Likewise to Samuel, when he was despised by the Jews, God says: 'They have not despised you, but they have despised me.' And the Lord also in the Gospel: 'He who hears you hears me, and Him who sent me; and he who rejects you rejects me, and Him who sent me.' And when He had cleansed the leper, He said, 'Go and show yourself to the priest.' And when afterward, at the time of His passion, He had received a blow from the priest's servant, and the servant had said to Him, 'Do you answer the high priest thus?'—the Lord said nothing contumeliously against the high priest, nor detracted anything from the honor of the priest, but rather, asserting and showing His own innocence, He said: 'If I have spoken evil, give testimony of the evil; but if well, why do you strike me?'
Likewise in the Acts of the Apostles, the blessed Apostle Paul afterward—when it had been said to him, 'Do you so revile the priest of God?'—although, the Lord being now crucified, those men had begun to be sacrilegious and impious and bloodstained and no longer retained anything of priestly honor and authority, nevertheless Paul, considering that very title, however empty, and a certain shadow of a priest, said: 'I did not know, brethren, that he is the high priest; for it is written, You shall not revile the ruler of your people.'
Since such and so many examples precede, by which priestly authority and power is established from the divine favor, what kind of men do you think those are who, being enemies of priests and rebels against the catholic Church, are terrified neither by the threatening of the forewarning Lord nor by the vengeance of the coming judgment? For heresies have arisen and schisms have been born from no other source than this, that the priest of God is not obeyed, and that one priest in the Church for a time, and one judge for a time in the place of Christ, is not considered.
And if the whole brotherhood would obey him according to the divine teachings, no one would stir up anything against the college of priests; no one, after the divine judgment, after the suffrage of the people, after the consent of the fellow bishops, would make himself a judge now not of the bishops but of God; no one would rend the Church of Christ by a breach of unity; no one, pleasing himself and swelling with pride, would found a new heresy apart and outside—unless there be someone of such sacrilegious rashness and ruined mind as to think that a priest is made without the judgment of God, when the Lord says in His Gospel: 'Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and not one of them falls to the ground without the will of the Father?'
When He says that not even the least things happen without the will of God, does anyone suppose that the highest and greatest things happen in the Church of God either without God's knowledge or without His permission, and that priests—that is, His stewards—are ordained not according to His decision? This is not to have the faith by which we live; this is not to give honor to God, by whose nod and will we know and believe that all things are ruled and governed. Plainly, bishops are made not according to the will of God who are made outside the Church, who are made contrary to the ordinance and tradition of the Gospel, just as the Lord Himself sets it down in the Twelve Prophets and says: 'They set up for themselves a king, but not by me.' And again: 'Their sacrifices shall be as the bread of mourning; all who eat of them shall be defiled.'
And through Isaiah too the Holy Spirit cries out and says: 'Woe to you, rebellious sons! Thus says the Lord: You have taken counsel, but not by me; and you have made a covenant, but not by my Spirit, to add sins upon sins.'
For the rest—for I speak as one provoked, I speak as one grieving, I speak as one compelled—when a bishop is appointed in the place of one deceased, when he is chosen in peace by the suffrage of the whole people, when he is protected by the help of God in persecution, faithfully joined to all his colleagues, already approved to his people in the episcopate for four years, serving discipline in tranquility, proscribed in time of storm, with the name of his episcopate appended and attached to him, so often demanded for the lion, honored in the circus, in the amphitheater, by the testimony of the Lord's favor—in these very days in which I wrote this letter to you, on account of the sacrifices which the people were ordered by a published edict to celebrate, again demanded for the lion in the circus by the shout of the populace:
when such a man, dearest brother, is seen to be assailed by certain desperate and lost men set outside the Church, it is evident who is doing the assailing—not, of course, Christ, who either appoints or protects priests, but he who is the adversary of Christ and the enemy of His Church, who for this reason persecutes with his harassment the one set over the Church, that, the helmsman being removed, he may rage more atrociously and violently about the shipwrecks of the Church. Nor ought it to disturb anyone who is faithful and mindful of the Gospel and who retains the commands of the forewarning Apostle, dearest brother,
if certain proud and contumacious men, enemies of the priests of God, in these last times either withdraw from the Church or act against the Church—since both the Lord and His apostles foretold beforehand that such men would now come. Nor let anyone marvel that the servant is forsaken by certain men, when the disciples forsook the Lord Himself, who was performing the greatest and most wonderful deeds and proving the powers of God the Father by the testimony of His works. And yet He did not rebuke those who withdrew, nor threaten them gravely, but rather, turning to His apostles, said: 'Do you also wish to go?'—keeping, namely, the law by which man, left to his own freedom and established in his own choice, seeks for himself either death or salvation.
Peter, however, upon whom the Church had been built by the same Lord, speaking one for all and answering with the voice of the Church, said: 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we believe and have known that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God'—signifying, namely, and showing that those who depart from Christ perish by their own fault, but that the Church, which believes in Christ and which holds fast what it has once known, never at all departs from Him, and that they are the Church who remain in the house of God; but that they whom we see not made solid by the stability of the grain, but, like chaff, winnowed by the spirit of the scattering enemy, are not the planting planted by God the Father—concerning whom John too in his epistle says:
'They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would surely have remained with us.' Likewise Paul admonishes us, when the evil perish from the Church, not to be moved, nor to have our faith diminished by the perfidious who withdraw. 'For what,' he says, 'if some of them have fallen from the faith? Has their unbelief made void the faith of God? God forbid; for God is true, but every man a liar.' As far as it concerns us, it belongs to our conscience, brother, to take care that no one perishes from the Church through our fault.
But if anyone perishes of his own accord and by his own crime, and is unwilling to do penance and to return to the Church, we who counsel for his health shall be blameless in the day of judgment, and they alone shall remain in punishments who have been unwilling to be healed by the wholesomeness of our counsel. Nor ought the revilings of the lost to move us, so that we should not depart from the right way and from the sure rule—since the Apostle too instructs us, saying: 'If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.' It makes a difference whether one desires to win the favor of men or of God. If men are pleased, the Lord is offended; but if we strive and labor that we may be able to please God, we ought to despise both the revilings and the curses of men.
But as for the fact that I did not at once write to you, dearest brother, about that Fortunatus, the pseudo-bishop set up by a few inveterate heretics—that was not a matter which ought to have been reported to your notice hastily and at once, as though it were something great or to be feared, especially since you already knew well enough the name of Fortunatus, who is one of the five presbyters long ago fugitives from the Church and lately kept away by the sentence of our fellow bishops, many and most weighty men, who in the previous year wrote letters to you about this matter. Likewise you would recognize Felicissimus, the standard-bearer of sedition, who is himself also contained in those same letters of our fellow bishops sent to you long ago—
who has not only been kept away by these men here, but also was lately driven by you from the Church there. Since I was confident that these things were within your knowledge and knew for certain that they cleaved to your memory and discipline, I did not think it necessary that the follies of the heretics should be announced to you swiftly and urgently. For it ought not to pertain equally to the majesty and dignity of the catholic Church what the audacity of heretics and schismatics contrives among themselves. For the party of Novatian too is said to have now made for itself there a pseudo-bishop—Maximus the presbyter, lately sent to us as a legate by Novatian and rejected from our communion.
Nevertheless I had not written to you about this, since all these things are despised by us, and I had lately sent you the names of the bishops appointed here who, sound and whole, preside over the brethren in the catholic Church. And this, of course, it pleased us, by the counsel of all of us, to write to you, that there might be a short way for dispelling error and for discerning the truth, and that you and our colleagues might know to whom you should write, and from whom you ought to receive letters in turn; so that if anyone besides these whom we have embraced in our letter should dare to write to us, you would know that he was either stained with sacrifice or with a libellus, or was one of the heretics—perverse, that is, and profane.
Having, however, obtained the occasion of a most intimate man and cleric through Felicianus the acolyte, whom you had sent with our colleague Perseus, among the other matters which from here were to be conveyed to your notice, I also wrote to you about that Fortunatus. But while our brother Felicianus was there either delayed by the wind or detained by us for the receiving of other letters, he was forestalled by Felicissimus, who hastened to you. For thus crimes always hasten, as though by their haste they might prevail against innocence.
Through Felicianus, moreover, I signified to you, brother, that there had come to Carthage Privatus, an old heretic in the colony of Lambaesis, condemned many years ago, on account of his many and grievous offenses, by the sentence of ninety bishops, and most severely branded by the letters even of our predecessors Fabian and Donatus—which is not hidden from your conscience. And when he said that he wished to plead his cause among us in the council which we held on the Ides of May last past, and was not admitted, he made that Fortunatus a pseudo-bishop for himself, worthy of his own college. There had come with him also a certain Felix, whom he himself had long ago set up as a pseudo-bishop outside the Church in heresy.
But Jovinus and Maximus too, as companions, were present with Privatus the heretic—men condemned by the sentence of nine of our colleagues for unspeakable sacrifices and for the crimes proved against them, and again also kept away by very many of us in council in the previous year. With these four was joined a fifth, Repostus of Suturnurca, who not only lapsed himself in the persecution, but also cast down the greatest part of his own people by sacrilegious persuasion. These five, with a few who had either sacrificed or were of evil conscience, co-opted Fortunatus as a pseudo-bishop for themselves—since, with the crimes consenting together into one, such a ruler should be, namely, as those who are ruled.
Hence now, dearest brother, you can also recognize the other lies which those desperate and lost men spread there—for whereas of the sacrificers or heretics there were no more than five pseudo-bishops who came to Carthage and set up Fortunatus as the companion of their madness, yet they, as sons of the devil and full of falsehood, dared, as you write, to boast that twenty-five bishops had been present. Which lie they were also boasting here previously among our brethren, saying that twenty-five bishops were going to come from Numidia to make a bishop for them.
After they had been exposed and confounded in their lie — when five shipwrecked men, alone surviving and kept away from us, had come together and uncovered the truth — they sailed to Rome with the wares of their falsehoods, as though truth could not sail in pursuit of them, the truth that would convict their lying tongues by the proof of a sure fact. And this, brother, is true madness: not to consider nor to know that lies do not deceive for long; that night lasts only until the day dawns; but that, once the day is made bright and the sun has risen, darkness and gloom give way to the light, and the robberies that prowled through the night come to an end. In short, if you were to ask them for names, they would not have even any whom they might falsely name.
So great is the dearth even of wicked men among them, that not even twenty-five can be gathered to their side, whether from those who sacrificed or from heretics. And yet, to deceive the ears of the simple and the absent, the number is inflated by lying — as though, even if this number were true, the Church could be vanquished by heretics or righteousness by the unrighteous. Nor is it fitting for me, dearest brother, now to deal with them on equal terms and to run through in my discourse the things they have committed and still commit, since we must consider what it befits the priests of God to put forth and to write; nor ought grief to speak among us as much as shame, lest, being provoked, I should seem to be heaping up curses rather than charges and sins.
I am silent, therefore, about the frauds committed against the Church; I pass over the conspiracies and adulteries and the various kinds of crimes. That one thing, in which the cause is neither mine nor men's but God's, I do not think should be passed over concerning their misdeed: namely, that from the very first day of the persecution, when the recent crimes of the offenders were still seething, and when from unholy sacrifices not only the altars of the devil but the very hands and mouths of the lapsed were still smoking, they did not cease to take communion with the lapsed and to intervene before any penance had been done. God cries out: 'He that sacrifices to gods shall be rooted out, save to the Lord alone.' And the Lord says in the Gospel: 'Whoever shall deny me, him will I deny.' And in another place the indignation and wrath of God is not silent, saying:
'To them you poured out libations, and to them you offered sacrifices. Shall I not be indignant at these things? says the Lord.' Yet they intervene that God be not entreated — God who Himself testifies that He is indignant. They intervene that Christ be not won over by prayers and satisfactions — Christ who declares that He will deny the one who denies Him. We, in the very time of persecution, sent letters about this very matter, and we were not heeded. After a council had been held repeatedly, we decreed, not by our consent alone but also under threat, that the brethren should do penance, and that no one should rashly grant peace to those who did no penance.
And they, sacrilegious against God, rash in impious fury against the priests of God, withdrawing from the Church and taking up parricidal arms against the Church, labor that the devil's malice may consummate its work — that the divine mercy may not heal those wounded within His Church. They corrupt by the deceit of their lies the penance of the wretched whom He would heal, that satisfaction may not be made to an indignant God; that the one who has either first blushed to be a Christian or afterward feared it may not seek Christ his Lord; that he who had withdrawn from the Church may not return to the Church. Effort is spent that sins may not be redeemed by just satisfactions and lamentations, that wounds may not be washed away by tears.
True peace is taken away by the lie of a false peace; the saving bosom of the mother is shut up by the intervening stepmother, lest weeping and groaning be heard from the breast and mouth of the lapsed. The lapsed are moreover compelled to revile the priests with those very tongues and mouths with which they had before sinned in the Capitol; they pursue with insults and reviling voices the confessors and the virgins and all the just who are eminent in the praise of faith and glorious in the Church. By these men, indeed, it is not so much the modesty, humility, and reverence of our people that is struck down, as it is their own hope and life that is torn to pieces. For not he who hears, but he who utters, the insult is wretched; nor he who is struck by a brother, but he who strikes a brother, is a transgressor in the law.
And when the guilty do injury to the innocent, it is they who suffer the injury who believe themselves to be doing it. Hence their mind is stricken, their spirit dull, their sense estranged: it is the wrath of God not to understand one's sins, so that no penance may follow — as it is written: 'And God gave them a spirit of compunction,' that is, lest they turn back and be healed and, after their sins, be made whole by entreaties and just satisfactions. Paul the Apostle in his epistle sets it down and says: 'They received not the love of the truth that they might be saved; and therefore God shall send them the working of error, that they may believe a lie, that all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have taken pleasure in unrighteousness.'
The first degree of blessedness is not to sin; the second, to acknowledge one's sins. In the first, an innocence runs whole and undefiled which one may keep; in the second, there follows a remedy which may heal. Both of these these men have lost, having offended God: so that both the grace which is received from the sanctification of baptism is lost, and there is no penance at hand by which the fault may be cured. Or do you think, brother, that crimes against God are light, faults small and trifling, when through these men the majesty of the indignant God is not entreated, when His wrath and fire and the Day of the Lord are not feared, when, with antichrist at hand, the faith of the militant people is disarmed, while the vigor and the fear of Christ are taken away? Let the laity see how they may cure this in themselves.
Upon the priests rests the greater labor, in asserting and safeguarding the majesty of God, lest we should seem in this respect to neglect anything, since the Lord admonishes and says: 'And now this commandment is to you, O priests: if you will not hear, and if you will not lay it to heart to give glory to my name, says the Lord, I will send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessing.'
Is honor, then, given to God when the majesty and censure of God are so despised that, although He declares that He is indignant and angry with those who sacrifice, and although He threatens eternal punishments and perpetual torments, it is nonetheless proposed and declared by these sacrilegious men that the wrath of God should not be considered, that the judgment of the Lord should not be feared, that no knocking should be made at the Church of Christ; but that, with penance set aside and no confession of the crime made, with the bishops despised and trampled, peace should be proclaimed by presbyters with deceitful words, and — that the lapsed may not rise, or those placed outside return to the Church — communion should be offered to those not in communion?
For these men it was not even enough to have departed from the Gospel, to have taken away from the lapsed the hope of satisfaction and penance, to have removed from all sense and fruit of penance those entangled in frauds, or defiled by adulteries, or polluted by the deadly contagion of sacrifices, so that they should not entreat God, nor make confession of their crimes in the Church; but they have set up for themselves, outside the Church and against the Church, a conventicle of a ruined faction, where a crowd of those evil in their consciences and unwilling to entreat and make satisfaction to God might flock together:
After all this, they moreover dare, with a pseudo-bishop set up for them by heretics, to sail and to carry letters from schismatics and profane men to the chair of Peter and to the principal Church, whence priestly unity took its rise; nor do they consider that these are the Romans whose faith was praised by the preaching of the Apostle, to whom perfidy can have no access. But what is the reason for their coming, and for announcing a pseudo-bishop made against the bishops? For either it pleases them what they have done, and they persist in their crime; or, if it displeases them and they withdraw, they know whither to return.
For since it has been ordained by us all, and is equally fair and just, that each man's cause should be heard there where the crime was committed, and since to individual pastors a portion of the flock has been assigned which each is to rule and govern, being about to render an account of his stewardship to the Lord, it is altogether fitting that those over whom we preside should not run about, nor by their crafty and deceitful rashness dash to pieces the cohering concord of the bishops, but should plead their cause there where they can have both accusers and witnesses of their crime:
unless to a few desperate and lost men the authority of the bishops established in Africa seems to be of less account — bishops who have already passed judgment on these men, and who recently, by the weight of their judgment, condemned their conscience bound with many snares of crimes. Now their cause has been examined; now sentence has been pronounced upon them; nor does it befit the dignity of the priesthood to be reproached with the levity of a fickle and inconstant mind, since the Lord teaches and says: 'Let your speech be: Yes, yes; No, no.' If the number of those who passed judgment on them the previous year be reckoned together with the presbyters and deacons, more were then present at the trial and examination than are these same men who now appear to be joined with Fortunatus.
For you ought to know, dearest brother, that after he was made a pseudo-bishop by heretics, he is now almost deserted by all. For those to whom deceptions were in the past held out, and to whom false words were given — that they would all at the same time return to the Church — after they saw a pseudo-bishop made there, learned that they had been frustrated and deceived, and they come back daily and knock at the Church; while we, however, who must render an account to the Lord, anxiously weigh and carefully examine who ought to be received and admitted to the Church. For to some, either their crimes stand in the way, or the brethren stubbornly and firmly resist, so that they cannot be received at all without scandal and danger to very many.
For rotten things are not to be gathered in such a way that what is whole and sound be wounded; nor is that a useful or prudent shepherd who so mingles diseased and infected sheep with the flock that he contaminates the whole flock with the affliction of the clinging evil. ['Pay no heed to their number: for better is one who fears God than a thousand impious sons,' as the Lord has spoken through the prophet, saying: 'Son, take no delight in impious sons, though they be multiplied to you, when the fear of God is not in them.'] O that you could, dearest brother, be present there with us when these depraved and perverse men return from the schism:
You would see what labor it is for me to persuade our brethren to patience, that with the grief of their souls allayed they may consent to the receiving and healing of the evil. For just as they rejoice and are glad when the tolerable and the less culpable return, so on the contrary they murmur and resist as often as the incorrigible and the wanton — those defiled either by adulteries or by sacrifices, and after these things still moreover proud — so return to the Church as to corrupt the good dispositions within. With difficulty do I persuade the people, indeed I wring it from them, that they should suffer such men to be admitted.
And the grief of the brotherhood has been made the more just by this: that one and another, received through my own indulgence though the people resisted and gainsaid, have turned out worse than they were before, and could not keep faith with their penance, because they had not come with true penance. But what shall I say of those who now have sailed to you with Felicissimus, the defendant in all crimes, sent as envoys by Fortunatus the pseudo-bishop, bringing to you letters as false as he is false whose letters they bear, as manifold is their consciousness of sins, as execrable their life, as foul — so that, even if they were in the Church, such men ought to be cast out of the Church?
In short, because they know their own conscience, they neither dare to come nor to approach the threshold of the Church, but wander abroad throughout the province to circumvent and despoil the brethren; and now sufficiently known to all and everywhere excluded for their misdeeds, they sail thither even to you. For they can have no face to approach us or to take their stand among us, since the crimes which are charged against them by the brethren are most bitter and most grave. If they should wish to undergo our judgment, let them come. In short, if there can be for them any excuse and defense, let us see what sense of satisfaction they have, what fruit of penance they bring. Neither here is the Church shut to anyone, nor is the bishop denied to any.
Our patience and indulgence and humanity is ready for those who come. I desire that all return into the Church; I desire that all our fellow-soldiers be enclosed within the camp of Christ and the dwellings of God the Father. I remit all things; I overlook much in my zeal and longing to gather the brotherhood together. Even the things that have been committed against God I do not examine with the full judgment of religion. In remitting offenses more than I ought, I almost myself offend. With ready and full love I embrace those who return with penance, confessing their sin with a humble and simple satisfaction.
But if there are any who think they can return to the Church not by prayers but by threats, or suppose they make an entrance for themselves not by lamentations and satisfactions but by terrors, let them hold for certain that the Church of the Lord stands shut against such men, and that the camp of Christ, unconquered and strong and fortified by the Lord's protection, does not yield to threats. The priest of God, holding fast to the Gospel and keeping the precepts of Christ, can be killed, but cannot be conquered. Zacharias, the priest of God, supplies and furnishes us with examples of virtue and faith: who, when he could not be terrified by threats and stoning, was killed in the temple of God, crying out and repeatedly saying that which we too cry out and say against the heretics: 'Thus says the Lord:
You have forsaken the ways of the Lord, and the Lord shall forsake you.' For just because a few rash and wicked men forsake the heavenly and saving ways of the Lord, and, not doing holy things, are deserted by the Holy Spirit, we ought not therefore to be forgetful of the divine tradition, so as to reckon the crimes of the raging to be greater than the judgments of the priests, or to suppose that human endeavors avail more for assault than the divine protection prevails for safeguarding.
Or is it for this, dearest brother, that the dignity of the Catholic Church and the faithful and uncorrupted majesty of the people placed within, and likewise the priestly authority and power, are to be laid aside — that men set up outside the Church as heretics should say they wish to judge concerning the prelate of the Church; the sick concerning the sound, the wounded concerning the whole, the lapsed concerning the standing, the defendant concerning the judge, the sacrilegious concerning the priest?