believed the judging examiners rather than the murmuring defeated? On this account, then, Petilian is to be praised, in that, since he saw this to be altogether most invincible, he passed it over in silence. He is plainly not to be praised, in that he tried to cover with clouds of words the other things, likewise invincible, which he nonetheless thought could be obscured, and in that he made me the case when he had failed in the case—saying nothing even about me myself except what was either altogether false, or not to be blamed, or no longer pertained to me.

But meanwhile you, whom I have set as judges between me and him, do you have the wit to discern at all between true and false? Between the inflated and the solid, between the turbid and the calm, between the swollen and the sound, between things divinely foretold and things humanly presumed, between proofs and accusations, between documents and fabrications, between the conduct of a case and the turning away from a case? If you have it, well and rightly; but if you do not have it, we shall not regret having taken care of you; for even if your heart is not turned to peace, our peace nonetheless returns to us (See Matt 10:13).