We believe the chief and highest good for all men to be the right confession of the true and irreproachable Christian faith, to this end that through all things it may be rendered the stronger, and that all the most religious priests of the inhabited world may be joined together in concord, and with one mouth profess and preach the right faith of Christians, and that every occasion devised by heretics may be taken away. Which thing is shown by the orations and edicts written out by us at various times.
But because heretics—since they neither conceive the fear of God in their mind, nor reckon in their soul the unbounded penalties appointed by the severity of the laws for men of this kind, and deceive some of the simpler folk, and, contrary to the custom of the holy catholic and apostolic Church of God, secretly celebrate conventicles and baptisms—we have judged it pious by our present edict to exhort such men, that they themselves both depart from their heretical madness, nor lead the souls of others by fraud into destruction, but rather run to the holy Church of God, in which nothing is held more ancient than right dogmas, and all heresies together with their leaders are smitten with anathema.
71:3
Quinuniversosvolumuscognoscerequodsidecaeteroinvenianturaliquiquiimprobatomoreitaconventiculaagitaverint, autadeaconvenerint, ampliuseosnontolerabimus, sedtamdomosinquibustalequidpeccatiperpetratumfueritsanctaeaddicemusecclesiae, quamiisquiitaperversomoreconventiculaegerinttquiqueadeosconvenerint, constitutionumpoenasomnibusinferrimodisjubebimus. Dat. Prid. Non. April., Coostantinop., du. JustinianoPP. Aug., Basiliov. c. cons.
Indeed we wish all to know that, if for the rest there should be found any who in the disapproved manner have held such conventicles, or have come together to them, we shall no longer tolerate them, but both the houses in which any such sin has been perpetrated we shall adjudge to the holy Church, and upon those who have thus in a perverse manner held conventicles, and whoever have come together to them, we shall command the penalties of the constitutions to be inflicted in all ways. Given on the day before the Nones of April, at Constantinople, in the consulship of our lord Justinian, perpetual Augustus, and of Basilius, most distinguished man.